Árbol de decisión

Following the 1948 war,¹⁰³ Mandatory Palestine was divided between three countries: the newly established State of Israel successfully maintained control of some 77 percent of the area (colored yellow in Figure 2 below); the 365 km² Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military administration (located in the lower left corner, colored green); whereas the West Bank, the brunt of the remaining 23 percent of Mandatory Palestine and including East Jerusalem (also colored green, middle right), was under Jordanian control (Beinin and Hajjar 2014, 5).

Although tensions at times ran high between Israel and its neighboring Arab states after the war, it was initially in the interest of all to remain calm; the involved states were young and vulnerable, and naturally cautious not to upset the delicate regional balance, no matter how hostile the Arab states were to the establishment of Israel (Singh 2011, 34).¹⁰⁴ Furthermore, they had all large populations of Palestinians, who in turn had become increasingly patriotic and nationalistic following the nakba trauma (Sayigh 1997, 46). As such, it was imperative for the continued stability of these states to control the Palestinians.

And as discussed by Robinson, the three states occupying the former territories of Mandatory Palestine—Israel, Egypt, and Jordan—all tried to control the Palestinians residing within their borders by replicating the “Ottoman and British policies of social control by strengthening the notable elite through allocation of resources,” in effect attempting to co-opt local Palestinian leaders and using these to control the population (1997, 8–11). Note, however, that the administrative way in which these three states dealt with the Palestinians differed somewhat.

Whereas Egypt kept rather tight control over Gaza, ruling the territory by military administration (Butler 2009, 98–100),¹⁰⁵ Jordan decided to annex the West Bank and East 102 Note also that the resistance against the Zionists has worked to counteract the diffusion of an Arab identity among Palestinian refugees, even if pan-Arabism to some extent has influenced the Palestinian fight for their homeland. See Løvlie (2014) and Baumgarten (2005) for further details.

103 Whereas the Palestinians as mentioned call this war the nakba, it is labeled by the Israelis as either the War of Liberation or the War of Independence.

104 To indicate the instability of the involved Arab states, there was a coup d'état in Egypt in 1952, when the Free Officers Movement deposed King Farouk; Egypt and Syria together formed the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961; in 1963, the Arab Socialist Baath party seized power in Syria, and in 1966, a second coup d'état was carried out by the neo-Baathists. Also in Lebanon the situation was volatile, and in 1958 UN forces had to aid the government to quell a violent insurrection aimed at getting Lebanon to join the United Arab Republic. Although no revolutions took place in Jordan, its first monarch, King Abdullah I, was assassinated by a Palestinian activist in East Jerusalem in 1951, and his successor Talal I was in turn deposed by his own son and heir, King Hussein I, soon after ascending the throne.

105 See Feldman (2008) for an in-depth study of the ways in which first Britain and then Egypt governed Gaza.

Jerusalem in 1950 and offered all Palestinians within its borders Jordanian citizenship (Sayigh 1997, 41).¹⁰⁶ Inside Israel, the relatively few Palestinians remaining were subject to tight control, although most eventually received Israeli citizenship (Sayigh 1997, 37–39).¹⁰⁷

Figure 2: Political map of Palestine

(Source: map 3584, rev. 2 by the UN Cartographic Section 2004, slightly adjusted).

106 Jordan’s rule of the West Bank from 1948 until 1967 has been dealt with expertly by various authors. See, for example, A. Cohen (1982) for an overview of political parties on the West Bank under the Jordanian regime.

107 The de jure and de facto social, economic, and political rights of the Israeli-Palestinians (alternatively, the Arab-Israelis) is a distinct area of research. See e.g., Tessler and Grant (1998) for a brief overview.

THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES,

Notwithstanding the efforts of the various host countries to control the Palestinians and curb their national aspirations, largely uncoordinated Palestinian guerrilla movements managed to carry out military operations inside Israel in the years following 1948. These operations inevitably led to reprisals from Israel, sometimes prompting Israel to breach the armistice lines and venture into its neighboring countries to capture or kill Palestinian militants. The Arab nations, in turn, saw these Israeli operations as provocations, and as a consequence of this tit-for-tat pattern of Palestinian guerrilla operations and Israeli reprisals, the regional situation became increasingly tense (Singh 2011, 34).¹⁰⁸

Following the 1966 coup d'état in Syria, the already tense situation took a turn for the worse;

the new regime actively encouraged Palestinian guerrilla movements to operate along its border with Israel, which inescapably destabilized the region. Added to this, in the spring of 1967, the Soviet Union provided false intelligence to the Syrians, claiming that Israeli forces were massing close to its border (Beinin and Hajjar 2014, 6). Responding to Syria’s plea for assistance, Egypt in turn began mobilizing its troops in Sinai in May, prompting the crisis to escalate further (Singh 2011, 34).

On June 5, 1967, Israel responded preemptively and struck militarily against both Syria and Egypt, and what became known as the Six-Day War was a fact.¹⁰⁹ Jordan soon came to the aid of its Arab brethren, and was subsequently also attacked by Israel. The war lasted only for six days, after which Israel emerged as the decisive victor; it had successfully defeated the much more populous surrounding Arab states and established itself as the dominant military power in the region. Through the course of this brief war, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Jordan (Beinin and Hajjar 2014, 6). In short, the Six-Day War of 1967 recast the fundamentals of the regional power balance, and its outcome continues to affect Middle Eastern politics to a profound degree (Popp 2006, 281).

108 Also, changes in the international power balance affected the regional situation and the Israel-Palestine conflict. For example, in 1956, when the Egyptian president Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which hitherto had been under joint French and British control, a short war broke out; Britain and France tried to regain control of the canal by military means and were aided in this by Israel. For a short period, this led Israel to occupy both Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. However, pressure from the US and the Soviet Union forced the former great powers to retreat, and Israel first handed back Gaza, and later the Sinai Peninsula, to Egypt. Naturally, such events did little to ease the tense regional situation (Sayigh 1997, 23–27).

109 See Popp (2006) for a thorough analysis of the various theories purporting to explain the outbreak of the Six-Day War.