Conflict in Israel and Palestine through 2015: Crash Course World History #223

Summary

In this episode of Crash Course World History, John Green delves into the complex and contentious history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Discussing key events from the late 19th century through 2015, he emphasizes the role of competing nationalisms over purely theological differences. Green explores how promises made by the British during World War I to different parties, the establishment of the Israeli state, and various wars and intifadas have shaped the current landscape. He highlights the importance of understanding both Israeli and Palestinian narratives to move towards a peaceful resolution.

Highlights

• Conflict centers on land and nationalism, not ancient religious disputes.
• The Ottoman Empire once peacefully ruled over a diverse Palestine.
• British promises after WWI sowed confusion and tension in Palestine.
• The 1947 UN partition plan led to a complex and often conflict-ridden map.
• Peace prospects hinge on mutual recognition of national narratives.

Key Takeaways

• The Israel-Palestine conflict is rooted in nationalism, not religion.
• The Balfour Declaration and British promises post-WWI complicated claims to Palestine.
• Both Israeli and Palestinian identities and narratives need recognition for peace.
• The 1947 UN partition plan led to war, displacement, and ongoing conflict.
• Peace talks have struggled due to unresolved issues like settlements and refugee rights.

Overview

The Israel-Palestine conflict is deeply entrenched in a set of nationalist rather than purely theological disputes. This episode of Crash Course World History, led by John Green, examines the consequences of European nationalism in the 19th century and how it influenced the emergence of Zionism and subsequent claims over the land of Palestine.

Critical to understanding the conflict’s roots is the series of promises made by the British during World War I to various groups vying for control over Palestine. This includes the well-known Balfour Declaration, which set the stage for further tensions after the war. As Zionist settlements expanded, the local Palestinian Arabs began to form their own national identity, leading to uprisings and revolts against British colonial rule.

The overthrow of Ottoman control and subsequent wars further complicated the region, with significant developments like the 1947 United Nations partition plan exacerbating tensions. Despite various attempts at peace, such as the Oslo Accords and the Clinton-era negotiations, issues such as settlements, refugee rights, and political sovereignty remain unresolved, emphasizing the need for a multifaceted and empathetic approach to understanding both Palestinian and Israeli perspectives.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to the Conflict John Green introduces the episode's topic on the Israel and Palestine conflict, attempting to discuss it without causing controversy. He clarifies misconceptions, stating the conflict isn't as ancient as often perceived, involving neither theological disputes between Islam and Judaism nor ancient biblical lineage debates. He points out that the conflict of the last several decades is not about religious practices, such as fasting during Yom Kippur or Ramadan.
• 01:00 - 02:30: Background and Ottoman Rule The chapter 'Background and Ottoman Rule' begins by highlighting the importance of land in understanding the conflict, suggesting that portraying it as eternal or purely religious simplifies its complexity. The narrative begins in the late 19th century, in line with many historians, focusing not on religion but on competing nationalisms, following the approach of historians like James Gelvin.
• 02:30 - 04:30: Zionism and British Promises In the late 19th century, Palestine was under Ottoman rule with a predominantly Muslim population, alongside Christian and Jewish communities, all speaking Arabic. In Jerusalem, the religious demographics were more balanced. The chapter gives insight into the diverse cultural life in Ottoman-era Palestine, exemplified by the experiences of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, an Arab Orthodox Christian musician in early 20th-century Jerusalem.
• 04:30 - 06:30: British Mandate and Growing Tensions This chapter explores the period during the British Mandate in Palestine and the rising tensions that accompanied it. Initially, Palestine under Ottoman rule was depicted as a space where diverse religious communities coexisted peacefully. However, the chapter shifts focus to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlighting the surge of nationalism in Europe, particularly within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It introduces Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist, who believed in the possibility of Jewish assimilation into European societies amidst the era's nationalistic fervor.
• 06:30 - 08:30: Partition and the 1948 War The chapter explores the rise of Zionism, a concept of Jewish nationalism, which aimed at creating a state for the Jewish people, rather than a religious Jewish state. The movement gained momentum post-World War I, during which the British government issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, announcing the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in Palestine. This promise was made despite the fact that Palestine was still under Ottoman control.
• 08:30 - 10:30: Post-war Changes and the Six-Day War The chapter delves into the complex and conflicting promises made by the British regarding the future of Palestine post-World War I. Initially, Britain had assured both the French and the Arabs of certain controls and outcomes concerning Palestine. A year before the Balfour Declaration, an agreement with the French secretly implied that post-war, the Arab territories would be divided with Britain retaining Palestine. Meanwhile, promises made in 1915 to Sharif Hussein of Mecca included the establishment of a large Arab state that encompassed Palestine if he supported a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Hussein did lead the revolt, thus intensifying the implications of these promises. Subsequently, Palestine was also promised to the Zionists, highlighting a series of overlapping commitments that would contribute to future conflicts.
• 10:30 - 13:00: First Intifada and Oslo Accords After World War I, the British established a colony in Palestine, intending to govern until Palestinians could rule themselves. However, despite Palestinian readiness, the British delayed granting them self-governance. They created separate institutions for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, which hindered cooperation among Palestinian Christians and Muslims.
• 13:00 - 15:30: Clinton Talks and Second Intifada The chapter discusses the complex dynamics in Palestine during the British mandate period. The British implemented a strategy of 'divide and rule,' while attempting to fulfill the Balfour Declaration's promise to support Jewish immigration under certain conditions. Between 1920 and 1939, the Jewish population in Palestine increased significantly. This was due to immigration and land purchases, which often involved buying land from absentee non-Palestinian Arab landowners and subsequently evicting Palestinian farmers who lived and worked on that land. By 1938, Jews made up nearly 30% of the population in Palestine, adding to the tensions in the region.
• 15:30 - 18:00: Recent Developments and Conclusion The chapter delves into the historical context of the tensions between Jewish people and Arab Palestinians during the 1920s and 1930s. It explains how Jewish efforts to secure land and labor led to increased tensions and how Palestinian Arabs began to see themselves as a distinct nation. This burgeoning nationalism culminated in a revolt against British control in 1936. Despite being quashed with the aid of Jewish militias, the uprising pressured the British into issuing a white paper that addressed some Arab concerns. The chapter reflects on these developments as crucial in understanding the complex political dynamics of the region and sets the stage for the concluding thoughts.
• 18:00 - 19:00: Final Thoughts and Credits The chapter titled 'Final Thoughts and Credits' discusses the complex situation in Palestine during the time leading up to and following World War II. It highlights Britain's controversial policy of limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, which angered Zionists, while the prospect of a delayed joint Arab and Jewish state did not satisfy Arab Palestinians. Although WWII was a relatively peaceful period for Palestine, post-war tensions surged, prompting Britain to cede the Palestine issue to the United Nations.

