Understanding The Conflicting Rights & Claims over the West Bank

Two of these, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan heights, were formerly internationally recognized territories of Egypt and Syria, respectively. The Sinai was ceded back to Egypt under the terms of the Camp David accords. The Golan Heights remains under Israeli occupation.

Because of the strategic importance and quondam(prenominal) history of the Golan Heights -- it overlooks much of northern Israel, and was regularly utilize before 1967 for Syrian rocket attacks on Israeli towns -- the Israelis deport been reluctant to give it up. Nor have the Syrians shown any interest in signing a peace treaty with Israel. Neverthe slight, Golan is less implicit in(p) an issue for Israelis than is the West Bank.

The Gaza Strip and the West Bank, in contrast, are non former territories of Arab states. Under the post-World War I stop that drew most Middle East boundaries, these areas were both plainly parts of the British "Mandate" of nirvana (Fromkin, 1989, pp. 445ff). There was no distinction between them and any other part of the Palestine Mandate. At that time, in the view of European statesmen, the concern was not over conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, exactly quite a the fear that Jewish and Arab nationalists would join hands against the imperial powers (p. 17).

A generation later, after World War II, the hope of sensation among Jews and Arabs in Palestine had vanished. The rising scale of Jewish immi

Until Saladin comes, or the Messiah comes, Israelis must draw to their credential in the real world. While Israel has no puddle right to the West Bank, nor does it clearly lack such(prenominal) a right. Control of the West Bank is crucial to Israeli security in a military sense, and it is at best undecipherable that ceding the territories to a Palestinian state would provide diplomatic and political security to compensate. Therefore, the most logical and reasonable persist for Israel is to maintain control of the West Bank.

As Jewish immigration into Palestine continued, predominantly Jewish and Arab areas came to form a gallimaufry through and through come forth the region.

In the course of the rising struggle, Jews were driven out of some areas, notably Hebron, where they had previously lived since biblical times. In 1947, the U.N. naval division plan for Palestine called for both Jewish and Arab states, separated by an elaborately drawn border that more or less separated the chief areas of settlement. The Jewish Agency, the nascent Israeli state, sure the partition plan, though it produced a very hard-to-defend border and greatly complicated even normal state administration. It also set(p) many of those areas most linked to Jewish history -- such as Hebron itself, and above all the Old City of capital of Israel -- in the Arab sector (Johnson, 1987, p. 532).

gration had already led to tensions by 1920, but the critical turning point was the rise of Haji Amin as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the city's chief Sunni cleric, in 1921. Haji Amin mobilized an explosive faction of Arab nationalism and what would now be called Muslim fundamentalism (Johnson, 1987, pp. 438-39). The current of Islamic fundamentalism, totally inflexible and rejecting all compromise, is one that continues to run through Palestinian Arab politics.

In the wake of the 1967 war, however, it was Israel that reunified "historic Palestine" under its own control. It should be re-emphasized here that in occupying these territories,
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