)
Okay. I need to diary the Hezbollah-Israel issue like I need another inch of waistline, but hey, it's sort of a big issue right now.
Here's my plan: Today, I'd like to do some background--a map of the area with some basic explanations, description of the formation of the State of Israel, touch on Hezbollah. Tomorrow, I'd like to detail what's happened so far, who's attacked what and where and how. And the day after that, I'd like to try and work up some sort of analysis.
It's my hope to be as objective as possible throughout--if you see me slipping, please give me a kick in the behind. Just don't make it swell, huh? It's big enough as is.
Anyway.
Okay. I need to diary the Hezbollah-Israel issue like I need another inch of waistline, but hey, it's sort of a big issue right now.
Here's my plan: Today, I'd like to do some background--a map of the area with some basic explanations, description of the formation of the State of Israel, touch on Hezbollah. Tomorrow, I'd like to detail what's happened so far, who's attacked what and where and how. And the day after that, I'd like to try and work up some sort of analysis.
It's my hope to be as objective as possible throughout--if you see me slipping, please give me a kick in the behind. Just don't make it swell, huh? It's big enough as is.
Anyway.
::
First off: The Map.
Here's the map, and below is some commentary on the more recognizable areas of the Israel/Lebanon/Syria/Jordan area of the map.
Map from the Library at the University of Texas, for educational purposes only. Has been cropped and resized.
As you can see, Israel (brown on the map) is roughly triangular, bordering the Mediterranean Sea and Egypt (green) on the west; Lebanon (blue) on the North; and Syria (a sort of teal color) and Jordan (orange) on the east. Iraq borders Syria and Jordan to the east. Saudi Arabia borders Iraq and Jordan to the southeast. Turkey borders Syria to the north.
Beirut is roughly halfway along Lebanon's Mediterranean (west) coastline.
Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, is on the Mediterranean coast, near the Lebanese border. It was hit by rockets, at least two fired from inside Lebanon, during the ongoing Israel-Lebanon conflict.
Map from the Library at the University of Texas, for educational purposes only. Has been resized.
The West Bank, a roughly kidney-shaped territory (with the long curve to the east) running along the Jordan River with its inward curve slicing through Jerusalem, runs along part of Israel's border with Jordan. The borders of the West Bank were determined by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War armistice lines. Jordan claimed the West Bank until 1988, when it gave up its claim to the area. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Days War, but annexed only the East Jerusalem section of the West Bank. Today, the West Bank is considered Israeli-occupied territory, but under international law is not considered de jure part of any state. Israel removed all permanent Israeli presence in four settlements in the northern West Bank in 2005.
Map from the Library at the University of Texas, for educational purposes only. Has been cropped and resized.
You can't see it on the first map, but the Golan Heights is a large roughly crescent-shaped white space between Israel and Syria. I've colored it orange. It's considered by the international community to be Syrian territory under Israeli occupation; Israel captured the Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Map from the Library at the University of Texas, for educational purposes only. Has been cropped and resized.
The Gaza Strip (which can't really be seen on the first map) is a narrow strip of land along what would otherwise be the southern Mediterranean coast of Israel. It shares its western boundary with Egypt, and its southern and eastern borders with Israel. Its northern boundary is the Mediterranean Sea. Nearly one and one-half million people live in the Gaza Strip, which has an area of 360 square km. Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip is not recognized as being de jure under the jurisdiction of any sovereign country. The international community considers the Strip Israeli-occupied territory. Israel disputes this status, more strongly after its 2005 removal of all permanent Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip.
Formation of the Modern State of Israel
For over 3,000 years, the Jewish people have regarded the State of Israel as their homeland. Various Jewish kingdoms and states have existed in the region (that includes present-day Israel), starting in 1200 BCE and continuing for a millenium. Large-scale expulsion of Jews from the region began in earnest after the failed Bar Kochba revolt (against the Roman Empire) in 132 CE.
