1845-1914 - Jews in Palestine
The number of Jews in
Palestine was small in the early 20th century; it increased from 12,000
in 1845 to nearly 85,000 by 1914. Most people in Palestine were
Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians. Support for the Zionist
movement came largely from Jews in Europe and North America.
1900 - Zionism
In 1896 following the appearance of anti-Semitism
in Europe, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism tried to find a
political solution for the problem in his book, 'The Jewish State'. He
advocated the creation of a Jewish state in Argentina or Palestine.
In 1897 the first Zionist Congress was held in Switzerland, which
issued the Basle programme on the colonization of Palestine and the
establishment of the World Zionist Organization (WZO).
In 1904 the Fourth Zionist Congress decided to establish a national
home for Jews in Argentina.
In 1906 the Zionist congress decided the Jewish homeland should be
Palestine.
In 1914 With the outbreak of World War I, Britain promised the
independence of Arab lands under Ottoman rule, including Palestine, in
return for Arab support against Turkey which had entered the war on the
side of Germany.
1916 - Sykes-Picot agreement
Britain and France signed a Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Which divided Arab region in to zones of influence. Lebanon and Syria
were assigned to France, Jordan and Iraq to Britain and Palestine to be
international.
1917 - Balfour Declaration
The British government therefore issued the
Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, in the form of a letter to a
British Zionist leader from the foreign secretary Arthur J. Balfour
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their
best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in
Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other country."
Full text
of Balfour Declaration
1918 - Jews immigration
After World War I
ended in 1918, Jews began to migrate to Palestine, which was set aside
as a British mandate with the approval of the League of Nations in 1922.
After World War I the terms of the Balfour Declaration were included in
the mandate for Palestine approved by the League of Nations in 1922.
The mandate entrusted Great Britain with administering Palestine and
with assisting the Jewish people in “reconstituting their national home
in that country.”
Large-scale Jewish settlement and development of extensive Zionist
agricultural and industrial enterprises in Palestine began during the
British mandatory period, which lasted until 1948. The Jewish
community, or Yishuv, increased tenfold during this era, especially
during the 1930s, when large numbers of Jews fled Europe to escape
persecution by the Nazis. Tel Aviv became the country's largest
all-Jewish city, dozens of other towns and villages were founded, and
hundreds of Jewish agricultural collectives (kibbutzim) and
cooperatives were established.
Many Jewish political parties founded in Eastern Europe as part of the
world Zionist movement developed bases in mandatory Palestine. They
included labor, orthodox religious, and nationalist groups whose
leaders emigrated from Europe and after 1948 became political leaders
and officials in the new Jewish state.
The Yishuv extended its institutions after World War I. Among these
institutions was an assembly with a National Council that managed the
community's day-to-day affairs in education, health, social welfare,
and other services. Jewish religious life was supervised by a
Rabbinical Council that controlled marriage, divorce, and other family
matters. Local government institutions were also developed to run the
city of Tel Aviv and many smaller Jewish settlements. The educational
system, cultivating Hebrew language and culture, expanded, and the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem was founded.
The World Zionist
Organization and the Jewish Agency for Palestine assisted the Yishuv by
raising funds abroad, recruiting Jewish immigrants, and seeking
political support from Western governments.
1919 - Palestinians first National Conference
The Palestinians
convened their first National Conference and expressed their opposition
to the Balfour Declaration.
1920 - San Remo Conference
The San Remo Conference
granted Britain a mandate over Palestine and two years later Palestine
was effectively under British administration, and Sir Herbert Samuel, a
declared Zionist, was sent as Britain's first High Commissioner to
Palestine.
1922 - The British Mandate
The Council of the
League of Nations issued a Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate was in
favor of the establishment for the Jewish people a homeland
1929 - The riots
In August 1929, the
century's first large-scale attack on Jews by Arabs rocked Jerusalem.
The riots, in which Palestinians killed 133 Jews and suffered 116
deaths.
Mostly inflicted by British troops were sparked by a dispute over use
of the Western Wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque, the site is sacred to
Muslims,but Jews claimed it is the remaining of old jews temple ( all
studies shows clearly that the wall is from the Islamic ages and it is
part of al-Aqsa Mosque). But the roots of the violence lay deeper in
Arab fears of the burgeoning Zionist movement, which aimed to make at
least part of British-administered Palestine a Jewish state.
The British had made promises to both Arabs and Zionists. The 1917
Balfour Declaration supported the establishment of a "national home"
for the Jews, while pledging that nothing would be done to " prejudice
the civil and religious rights" of the Arabs. But the very presence of
a Jewish homeland would, Arabs insisted, infringe on those rights.
