The story

The suffering in Palestine goes back a long way.

Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire until it was destroyed at the end of the First World War. Several Arab countries were at this time placed under temporary administration until they were considered ready for independence. Palestine was put under British mandate in 1922 by the League of Nations.

However, earlier in 1917, the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, made what became known as the Balfour Declaration. It promised ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine (not a nation state) but it insisted that nothing should be done to prejudice the rights of the existing non-Jewish community.

Between the two world wars Zionists moved into the land and settled, but the rise of Nazism in Germany increased the flow of people with those fleeing persecution in Europe. During the Second World War Palestinians and Zionists ‘agreed’ not to confront each other. However, as soon as the war was over violence and confrontation erupted. It was a time when the suffering of the Jews under the Nazis had created a huge sense of guilt in the international community.

In early 1947 the British announced that they would withdraw from Palestine, and in November, under pressure from Zionist groups, the UN passed a resolution granting just over half the land of Palestine for the creation of the state of Israel against the wishes of the majority. Jordan then ruled over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt over Gaza. Tragically the attempt to divide Palestine peacefully failed, and in the bitter war that followed Jewish militia groups seized more than three-quarters of the land (see maps below).

More than 750,000 Palestinians, whose families had lived there for centuries, became homeless refugees. Many fled to neighbouring countries in a great exodus. Twenty years later, in 1967, Israel, by then a powerful military nation supported by the USA, occupied the remaining Palestinian territories controlled by Jordan and Egypt, as well as parts of Lebanon and Syria.

Prisoners

Since then there have been recurrent incursions into even those few areas nominally under Palestinian control. Israel’s army now occupies what is called the West Bank [the land on the west bank of the Jordan river] and East Jerusalem and Gaza [a coastal strip of land bordering the Mediterranean]. The whole of Palestine is now under Israeli military control with Gaza entirely imprisoned, with Israel controlling all entry and exit points.

This process of occupation has been aided by the creation of hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied zone. The Palestinians are now prisoners in their own land. As a result of this injustice, violence has become endemic.

Under the occupation an ‘apartheid wall’ and a system of Israeli-only highways have been built, effectively confining the Palestinian communities to small and fragmented reservations or ‘bantustans’.

Hundreds of military barriers and checkpoints prevent Palestinians reaching their schools, hospitals and fields. More than 12,000 houses have been demolished, and thousands of olive groves, some hundreds of years old, have been destroyed.

Many UN resolutions have been passed condemning Israel. All have been ignored. The Wall has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice. Many Jews in Israel and across the world oppose the Occupation and its illegal suppression of the Palestinian people. But with powerful international allies like the United States, Israel can ignore all criticism.