Oasis Plan's Historical Primer, (1/5)

In 1994, economist Lyndon LaRouche proposed the Oasis Plan as a template for peace in the Middle East. The Plan seeks to reverse the cycle of conflict which has characterized the region in recent and distant history by incentivizing cooperation amongst the Middle East’s countries. Those statesmen and others who evaluate the Plan will do so against such history, so it helps to understand the context through which the Oasis Plan’s wisdom will shine through.

This is the second installment in a septempartite series which introduces LaRouche’s Oasis Plan. The Plan’s objectives were detailed in the first. Installments two through six will cover just the pertinent regional history, with the present installment covering Israel’s founding. If you are already up to date with Middle Eastern history, then no hard feelings if you prefer just to skip to the seventh and final installment which concludes with Plan’s mechanics and financing. The aim is to publish the installments within two or three days of each other.

Beginnings (1517 A.D. – 1948 A.D.)

In 1517 the Ottomans wrested the area of Israel and Palestine from the Mamluks. Initially the change in sovereign improved conditions for the area’s people, Arabs (both Muslim and Christian) and Jews who were farmers and artisans. Ottoman government was usually decentralized, such that the pashas (provincial governors) would not harass the locals as long as taxes were paid and quotas for troops fulfilled. (¶ 16) However, the decentralization also fostered neglect since there was little oversight by the Porte (the Ottoman imperial court in Istanbul).

By the 18th century’s end, absentee landlords leased tracts to tenant farmers who worked them for broke, such that forests were felled in Galilee and Carmel, and farmlands succumbed to desertification. In 1839, retired Jewish financier Sir Moses Montefiore visited the area and recognized the lands’ degeneration. He thus proposed the large-scale introduction of Jewish farmers for rehabilitation. In 1854, American Jewish philanthropist Judah Touro died, naming Sir Moses as executor of his testament which allocated $60,000 (equivalent to $2.3 million today) to Jewish settlement in Israel. Sir Moses purchased an orchard outside Jaffa which provided agricultural training to Jews (¶ 7). Outside Jerusalem’s fortifications, Sir Moses built a community (modern day Mishkenot Sha’ananim) which settled Ashkenazi Jews together with their Sephardic counterparts. The Ashkenazi mostly spoke Yiddish whilst the Sephardic spoke Ladino, so the Hebrew which both used in liturgy became the lingua franca and was re-purposed for secular communication.

In the 1880s, Jews fed up with Eastern Europe’s seasonal pogroms had begun to migrate to Jerusalem and its environs in waves called aliyah. In 1897, Theodor Herzl founded the international Zionist Movement with the objective of establishing a homeland for all Jewry in the holy land. Jews around the world responded by migrating en masse, such that by 1948 the Yishuv or Jewish community numbered 806,000.

A complication in the Zionist objective was the fact that the homeland it was claiming for the Jews was already long inhabited by Muslims and Christians. In 1914, the United Kingdom entered World War One against the Ottomans, Germany and Austro-Hungary. On November 2nd, 1917, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, dispatched a letter to pre-eminent Zionist Lord Walther Rothschild which expressed the UK government’s approval of the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This private letter, which historians call the Balfour Declaration, was not just a unilateral expression of British plans for territory which it did not yet control, but an enunciation of consensus between the UK and its allies for Israel’s post-war establishment in the region. (p. 21 ¶ 3) This consensus was far from casual but rather the product of dedicated lobbying by Zionist diplomat Nahum Sokolow, who visited and corresponded with the UK’s allies to win approval for a Jewish state in the Middle East. (¶ 25)

The UK prevailed over the Ottomans in the war, which brought the area under British sovereignty in 1919. In July 1922, the Council of the League of Nations incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the mandate for the region’s governance, on the Declaration’s explicit condition that, “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Of such non-Jewish communities, in 1919 there were around 440,000 Arabs, who by 1940 numbered 1,000,000.

The condition for peaceful coexistence with the area’s non-Jewish communities became unwieldy from the outset. On August 15th, 1929, tensions between Zionist settlers and Palestinian Arabs erupted into the al-Buraq Riots which killed 113 Jews, 116 Arabs and wounded many more on both sides. Between 1936 to 1939, the Great Arab Revolt killed around 500 Jews and 5000 Arabs. The violence was so endemic to the region that the United Kingdom’s Peel Commission in July 1937 recommended Palestine’s separation into Jewish and Arab states, a position advanced by the United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947. The City of Jerusalem, sacred to Jew, Arab and Christian alike, would be administered in trust by the UN. The region’s balance of power then drastically changed.