Conflict in Israel and Palestine through 2015: Crash Course World History #223 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today, we're going to talk about Israel and Palestine, hopefully, without a flame war. Yeah, yeah big ask, Mr. Green, I mean, that fight goes back thousands and thousands of years. Except, thousands of years ago... there wasn't an Islam yet, so, yeah, no. Also, let me submit that very little of this conflict between Israel and Palestine over the last several decades has been about, like, theological differences between Islam and Judaism. No one's arguing about whether the most important prophets descended from Abraham's son Isaac, or his son Ishmael, right? It's not about whether to fast during Yom Kippur or Ramadan.
• 00:30 - 01:00 It's about land. Portraying the conflict as eternal or as religious makes it feel intractable in a way that frankly, it isn't. So instead, let's begin as most historians do in the late 19th century. And instead of talking about religion, let's follow the lead of historians like James Gelvin and discuss competing nationalisms. [Theme Music]
• 01:00 - 01:30 Ok, so in the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled over what we now know as Palestine. The population there, according to Ottoman records from 1878, was 87% Muslim, 10% Christian and 3% Jewish. Everybody spoke Arabic as the daily language, and in Jerusalem the religious populations were roughly equal. To give you a sense of life in Ottoman Palestine, an Arab Orthodox Christian musician named Wasif Jawhariyyeh grew up in Jerusalem in the first decade of the 20th century
• 01:30 - 02:00 learning the Quran in school and celebrating both Passover and Eid with his Jewish and Muslim neighbors. Ottoman Palestine was, in short, a place in which people of different religious faiths lived peacefully together. Alright, let's go to the Thought Bubble. The late 19th century was the Golden Age of nationalism in Europe, and no place was crazier than the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire in which at least 10 different nations all wanted their own state. And in that hyper-nationalistic empire lived a Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl who had hoped that Jews could assimilate into European nations
• 02:00 - 02:30 but soon became convinced that the Jewish people needed to leave Europe and settle in their own state. The concept of Jewish nationalism came to be known as Zionism. It's important to keep in mind that most Zionists were secular Jews, so they imagined Israel as a state for Jews more than a Jewish state. In 1917, the British government, hoping to gain the support of Jewish people, issued the Balfour Declaration, promising, quote, "The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," a bold promise considering that Palestine was still technically Ottoman, as they hadn't yet lost World War One.
• 02:30 - 03:00 Of course, they would soon, but it turned out that the British were overpromisers when it came to Palestine, because a year before the Balfour Declaration, the British had secretly promised the French that they would divide up the Arab territories and the Brits would keep Palestine. Furthermore, in 1915, other British officials had promised the ruler of Mecca, Sharif Hussein, that he would rule over an Arab state including Palestine if he led an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, which Hussein promptly did, so basically the Brits had promised Palestine to the Meccans, to themselves, and to the Zionists. What could go wrong?
• 03:00 - 03:30 Thanks, Thought Bubble. So shortly after the end of the war, the British established a colony in Palestine with the idea that they'd rule until the Palestinians were ready to govern themselves, at which point the people living in Palestine were like, "Well, now seems good," and the British were like, "Yeah, but maybe not just yet." Meanwhile, the British established separate institutions for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, making it difficult for Palestinian Christians and Muslims to cooperate
• 03:30 - 04:00 and easier for the British to, quote, "divide and rule" the inhabitants of Palestine. Again, what could go wrong? Meanwhile, the British did attempt to honor the Balfour Declaration's promise to, quote, "facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions." Between 1920 and 1939, the Jewish population of Palestine increased by over 320,000 people. In fact, by 1938, Jews were just under 30% of the population of Palestine. And the growing Jewish population focused on purchasing land from absentee non-Palestinian Arab landowners and then evicting Palestinian farmers who were living and working there.
• 04:00 - 04:30 By controlling both the land and the labor, they hoped to establish a more secure community within Palestine, but of course, these practices heightened tensions between Jewish people and Arab Palestinians between the 1920s and the 1930s. Along the way, Palestinian Arabs began to think of themselves as the Palestinian nation, and that growing sense of nationalism erupted in 1936, when the Palestinians revolted against the British. With the help of Jewish militias, the British brutally suppressed the Palestinian revolt, but in the aftermath, the British issued a white paper,