1936 - A six months General Strike in Palestine
The Palestinians held a
six months General Strike to protest against the confiscation of land
and Jewish immigration.
1937 - Peel Commission
Since the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 (which endorsed the idea of a Jewish state within
Palestine), the British government had been struggling to reconcile the
conflicting aspirations of Jews and Arabs in Palestine, which Britain
administered under a League of Nations mandate . Those who still
believed in the possibility of peaceful coexistence between the two
groups got a grim comeuppance in July 1937 when the Peel Commission,
headed by Lord Robert Peel, issued its report. Basically, the
commission concluded, the mandate in Palestine was unworkable There was
no hope of any cooperative national entity there that included both
Arabs and Jews, . The impetus for the commission's formation had been
the most recent spark of Palestinian violence. Riots and Arab protests
against the Jews in Palestine had been escalating throughout the 1920s
and '30s. In the mid-1930s, in response to the thousands of Jews who'd
arrived from Europe, Palestinian Arabs formed the Arab High Committee
to defend themselves against what they perceived as a Jewish takeover A
general strike exploded into a revolt. Desperate for a solution, the
British appointed Lord Peel to study the situation. The Arab leadership
boycotted the study.
After dismissing the possibility of Arab-Jewish amity, the commission
went on to recommend the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an
Arab state, and a neutral sacred-site state to be administered by
Britain. Within two years, Britain found itself in a no-win situation,
and on the eve of World War II issued the infamous "White Paper"
severely curtailing Jewish immigration into Palestine.
1939 - GB restricting Jewish immigration
The British government
published a new White Paper restricting Jewish immigration and offering
independence for Palestine within ten years. This was rejected by the
Zionists, who then organized terrorist groups and launched a bloody
campaign against the British and the Palestinians. The aim was to drive
them both out of Palestine and to pave the way for the establishment of
the Zionist state.
1945 - Britain's Palestine Dilemma
With World War II over
and the Nazi death camps open for the world to see, Zionists redoubled
their demands that Britain open its Palestine mandate to unlimited
Jewish immigration.
Jewish terrorist groups the Irgun Zvei Lumi and the Stern Gang
escalated their campaign to force Britain's hand.
Arabs in the region opposed a Jewish influx, but in Palestine itself
they lacked unified leadership. So in March 1945, Saudi Arabia, Syria,
Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, Yemen, and Egypt organized the League of
Arab States to pressure Britain from the other side. Britain's new
labour government (unlike its predecessor) strongly sympathized with
Zionism's goal, yet it hoped to remain friendly with the Arabs. Adding
to the British quandary was President Truman. whose Zionist leanings
were clear. In April 1946, yielding to U. S. pressure, Britain sent yet
another commission to study the issue. The Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry recommended that 100,000 European Jewish refugees be admitted
immediately, that restrictions on Jewish land purchases in Palestine be
lifted, and that a binational Jewish-Arab state be established under
United Nations trusteeship. Faced with the political and economic costs
of policing Palestine, the British gladly turned the matter over to the
UN. In 1947 the UN sent its own commission to seek answers to the
Palestine problem. The result, the following year, was the founding of
Israel and a war between the Jewish and Arab.
1947 - The UN partition plan
The UN convened its
first special session in 1947 , and on November 29, 1947, it adopted a
plan calling for partition of Palestine in to Jewish and Arab states ,
with Jerusalem as an international zone under UN jurisdiction the
Jewish and Arab states would be joined in an economic union. The
partition resolution was endorsed by a vote of 33 to 13 , supported by
the United States and the Soviet Union . The British abstained.
Full text
of UN partition plan
1947 - Great Britain withdraw
Exhausted by seven years of war and eager to
withdraw from overseas colonial commitments, Great Britain in 1947
decided to leave Palestine and called on the United Nations (UN) to
make recommendations.
The map on the left shows the lands which was owned by Jewish and
Jewish agencies and also lands owned by Arab before British withdraw
from Palestine.
1948 - First Arab-Israeli War
In Palestine, Arab
protests against partition erupted in violence, with attacks on Jewish
settlements in retaliation to the attacks of Jews terrorist groups to
Arab Towns and villages & massacres in hundred against unarmed
Palestinian in there homes, that soon led to a full-scale war. The
British generally refused to intervene, intent on leaving the country
no later than August 15, 1948, the date in the partition plan for
termination of the mandate.
When it became clear that the British intended to leave by May 15,
leaders of the Yishuv decided ( as they claim ) to implement that part
of the partition plan calling for establishment of a Jewish state.