It was at this time that the Roman empire gave the region the name "Palaestina Syria" (in English, "Palestine"). Rome ruled Palestine until 300 CE, when the area was taken into the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium ruled the area until Jerusalem was conquered by the Caliph, around 638 CE. It was under the Caliphate that Jerusalem and its environs gradually came to accept Islam and the Arabic-Muslim culture of the Caliphate. As the place from which the Prophet ascended into heaven "after a miraculous overnight ride on his horse Al-Buraq", Jerusalem became a holy city to Muslims. (link) The generally-accepted site of the former Jewish temples became the site of the al-Aqsa mosque.
The Caliphate's rule gave way to that of the Seljuk Turks in 1071 CE. The Fatimid rulers of Egypt, due to an alliance with Christian Crusaders, succeeded the Seljuk rule in 1098, capturing Jerusalem, Jaffa, and other parts of Palestine. The Fatimid rule lasted less than a year, as Crusaders, breaking their alliance, attacked and captured Jerusalem and Jaffa in 1099.
In 1187 CE, Saladin, a Muslim ruler, conquered Jerusalem. Crusade after crusade tried and failed to recapture Jerusalem. When the Christian Crusaders left Palestine, they left its shores depopulated and impoverished for centuries.
In the mid-1200s CE, Mameluks established an empire that eventually grew to include Palestine. The majority of Palestine's population were Arab-speaking Muslims. However, during the 1300s CE, Jews from Spain and other countries around the Mediterranean began to settle in Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine.
In 1517, the Mameluks were defeated by the Ottoman Empire. Palestine became partof the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan invited Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition to settle in the Ottoman Empire, including several of Palestine's cities.
This increase in Palestine's population was reversed in the 19th century CE, after the Empire's war with Napoleon and subsequent mismanagement by Egyptian and Ottoman rulers. Both Arabs and Jews fled to more prosperous lands.
Subsequent to reorganization, the Turkish Empire allowed the beginnings of Jewish settlement of Palestine, and in 1880, there were 24,000 Jews living in Palestine, of a total population of 400,000. It was at about this time that the Ottomans began severely restricting the emigration and settlement of Jews in Palestine.
Political and social change in Europe during the 19th century brought about a resurgence of Zionism, and in 1897, the First Zionist congress was held in Basle, Switzerland. The Zionist Program, as delineated at Basle, consisted of settling Palestine with Jewish emigrants, the creation of national Zionist organizations to unite and organize Jews across the world, and the stengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and consciousness. It also called for taking preparatory steps to obtain the consents of governments, where necessary, to achieve the goals of Zionism. The First Zionist congress was not concerned with the issue of the Arab population of Palestine. It foresaw millions of Jews emigrating to Palestine, becoming the majority, and ruling the area.
During World War I, the Ottoman Empire joined Germany and Austria-Hungary, fighting against the Allies. When the war ended, Britain and France planned to divide the former Ottoman holdings in Palestine between themselves. The United States and other countries pressed for Arab self-determination.
In 1917, before Britain conquered Jerusalem and Palestine, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration The Balfour Declaration expressed Britain's support for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine without violating the rights, both civil and religious, of the existing non-Jewish communities. After the war, the League of Nations divided much of the former Ottoman Empire into mandated territories.
Britain anxious to keep Palestine from the French, asked for a mandate that would create the Jewish Homeland in Palestine, a project supported by America. Arabs then living in Palestine lobbied against the creation of Israel. They felt that the areas now called Palestine were their home; that they were in danger of dispossession by the Zionists; and that they did not want to be under Jewish rule.
Prophetically, David Ben Gurion, who would become Israel's first Prime Minister, said at the time, "But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question...We as a nation, want this country to be ours, the Arabs as a nation, want this country to be theirs." (link)
Ultimately, the British were given a mandate over Palestine ("the British Mandate"), to help the Jews of Palestine create a national homeland and self-governing institutions. The Mandate was eventually split off into two separate Mandates, Palestine and Trans-Jordan (now Jordan). The Arabs of Palestine rejected self-governing institutions that included any Jews at all, and the Jews of Palestine were leery of any majority-ruled self-governing institution, which would have been controlled by Arabs.