• 04:30 - 05:00 limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, and calling for the establishment of a joint Arab and Jewish state in Palestine within ten years. This managed to leave no one happy. The Zionists were angry at Britain for limiting Jewish immigration at a time when Jews particularly needed to leave Europe, and the Arab Palestinians were unhappy about the prospect of waiting ten years for a state. And then came World War II, which was actually quite a peaceful time in Palestine. But then it ended, and tensions resumed, and the British realized that colonies like Palestine were far more trouble than they were worth, so they handed the issue of Palestine over to the newly created United Nations.
• 05:00 - 05:30 They were like, "Oh hey there, United Nations! For your first problem..." So in November of 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Palestinian and Jewish states. The Partition Plan called for two states roughly equal in size, but the borders looked like a jigsaw puzzle. I mean, you do not look at this map and think, "Yeah, that's gonna work!"
• 05:30 - 06:00 Sure enough, it didn't, and soon after the plan was announced, the cleverly named 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out, with Israel on the one side and the Palestinians and many Arab states on the other. The Israelis won, and when an armistice was signed in 1949, Israel occupied a third more land than they would have had under the UN proposal. Meanwhile, Jordan controlled and later annexed the West Bank and the old city of Jerusalem, and Egypt controlled the Gaza strip. Over 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes and became refugees in the surrounding Arab countries.
• 06:00 - 06:30 To Israelis, this was was the beginning of their nation; to the Palestinians, it was the nakba, the catastrophe, as they became stateless. Over the next 18 years, nothing changed territorially, and then, in 1967, Israel and several Arab states went to war again. It was called the Six-Days War because -- get this -- it lasted six days. Israel won, and then gained control over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. So the 1947 proposal looked like this; by 1967, things looked like this.
• 06:30 - 07:00 Then the UN passed Resolution 242 - man, they are good at naming resolutions! - which outlined a basic framework for achieving peace, including Israel withdrawing from the territory acquired in the war, and all participants recognizing the rights of both a Palestinian and an Israeli state to exist. This of course did not happen. After the war, the broader Israeli-Arab conflict morphed into a more specific Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this is a nice moment to note that not all Muslims are Arabs, not all Arabs are Palestinians, and not all Palestinians are Muslims.
• 07:00 - 07:30 Like, there's a significant Christian minority of Palestinians, for instance. Palestinian is a word used to describe the ethnic identity of those who have historically lived in Palestine. There were, for instance, lots of Christians in the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, formed in 1964 and led by Yasser Arafat. The PLO oversaw guerrilla groups that attacked civilians, but also used nonviolent approaches to try to achieve a Palestinian state, and meanwhile, the Israeli government began to establish Jewish settlements in what had been Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
• 07:30 - 08:00 There are now over 350,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and over 200,000 in East Jerusalem, and these settlements are illegal, according to international law, but Israel counters by saying that they aren't really illegal because Palestine isn't really a state. By the late 1980s, Palestinians launched the first intifada, which literally means "shaking off." And this began with, like, boycotts of Israeli products and services and refusing to pay Israeli taxes, but when the Israeli armed forces cracked down on protesters, violence ensued.
• 08:00 - 08:30 And the first intifada also saw the founding of Hamas, which launched the first suicide bombing against Israel in 1993. Hamas gained support partly because of its militancy, but mostly because of its social welfare projects in Gaza. It built and staffed schools, mosques, and clinics. The most important legacy of the First Intifada was the emergence of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis. This led to the Oslo Accords, and the peace process, based on our old friend, United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. But there were a lot of issues to resolve - I mean, putting aside the question of, like, how to make two states that don't look like a jigsaw puzzle,
