Israel/Palestine

2. Why did the Zionist movement set the stage for the long-term conflict in the Middle East and contribute to the rise of Arab Nationalism and the creation of Palestinian identity?

Theodor Herzl’s Zionism states the necessity of an independent Jewish state, an argument that rose to popularity after WWII, a time of great sympathy for Jews. Although Herzl never specifically cites a Jewish right to Israel, and Jews hadn’t had control for Israel for hundreds of years, Israel was partitioned by the UN after WWII into the Jewish state Israel and the Arab state of Palestine.

Arabs living in Israel essentially had no choice but to let a league of Western nations partition Arab land for the Jews, a people whom the Westerners didn’t even treat well themselves, on the claim that the Jewish race has a birth-right to the land that Arabs, Romans and Ottomans had been in control of for previous centuries. However, not all Isreali Arabs were against partition, as almost a third of Arabs living in Israel at the time were Jewish. However, Israeli Arabs and most other Arab leaders opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Israel as the majority of Israeli Arabs who were not Jewish would be trapped in a Jewish state.

But as the UN partitioned Israel in 1947, other Arab nations besides Palestine became angered at the impertinence of the UN and of the new state of Israel. Non-Jewish Israeli Arabs found themselves pushed out of Israel to make way for floods of Jewish immigrants, and pushed back across UN-decreed borders into the comparatively small state of Palestine. Surrounding Arab nations like Jordan and Syria were faced with Israeli Arab refugees seeking to avoid the tension rising between Jewish Israel and Palestine as Israel declared its full independence in 1948.
Arabs forced into Palestine began to identify Israel as the enemy during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948, and began to call themselves Palestinians to differentiate themselves from the Jewish people. Pan-Arab nationalists fed on the fire of the problematic Jewish state of Israel to argue the cause of a Pan-Arab state; a state that would include the lands of Palestine, an area that chose to maintain culturally Arab in the face of potential Jewish influence. Arab nations including Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Egypt all backed Palestine in its fight against the Jews who had pushed fellow Arabs out of Arabian territory of pre-partition Israel.

Although Herzl never claimed Jews to have a right to Israel as his “Jewish state”, the UN’s partition of Israel and subsequent displacement of the majority of Arabs living in Israel set, sparked and fed a dispute that would involve all Arab nations. During a time of heightened nationalism all around the world, the dispute between Israel and Palestine logically follows the general political trend of the 1940’s, as well as the age-old arguments over these culturally-rich territories.