In Tel Aviv on May 14 the Provisional State Council, formerly the
National Council, “representing the Jewish people in Palestine and the
World Zionist Movement,” proclaimed the “establishment of the Jewish
State in Palestine, to be called Medinat Israel (the State of Israel) …
open to the immigration of Jews from all the countries of their
dispersion.”
On May 15 the armies of Egypt, Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria,
Lebanon, and Iraq joined Palestinian and other Arab guerrillas who had
been fighting Jewish forces since November 1947. The war now became an
international conflict , the first Arab-Israeli War . The Arabs failed
to prevent establishment of a Jewish state, and the war ended with four
UN-arranged armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon,
Jordan, and Syria. The frontiers defined in the armistice agreements
remained until they were altered by Israel's conquests during the Six
Days War in 1967.
More about
Arab-Israeli Wars
1948 - Israel founded
The population balance
in the new state of Israel was drastically altered during the 1948 war.
The armistice agreements extended the territory under Israel's control
beyond the UN partition boundaries from approximately 15,500 to 20,700
sq km (about 6,000 to 8,000 sq mi).
The small Gaza Strip on the Egypt-Israel border was left under Egyptian
control , and the West Bank was controled by Jordan. Of the more than
800,000 Arabs who lived in Israeli-held territory before 1948, only
about 170,000 remained. The rest became refugees in the surrounding
Arab countries, ending the Arab majority in the Jewish state.
Israel's Provisional State Council organized elections for the first
Knesset (parliament) in 1949. Chaim Weizmann, the most prominent
Zionist leader of the prewar period, became the country's first
president.
Full text
of Proclamation of Israel's Independence
1954 - Nasser Takes Charges
For almost two years,
Colonel Gamal Abdal Nasser had quietly directed Egypt's revolution from
above, while General Muhammad Naguib served as president and prime
minister.
February 1954, the colonel stepped to the fore. Citing Naguib's ties to
the banned Muslim Brotherhood and his intention to restore the old
system of government, Nasser forced him to resign. In April, Nasser
took over the premiership.
1956 - Suez war
Attempts to convert the
Israeli - Arab armistice agreements into peace treaties failed . The
Arabs insisted that the refugees be permitted to return to their homes,
that Jerusalem be internationalized, and that Israel make territorial
concessions before they entered peace talks. Israel charged that these
demands would undermine its security and refused them.
Frequent incursions by refugee guerrilla bands and attacks by Arab
military units were made, which Israel answered with forceful
retaliation. Egypt refused to permit Israeli ships to use the Suez
Canal and blockaded the Straits of Tiran (Israel's access to the Red
Sea), which was seen as an act of war. Border incidents along the
frontiers with Egypt escalated until they erupted in the second
Arab-Israeli War in October and November of 1956.
Great Britain and France ostensibly joined the attack because of their
dispute with Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had just
nationalized the Suez Canal. Nasser took over the canal after Great
Britain and France withdrew offers to finance the construction of the
Aswân High Dam. Israel scored a quick victory, seizing the Gaza
Strip and the Sinai Peninsula within a few days. As Israeli forces
reached the banks of the Suez Canal, the British and French started
their attack. The fighting was halted by the UN after a few days, and a
UN Emergency Force (UNEF) was sent to supervise the cease-fire in the
Canal zone. In a rare instance of cooperation, the United States and
the Soviet Union supported the UN resolution forcing the three invading
countries to leave Egypt and Gaza. By the end of the year their forces
withdrew from Egypt, but Israel refused to leave Gaza until early 1957,
and only after the United States had promised to help resolve the
conflict and keep the Straits of Tiran open.
More about
Arab-Israeli Wars
1958 - Arabs Unite
The 1958 merger of Syria
and Egypt into the United Arab Republic was the first of a series of
dramatic realignments throughout the Middle East, inspired by the
vision of Gamal Abdal Nasser. Syria had been moving in the Egyptian
dictator's ideological direction since the fall of a rightist military
regime in 1954: the new junta , dominated by the socialist Ba'ath party
, had followed Egypt in recognizing Mao's China and acquiring Soviet
arms, Squeezed between Washington ( which backed anti-Soviet Arab
governments against their nonaligned neighbors ) and a growing domestic
Communist movement, Syria's leaders decided to put their pan-Arabist
notions to the test.National borders, after all,were a Western
invention: Syria would lose nothing and gain untold strength by melding
with dynamic Egypt.