• 08:30 - 09:00 there was the question of the Jewish settlement, and the right for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to Palestine. Water rights, which are a big deal in that part of the world, and so on. It's very complicated! So then came the Clinton talks. Oh, it's time for the Open Letter! But first, let's see what's inside of the globe. Oh, look! It's a collection of philandering American presidents. An Open Letter to Bill Clinton: Hey, Bill, so your talks probably came closer than any other time in recent history to an actual peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
• 09:00 - 09:30 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was willing to give up more land currently claimed by Israel than at any other time in the past; even Yasser Arafat was surprised. Although not all the questions got addressed, you were definitely closing in on something. But in the end, it didn't happen, and since then, not to criticize you, things have gotten kind of worse and worse and worse. Worst of all, that was your big legacy moment. Now all you've got is the conflict in Northern Ireland getting resolved while you were president. In short, it could have been amazing, but instead it was kind of... neeeeh. Kind of like your presidency, actually!
• 09:30 - 10:00 At least you always have those vodkas-soaked hugs with Boris Yeltsin to look back on. Best Wishes, John Green. So the Clinton talks failed; Ehud Barak's government was undermined, and then, in September of 2000, Prime Minister candidate Ariel Sharon led a group of 1,000 armed guards to the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. To Muslims, this is known as the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and it's the third-holiest site in Islam, behind only the Kaaba in Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. And it's the holiest site in Judaism, so in short, it's a pretty touchy place to march to with a thousand armed guards.
• 10:00 - 10:30 So the events sparked a massive protest, which eventually led to the much more violent Second Intifada, in which more than three thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis were eventually killed. In 2002, the Israelis, claiming to act in defense of civilians, began construction of a wall around the West Bank, but instead of following the borders established after the 1967 War, the barrier was built to include many Israeli settlements on the Israeli side. To Israelis, that was about self-defense; to Palestinians, it was an illegal land grab.
• 10:30 - 11:00 Then, in 2005, Yasser Arafat died, and in an election shortly thereafter, Hamas won a majority of the parliamentary seats. Since then, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have sort of divided how to govern Palestine, and it's also sort of been poorly governed. In the past ten years, Hamas has frequently launched rocket attacks into Israel; Israel has responded with extended and extremely violent invasions of Palestinian territory that have seen thousands of Palestinians killed, many of them militants, but also many not.
• 11:00 - 11:30 Both parties claim to be responding to the provocations of the other, but much of the conflict reflects the consistent failure on all sides to understand the legitimacy of the other's narrative. To Palestine, the Palestinian people have been denied a state not just since the formation of Israel, but also for decades before that, and now they live under what amounts to a military occupation. And that's all true. To Israel, the Jewish people clearly need a homeland, which the United Nations established. And they certainly aren't the first nation state to consolidate and increase their territory via military victory. And they need to protect their nation against the many active threats made against them by their neighbors.
• 11:30 - 12:00 That's also true! It's important to understand the internal logic of these competing nationalist visions. For both Zionists and Palestinian national visions to eventually work, it's necessary to understand the right of each to exist and the legitimacy of each's historical narrative. But these problems aren't thousands of years old, and they aren't intractable. They emerged in the British Mandatory Period.
• 12:00 - 12:30 But let's hope that by understanding this isn't an endless religious war, that we might be closer to seeing its end. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week. Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and Stacy Emigholz studio in Indianapolis, and it's made possible by our subscribers on Subbable, so thanks to you all. By the way, if you want to learn more about Israel and Palestine, our friends at Thought Café have made a series of videos; you can also find a link to them in the video info below. Thanks again to all our Subbable subscribers; thanks to the educators who share these videos with their students and to the students who share them with their teachers.
• 12:30 - 13:00 As we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.