Jewish immigration into the Mandate territory continued into the 1920s, inciting riots and pogroms against Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, Jaffa and Haifa. This led to the creation of the Jewish self-defense organization Haganah in the 1920s. Immigration swelled rapidly in the 1930s, driven not by the Nazis (at least, not at first) but by persecution in Eastern Europe, and continued until the Great Arab Revolt of 1936.
In 1936, the British killed Izz al din El Qassam, a oreacher who was a Syrian immigrant to Palestine, in a gun battle. El Qassam had been agitating against the British and the Jews. The revolt, coopted by the Husseini family, grew rapidly, due to the intial unpreparedness of the British. Nearly half of the 5,000 Jewish residents of the old city of Jerusalem were forced to flee. Hundreds of Jews, and thousands of Arabs, were killed. The Husseini family killed both Jews and Palestinian Arabs opposed to their policies. Jews responded first with defensive measures, and with random terror bombings of civilian Arab targets.
In response to the revolt, British officials, through a White Paper, began to limit immigration. 15,000 Jews were to be allowed to immigrate to Palestine each year for five years; immigration of Jews thereafter was to be subject to Arab approval.
During the Holocaust, many Arabs and Jews in Palestine fought on the side of the allies. Among Palestinian Jews, knowledge of Nazi persecutions of Jews and growing suspicions about Nazi extermination of Jews was a special motivation. The White Paper still limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, so Palestinian Jews arranged for illegal immigration to Palestine from occupied Europe. Despite increasingly graphic accounts of Nazi atrocities, Palestine was still barred to Jewish immigration.
In 1939, the Zionist leadership met in New York and delivered the Biltmore Declaration, stating that they supported the creation of the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth, and essentially declaring the British, in principle, an enemy to be fought. The British official in charge of enforcing the terms of the 1939 White Paper (which required the British to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine by force), Lord Moyne, was assasinated in Egypt by two members of the Jewish Lehi Underground. They were caught and hanged, and the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive, concerned about the effect of the assasination on post-war British cooperation, embarked on a campaign against the Lehi and the Irgun. Members of the underground organizations were to be ostracized. Leaders of the underground were caught by Haganah, interrogated, and sometimes tortured. About 1000 people turned over to the British.
After the war, the full extent of the atrocities of the Holocaust were discovered. The Labor Party, which had promised to revoke the White Paper's restrictions on immigration to Palestine, came into power. They reneged on their promise, and increased efforts to stop Jews immigrating to Palestine. Haganah attempted to bring Jews into Palestine illegally. The Jewish underground groups united in an attempt to drive Britain out of Palestine by force. As a result of the bombings of trains, train stations, an officers' club, and military headquarters at the King David hotel, as well as murders and kidnappings of British military personnel, British newspapers began to demand that the government settle the conflict immediately.
Britain declared Palestine ungovernable and returned the mandate to the United Nations. The United Nations devised a Partion Plan in 1947 that would create an Arab state and a Jewish state from the former British Mandate territory. It put Jerusalem under international administration. It divided Palestine into two roughly equal portions with ragged borders, as seen in the map below:
This map was taken from MidEast Web, for educational purposes only.
The intent was an economic union between the two states, with open borders. It was a miserable failure. Jews accepted the plan; Arabs did not. When compared to the relative percentage of land owned by each group, the Partition plan was grossly unfair: at the time of the plan's creation, slightly less than half the land of Palestine was owned by Arabs. Slightly less than half the land was "crown land", owned by the state, and only 8% of land was owned by Jews. Most of the 600,000 Jews then in Palestine lived largely within their Partition-allotted borders, or within the city of Jerusalem. Mutual antagonism between the Arabs and Jews would make the Partition plan impossible to implement. The UN was both unwilling and unable to go about forcing the internationalizion of Jerusalem.
It was a moot point. The Arab League, prodded by Haj Amin Al-Husseini, declared war to rid Palestine of the Jews. Clashes (but not an Arab invasion) began almost as soon as the UN Partition Resolution was passed, in November and December of 1947. At first, it appeared that Jewish forces would lose, and lose badly. April 1948 marked a turning point in the pre-invasion war, in favor of Jewish forces.
