Historical Background of Hamas-Israel Conflict

The 5-minute version of a very long story

Map of Israeli settlements on the West Bank as blue dots, and the land controlled by these settlements as white. Land controlled by the Palestinian Authority is tan or brown.

My goal is to provide some historical facts as a background to the current Israeli-Hamas conflict. This is one of those situations where if you don't know the whole story, you don't know any of the story.

The first known occupants of the Holy Land were the Canaanites. They were slowly displaced by Israelites between 1200 BC and 1000 BC, when the last significant Canaanite city, Jerusalem, was conquered by King David. I think we can safely leave out this historical fact from our consideration of the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

The next significant historical fact is the conquest of Jerusalem by the Romans in 63 BCE. The Jews have not controlled the Holy Land from that date until 1948, although at least a few Jews have always lived in the Holy Land during those years.

The Jews did not accept Roman dominance quietly.  The Romans demolished the temple in 70 CE following the First Jewish Revolt. After the failed Second Jewish revolt in 135, the Romans expelled the Jews from the Holy Land. The city was renamed Aelia Capitolina, and a pagan temple was built on the ruins of the Jewish temple. It remained illegal for Jews to live in or near Jerusalem for many years.

Jews continued to live peaceably in other parts of the Roman Empire, including in Syria, Galilee, and Egypt. As Roman vigilance waned, Jews began slowly moving back to the region in and around Jerusalem.

An Arab army conquered the Holy Land in 638, and Jews lived there under Muslim governments until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.  This was succeeded by a British mandate government until 1948.

In 1897, the Zionist movement was founded by Theodor Herzl who encouraged European Jews to move to the Holy Land. Originally, these immigrants bought land from wealthy Palestinians landholders, often land that was believed to be worthless and incapable of cultivation.  Because of the discrimination and violence that European Jews faced in Eastern Europe, this was also the era of peak Jewish immigration to the United States from Eastern Europe.

In 1917, British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour committed Britain to working toward the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Where, when, and how were not specified. At one point, the British government, recognizing the difficulty of large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine, offered to give the Zionist movement the entire country of Uganda. (Now that's a shameless colonial concept—giving away other people's land!) Zionist leaders presented this proposal at a Zionist Congress meeting and the idea was shouted down in an angry uproar. Zionist supporters wanted to settle in the Holy Land and in no other place.

During this period, Zionists developed a slogan that was a shameless bit of misinformation: "A land without a people for a people without a land.” This insinuated that giving the Holy Land to the Zionists would disadvantage nobody.  An analogous American slogan would be: “Go to the wide open empty spaces of ________ (fill in the name of any state). Empty land is waiting for you!”

Zionist also argued that the Palestinians were not a people., but merely random inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire. It was true that the Zionists were a well-organized group with a strong identity and affiliates who could lobby in every major western country, while the Palestinians were the disorganized and often apolitical residents of a land ruled by others, whether the Ottoman Empire or the British mandate.

Another reason for the weak Palestinian identity of the early 20th century is that many Arab leaders cherished the goal of creating a single united Arab nation to replace Ottoman rule. This aspiration is reflected in the film Lawrence of Arabia, when Arab leaders meet in Damascus after World War I to organize this new Pan-Arab nation. Instead, the roundtable conference devolves into chaos. In the end, it was the retreating European colonial powers who carved the defunct Ottoman Empire into into the countries we are familiar with today: Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq.

After the horrors of World War II, Western nations became eager to help Jews find a sense of security. A turning point came in March 1948 when Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist leader, visited Harry S Truman and convinced him to support the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948.

In 1948 the UN partition of Palestine went into effect, and Arab nations attacked the newly declared state of Israel. After the clash of armies had ended in victory for Israel, the Israeli army went through the territory of the newly founded nation encouraging Palestinians to voluntarily evacuate, with vague or even blatant threats of violence. Once Palestinians left, they were declared to have voluntarily abandoned their property, which could be taken over by Israelis on a permanent basis.  One consistent Palestinian demand has been that the owners of this property and their heirs should be allowed to reclaim the land they fled from in 1948.

A big shift came in 1967 when victory in the Six Day War gave Israel control of the West Bank and Gaza, the major areas designated for Palestinians in the 1948 UN partition. Israel also occupied strategically important high ground in the Syrian Golan Heights.

I will not cover the years between 1967 and 2023 in any detail, but it has been a constant tale of restrictions by Israel on Palestinians, and tit for tat violence.  Palestinians living in Hamas and the West Bank have very little chance to obtain higher education or to engage freely in commerce. Their life prospects are bleak. I’d say the pattern has been a million restraints and deprivations visited upon Palestinians by the Israeli government and settlers, balanced by fewer but spectacular acts of resistance and revenge on the part of Palestinians. Atrocities have not been all on one side—on February 25, 1994, US-born doctor Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler, killed up to 30 Palestinians at a mosque in Hebron in a ten-minute rampage.

In preparing this post, I was surprised to learn that West Bank settlements were encouraged from 1967, not just by right wing Israelis, but also the left-wing Labor Party. To me, this was the move on the part of Israel that has made the conflict intractable. The following is from Wikipedia:

As early as September 1967, Israeli settlement policy was progressively encouraged by the Labor government of Levi Eshkol. The basis for Israeli settlement in the West Bank became the Allon Plan,[53][54] named after its inventor Yigal Allon. It implied Israeli annexation of major parts of the Israeli-occupied territories, especially East Jerusalem, Gush Etzion and the Jordan Valley.[55] The settlement policy of the government of was also derived from the Allon Plan.[56]

In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin was re-elected as prime minister on a platform embracing the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords.  This set up a quasi-governmental Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli in retaliation for his peace making efforts, and movement toward a peaceful settlement gradually petered out.

That's where I'm going to leave this account of the historical context of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Closest Historical Parallel

If I were asked to name a historical parallel, I would point to the European American occupation of the lands of Native Americans. With two critical military differences:

• US Armies were almost always better armed than the Native Americans. Native Americans had to take care of their women and children while they fought, while American armies usually had no such burdens.

• Native Americans were fighting for their land in open or wooded spaces. The inhabitants of Gaza are fighting for [whatever they are fighting for—I find their demands unrealistic to say the least] in an urban environment where conventional forces face greatly increased difficulties and where great numbers of civilian casualties are inevitable.

Bottom Line

I don’t think there has ever been a more complex mess or intractable conflict than the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.