Founding to Intifada I (1948 – 1988)

On May 14th, 1948, the State of Israel was founded. Thereupon its five Arab neighbors of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon attacked the fledgling state in what has been denominated the Arab-Israeli War. In February 1949, an armistice was concluded, formalizing Israel’s gains in territory which UN Resolution 181 had contemplated for a future Palestinian state. The Palestinians’ displacement due to this annexation is termed the Nakba, which is Arabic for catastrophe.

On July 26th, 1956, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. It was built in 1869 by a Franco-British joint venture, which still operated the canal in 1956. Egypt offered remuneration for the nationalization. (p. 136 ¶ 4) Egypt had hoped tolls from the canal’s operation would finance the Aswan Dam, funding for the construction of which had been withdrawn by the USA and UK. Rather than accept Egypt’s reimbursement for the canal, the UK and France opted to seize it by force through an alliance with Israel, since Israel was already apprehensive about Egypt closing the canal to Israeli shipping. On October 29th, 1957, Israel launched Operation Kadesh, whereby it invaded the Sinai Peninsula en route to the Suez Canal. On the pretext of “protecting” the canal from destruction by these two belligerents, France and the UK bombarded Egypt’s coastline before landing troops.

The international community condemned these acts as flagrant aggression. The UN’s General Assembly issued Resolution 997 which called a ceasefire and established a peacekeeping force comprising ten neutral countries to maintain the Suez Canal open to international shipping. Israel withdrew from Egypt, leaving an uneasy peace between the two countries.

Tensions simmered through the years, erupting into sporadic border skirmishes, but the next drastic change in the regional balance of power came over the course of six fateful days in 1967. Egypt and Jordan had ratified a defensive pact, later joined by Syria and Iraq. Egypt announced on May 23rd that it was blockading the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, such that Israel could receive no imports through its southern port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba. Egypt then concentrated seven brigades and 1000 tanks next to Israel’s border by the Sinai Peninsula. It appeared to Israel that its neighbors were set to repeat a coordinated assault as they had nineteen years earlier.

Preemptively, on June 5th, 1967, Israel launched an airstrike into Egypt, destroying 90% of Egyptian military aircraft, which allowed Israeli tanks to traverse the Sinai and occupy the Suez Canal and Gaza Strip with minimal casualties. With aerial superiority achieved, Israel turned its sights onto Egypt’s allies. By June 8th, Israel had seized the Jordan River’s West Bank, territory which included Judaism’s holy sites of Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron and Jerusalem’s ancient sections. Finally, by June 11th, Israel had seized the Golan Heights from Syria.

In November 1967, the UN Resolution 242 condemned the territorial seizures and demanded Israel’s retreat to its pre-war boundaries. But domestically that was unfeasible after the whole country had been mobilized and had sustained around 1000 casualties with many more wounded. Had Israel lost the war, there was every reason to expect that the Arab belligerents would annihilate Israel, so there had to be some consequence for their failed attempt. Israel’s territorial acquisitions had tripled its original size and further complicated the designation of land for an independent Palestinian state.

The official policy with the newly acquired territories was for the Israeli military to hold them as leverage to exact concessions and guarantees for peace from Israel’s former adversaries, with eventual return of the territories to them. Initially this was at odds with the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel, a popular and influential rekindling of the Zionist pioneering ethic which sought to settle Jews in the Eretz Yisrael, biblical Israel’s furthest domain. To this end, organizations like Gush Emunim were founded to pipeline Jewish settlers into the territories in the hopes of creating new “facts in the field.” The fervor for Jewish settlement in contested territories increased significantly and gained some sympathizers in Israel’s government after the next round of bloodshed.

On October 6th, 1973, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq tried their luck against Israel one more time in what is called the Yom Kippur War. Initially they enjoyed success, but stiff Israeli counteroffensives brought them to the negotiating table by October 28th, 1973. The lasting outcome of this war was entente between Egypt and Israel, culminating in the Camp David Accords of 1978, by which the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt. (p. 3) Jordan normalized relations with Israel in 1992.