More changes followed quickly. Yemen, though ruled by a conservative
monarch, sought security by affiliating itself with the U.A.R. in a
confederation called the United Arab States, The Western oriented
kingdom of Iraq and Jordan formed a rival union. In Saudi Arabia, King
Saud was forced to cede authority to his relatively pro-Egyptian
brother Faisal after being implicated in a plot on Nasser's life. In
Lebanon, civil war erupted between Syrian-backed Arab nationalists and
supporters of pro-Western president Camille Chamoun. In Iraq, when
Premier Nuri al-Said decided to aid Chamoun, pro-Egyptian officers
revolted-killing Said along with King Faisal II and most of the royal
family. The Iraqi-Jordanian federation was no more.
Fearing the spread of Nasserism to Lebanon, the United States sent
10,000 troops and sponsored talks between the warring factions. A
compromise led to elections, and General Fuad Chehab less
enthusiastically pro-Western and friendlier to Nasser than Chamoun
became president.
Except for Jordan, all the Arab nations had now fallen more or less
into Cairo's camp. But they soon fell out again. Iraq's strongman,
Abdul Karim Kassem, developed a bitter personal rivalry with his
Egyptian counterpart . The Syrians came to resent Nasser's
authoritarianism, while the Saudis and Yemen resisted his socialism .
And by 1961 , when Syria seceded from the U.A.R. , Arab unity lay in
ruins.
1964 - PLO established
The Palestine Liberation Organization was
established. On 1 January 1965 The Palestine Revolution began .
More
about PLO
1967 - The Six Days War
After the Suez-Sinai war
Arab nationalism increased dramatically, as did demands for revenge led
by Egypt's president Nasser. The formation of a united Arab military
command that massed troops along the borders, together with Egypt's
closing of the Straits of Tiran and Nasser's insistence in 1967 that
the UNEF leave Egypt, led Israel to attack Egypt, Jordan, and Syria
simultaneously on June 5 of that year.
The war ended six days later with an Israeli victory. Israel's
French-equipped air force wiped out the air power of its antagonists
and was the chief instrument in the destruction of the Arab armies.
The Six Days War left Israel in possession of Gaza and the Sinai
Peninsula, which it took from Egypt; Arab East Jerusalem and the West
Bank, which it took from Jordan; and the Golan Heights, taken from
Syria. Land under Israel's jurisdiction after the 1967 war was about
four times the size of the area within its 1949 armistice frontiers.
The occupied territories included an Arab population of about 1.5
million.
The occupied territories became a major political issue in Israel after
1967. The right and leaders of the country's orthodox religious parties
opposed withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, which they considered
part of Israel. In the Labor Alignment, opinion was divided; some
Laborites favored outright annexation of the occupied territories,
others favored withdrawal, and some advocated retaining only those
areas vital to Israel's military security. Several smaller parties,
including the Communists, also opposed annexation. The majority of
Israelis, however, supported the annexation of East Jerusalem and its
unification with the Jewish sectors of the city, and the Labor-led
government formally united both parts of Jerusalem a few days after the
1967 war ended. In 1980 the Knesset passed another law, declaring
Jerusalem “complete and united,” Israel's eternal capital.
The 1967 war was followed by an upsurge of Palestinian Arab
nationalism. Several guerrilla organizations within the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) carried out guerrillas attacks on Israeli
targets, with the stated objective of “redeeming Palestine.” guerrillas
attacks on Israelis targets at home and abroad unified public opinion
against recognition of and negotiation with PLO, but the group
nevertheless succeeded in gaining widespread international support,
including UN recognition as the “sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinians.”.
More about
Arab-Israeli Wars
1972 - Munich Olympics
The stunning
performances of the young Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut and the gold
medals of American swimmer Mark Spitz and British athlete Mary Peters
could not dispel the horror in Munich when the 20th Olympic Games
became the setting for an guerrilla attacked which left 11 Israeli
athletes dead.
The attacked began just before dawn on September 5th when eight hooded
guerrillas scaled the fence around the Olympic Village. Bursting into
the dormitory where the 11 Israeli athletes were sleeping, they shot
two dead and took the other nine hostage, threatening to kill them
unless 200 Arab guerrillas were released. The German authorities agreed
to take the guerrillas to Furstentbldbruck military airfield where a
Lufthansa airliner was waiting on the tarmac to fly them out of the
country. There they were ambushed by German marksmen, but in the
ensuing gun battle all nine hostages were killed in the cross-fire.