The governments of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt were initially reluctant to go to war. It was only after the State of Israel was declared in May 1948 and the British withdrew from Palestine that Israel's neighboring Arab countries invaded Israel and Palestine. Initially, Egypt and Syria in particular made strong advances. Then a ceasefire in June gave both sides time to regroup.
The temporary truce gave Israel time to train and recruit soldiers, and to receive large shipments of arms and munitions. The underground armies were united into one combined fighting force, the Israeli Defense Force, or IDF. Neither Egypt nor Syria used the time half as wisely.
During the 10 days' fighting period between the first and second truces, the IDF opened a corridor through central Israel, invading the Arab towns of Lod and Romla, expelling Palestinians from the town after killing large numbers of them. They also cleared out Palestinian villages surrounding Tel Aviv.
When the Arab armies failed to united and organize during the first ceasfire, they lost their initial advantage. When the fighting ended, in 1949, Israel owned 78% of the land west of the Jordan River, far more than the UN Partition had allowed for. Jerusalem was now divided between Jordan (east Jerusalem) and Israel. Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Jordan the West Bank. Nearly three-quarters of a million Arabs fled or were driven out of Israel. Nearly as many Jews became refugees from Arab countries, many of whom were stripped of their property, rights, and nationality.
As the Arab countries refused to sign the peace treaty with Israel, the new Israeli borders never received de jure recognition. They were established by the UN along the "green line" of the 1949 armistice agreements.
With the exception of East Jerusalem (which Israel won from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Days War and kept); the disputed territories (Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights); and the Sinai penninsula, which Israel won in the Six-Days War but returned to Egypt in exchange for peace, in 1949, Israel's borders were as they are now.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah (or Hizbullah) ("Party of God") is an Islamic group in Lebanon with both political and military arms. It was founded in 1982, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Its aim is the destruction of Israel. Largely due to its military arm, it succeeded in driving Israeli forces from Lebanon in 2000. It is currently headed by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Hezbollah, inspired by the success of the Iranian Revolution, originally intended to transform Lebanon into an Iranian-style Islamic state. Though it has since abandoned this idea, it is a definite force in Lebanese politics, holding nearly 23 out of 128 of Lebanon's parliament seats. It has two ministers in the Lebanese government, and endorses a third.
Shi'a are the most populous religious group in Lebanon, comprising 40% of the Lebanese population. Hezbollah, as a Shi'a organization, is very popular among Lebanon's Shi'a. But it's not only the Shi'a who support Hezbollah.According to Emile Lahoud, Lebanon's Christian President
For us Lebanese, and I can tell you a majority of Lebanese, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement," says Lahoud. "If it wasn't for them, we couldn't have liberated our land. And because of that, we have big esteem for the Hezbollah movement.(link)
It's not just the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000 that they're talking about, either. Though Hezbollah's military wing has certainly accomplished a great deal of good for Lebanon in many Lebanese minds, it's the political wing of Hezbollah that makes a large everyday impact. They build schools, hospitals, and clinics. They're mainly a military organization, but their political wing is certainly not without power of its own.
Supporters of Hezbollah aren't only in Lebanon. Hezbollah has both supporters and cells in South America, North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. It receives financial support, as well as training, weapons, explosives, politicla, diplomatic, and organizational aid from Iran. Syria provides it with diplomatic, political, and logistical support. It is also funded through charitable donations and business interests. (link)
In the early 1980s, Hezbollah emerged as an Iranian-backed, and Syrian-backed (link), resistance group focused on expelling Israeli and Western forces from Lebanon. Intelligence agencies believe it was responsible for kidnappings such as those of Terry Waite and John McCarthy. It is also suspected of involvement in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American Marines. (link) It's suspected in the Beirut U.S. Embassy suicide truck bombing; the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 which resulted in the murder of a US Navy diver; multiple kidnappings in Lebanon in the 1980s; the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992; and the attack on the Israeli cultural center in Buenos Aires in 1994. (link) Hezbollah has repeatedly denied responsibility for both deadly attacks in Argentina. (link)
Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by the Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. It was branded a terrorist organization by the European Parliament in 2005, by non-binding resolution, but the EU has yet to act on this resolution.
==>tomorrow: part II: The Current Conflict