As the inveterate pan-Arab adversaries saw more value in trading with Israel than fighting it, options narrowed for Palestinian statehood achieved by way of conventional warfare. In 1964, those who desired an independent Palestinian state had founded the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under the Arab League’s auspices. The PLO was an umbrella group, which included subgroups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine People’s Party, which emerged in Israel’s newly acquired territories. Whereas these groups were more oriented towards political action and negotiation with Israel, factions favoring statehood such as Yasser Arafat’s al-Fatah (founded in the 1950s) were oriented towards militancy, which included attacks by fedayeen guerrillas against Jewish settlements in the territories which Israel was transitorily occupying. (hereinafter, the “occupied territories”)

The movement for strategic Jewish settlement in the occupied territories and that for Palestinian statehood violently clashed in what has been termed the Intifada. In 1979 Israel’s five-member Supreme Court had unanimously ruled that the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh was established on land expropriated from Arabs without appropriate security justifications. This ruling forced civilian settlers into the work-around of founding settlements in closer coordination with and proximity to military deployments in the occupied territories. To the Palestinians it appeared as if private Israeli citizens were illegally expropriating Arab land and doing so with the blessing of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). By December 1987, 2200 armed Jewish settlers had appropriated 40% of the Gaza Strip’s 140 square miles (362 km²) with 650000 Palestinians segregated in the remaining 60%. On December 9th, 1987, the Intifada started with decentralized demonstrations and riots between Gaza and the West Bank. The Jewish settlers and Israeli security forces in turn utilized countermeasures against the growing violence.

The PLO’s leadership, exiled then to Tunisia, remotely organized general labor strikes since many Israeli industries relied on Palestinian labor. These activities mobilized wide swaths of Palestinian society and demonstrated that the PLO could exert considerable pressure without resort to violence, and from afar in coordination with local operatives, many of them female. In July 1988, King Hussein of Jordan discontinued administrative ties with the West Bank, which in effect legitimized the PLO as that area’s political representative. In November 1988, the PLO formally renounced terrorism, proposed the creation of a Palestinian state, recognized Israel, and proposed peace between the two nations.

Oslo to Intifada II (1988 – 2005)

The PLO’s renunciation of terrorism and its recognition of Israel paved the way towards negotiations between the two entities. Between September 1993 and September 1995, Israel and the PLO (back from exile as of July 1994) signed the Declarations on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, referred to as the Oslo Accords. The Accords would establish the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the entity to govern the West Bank and Gaza, with Israel relinquishing in phases military and civilian jurisdiction. After five years, Israel and the PA would permanently demarcate borders, decide Jerusalem’s governance, and negotiate Palestinian refugees’ right of return, understood as the legality of those displaced in the Nakba to reclaim realty which had belonged to them or their families.

However noble the intentions behind the Oslo Accords, the reality did not pan out. On the Palestinian side, the rival Islamist group Hamas refused to honor the Accords and undermined the PA by conducting attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers. On the Israeli side, there was widespread opposition to the Oslo Accords and Prime Minister Itzkak Rabin who had signed them. Such was Rabin’s unpopularity that a Jewish hardliner assassinated him on November 4th, 1995.

The opposition Likud Party, headed then as now by Benjamin Netanyahu, won the next election in 1996 and began a reverse from the Oslo Accords. Israel allowed (or at least did not impede) the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to increase from 100,506 to 190,206 as counted from the year 1992 to 2000. Not only were Jewish settlements growing larger and denser, but their placement effectively cut Palestinian communities off from one another, creating circuitous corridors along which Palestinians would have to pass for commerce or to visit family, often subject to intrusive checkpoints. Jerusalem itself was all but closed to visits by Palestinians who did not already reside there.

As mutual distrust and tensions festered, the Second Intifada broke out in the year 2000, and was vastly more deadly than the first. Suicide bombings became more prevalent, with 138 documented instances between the years 2001 and 2005, often against civilian targets in the occupied territories and Israel proper (the outline of which is often referenced in journalism as the Green Line, based on the overall better environmental upkeep when compared to the surrounding Palestinian lands). Between those same years, the conflict killed around 4000 Palestinians, and 1000 Israelis, with tens of thousands wounded on both sides. In 2002, Israel began the construction of a partition barrier on the West Bank in the hopes of thwarting potential attacks. For Israel’s other front with Gaza, a very different course of action would be pursued.