1973 - The October War
In 1973 Egypt joined
Syria in a war on Israel to regain the territories lost in 1967. The
two Arab states struck unexpectedly on October 6, which fell on Yom
Kippur , Israel's holiest fast day . After crossing the suez channel
the Arab forces gain a lot of advanced positions in Sinai Peninsula and
Golan Heights and manage to defeat the Israeli forces for more then
three weeks . Israeli forces with a massive U.S. economic and military
assistance managed to stop the arab forces after a three-week struggle
and defeat with the cost of many casualties,and the Arabs strong
showing won them support from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) and most of the world's developing countries.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait financed the Arab forces, making it possible
for Egypt and Syria to receive the most sophisticated Soviet weapons ,
and the Arab oil producing states cut off petroleum exports to the
United States and other Western nations in retaliation for their aid to
Israel.
Israel, forced to compete with the nearly unlimited Arab resources, was
faced with a serious financial setback. Only massive U.S. economic and
military assistance enabled it to redress the balance, but even
American aid was unable to prevent a downward spiral of the economy.
In an effort to encourage a peace settlement, U.S. President Richard M.
Nixon charged his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, with the task of
negotiating agreements between Israel and Egypt and Syria. Kissinger
managed to work out military disengagements between Israel and Egypt in
the Sinai and between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights during 1974.
More about
Arab-Israeli Wars
1974 - PLO representative the Palestinian people
The Arab Summit in Rabat
recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people. At the United Nations General Assembly, the UN
reaffirmed its commitment to an independent sovereign state in
Palestine and gave the PLO observer status at the United Nations.
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, addressed the General Assembly of
the United Nations.
1979 - Camp David
Begin, however, was the
first Israeli leader to achieve a peace settlement with an Arab state.
It resulted from the surprise initiative of President Anwar al-Sadat of
Egypt, who in November 1977 flew to Jerusalem, where he addressed the
Knesset and called on Begin to begin peace talks. After protracted
negotiations sponsored by U.S. President Jimmy Carter at Camp David,
Maryland, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed in Washington,
D.C., on March 26, 1979. Although the treaty ended the prospects for
war between Israel and Egypt, many issues remained between the two
countries, including the problem of arranging for Arab autonomy in the
occupied West Bank and Gaza.
1979 - Russian Jews
The Jews of the
Russian empire had been oppressed
for centuries, and though the pogroms ended under Soviet rule,
discrimination did not. Fearing international embarrassment and a
"brain drain" of skilled workers, MOSCOW had long restricted
emigration. But in the 1970s, detente brought a loosening of curbs. The
exodus peaked in 1979 , when more then 51,000 exit visas were issued.
The sharp increase,
coinciding with the conclusion of the second
U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) , was widely seen
as an attempt to influence treaty ratification. A second Soviet foreign
policy goal to achieve most favored nation status with the United
States was equally important: In 1979, US officials were considering
repeal of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a 1974 law that tied trade
grants to free emigration.
Even as emigration soared, the Kremlin cracked down on Jewish
activism-reviling refuseniks (the term for those refused permission to
leave) as "agents of world Zionism" and sentencing many to long terms
in labor camps or psychiatric institutions. The 1977 arrest of Anatoly
Shcharansky, a young mathematician who'd talked openly with Western
reporters about his failure to gain an exit permit, generated
international outrage. Charged with spying for the CIA, Shcharansky was
convicted in a closed trial, and served nine years in prison before
being released to Israel as part of a spy exchange. His case was
extraordinary only in the attention it drew.
Watchdog groups estimated that by 1979, some 180,000 Soviet Jews had
filed for visas, yet emigration plummeted the following year, when SALT
II failed to be ratified and the Carter administration - reacting to
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - imposed a grain embargo. By 1984,
the number of emigres had slumped to 896.
1981 - Sadat assassinated
On October 6th,
President Mohammed Anwar el Sadat
of Egypt was murdered by Islamic fundamentalist gunmen in Cairo. The
shooting happened at 1 p.m. during the annual military parade to
commemorate the beginning of the Egyptian attacked in the 1973
Arab-Israeli war. A lorry in the procession stopped in front of the
rostrum where the President and other luminaries were watching a
fly-past of Egyptian Air Force jets. Armed men climbed out and ran
towards Sadat, hurling grenades and opening fire with automatic
weapons. The President and seven others fell, mortally wounded . Sadat
was flown to the Maadi military hospital where he died an hour and 40
minutes later. Sadat's funeral on October 10th was attended by only one
Arab head of state. He had isolated himself in the Arab world by the
rapprochement with Israel which had won him and Menachem Begin the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 and led to a peace treaty between the two
countries in 1979. Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Palestinian Liberation
Organization openly applauded his assassination.
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the Time Line between 1982 - 2003
