Officially State of Israel , Hebrew Medinat Yisra'el , Arabic Isra'il; country in the Middle East, located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. It is bounded to the north by Lebanon, to the northeast by Syria, to the east and southeast by Jordan, to the southwest by Egypt, and to the west by the Mediterranean Sea. The total area is 7,992 square miles (20,700 square km) excluding East Jerusalem and other territories occupied in the 1967 war. Jerusalem is the capital and the seat of government.
Israel is a small country with a relatively diverse topography, consisting of a lengthy coastal plain, highlands in the north and central regions, and the Negev desert in the south. Running the length of the country from north to south along its eastern border is the northern terminus of the Great Rift Valley.
The State of Israel is the only Jewish nation in the modern period, and the region that now falls within its borders has a lengthy and rich history that dates from pre-biblical times. The area was a part of the Roman and, later, Byzantine empires before falling under the control of the fledgling Islamic caliphate in the 7th century CE. Although the object of dispute during the European Crusades, the region, then generally known as Palestine, remained under the sway of successive Islamic dynasties until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, when it was placed under British mandate from the League of Nations.
Even before the mandate, the desire for a Jewish homeland prompted a small number of Jews to immigrate to Palestine, a migration that grew dramatically during the second quarter of the 20th century with the increased persecution of Jews worldwide and subsequent Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. This vast influx of Jewish immigrants into the region, however, caused tension with the native Palestinian Arabs, and violence flared between the two groups leading up to the United Nations plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian sectors and Israel's ensuing declaration of statehood on May 14, 1948.
Israel fought a series of wars against neighbouring Arab states during the next 35 years, which have resulted in ongoing disputes over territory and the status of refugees. Despite continuing tensions, however, Israel concluded peace treaties with several neighbouring Arab states during the final quarter of the 20th century.
Jews constitute about four-fifths of the total population
of Israel. Almost all the rest are Palestinian Arabs, of whom most (roughly
three-fourths) are Muslim; the remaining Arabs are Christians and Druze,
who each comprise only a small fraction of the total population. Arabs
constitute the overwhelming majority of the occupied territories of the
West Bank and Gaza. (For information on Palestinians residing outside Israel,
see Palestine).
Religious Jewry in Israel constitutes a significant and
articulate section of the population. As such, it is often at odds with
a strong secular sector that seeks to prevent religious bodies and authorities
from dominating national life. The two main religious-ethnic groupings
are those Jews from central and eastern Europe and their descendants who
follow the Ashkenazic traditions and those Jews from the Mediterranean
region and North Africa who follow the Sephardic. There are two chief rabbis
in Israel, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi. Tension is frequent between
the two groups, largely because of their cultural differences and the social
and political dominance of the Ashkenazim in Israeli society. Until recently,
it was generally true that the Sephardim tended to be poorer, less educated,
and less represented in higher political office than the Ashkenazim.
The Circassians, who are Sunnite Muslims, emigrated from
the Caucasus in the 1870s. They number a few thousand and live in villages
in Galilee, preserving their native language and traditions. Older Circassians
speak Arabic as well as the Circassian language, but members of the younger
generation speak Hebrew. The men serve in the Israeli armed forces.
More than half of the Arab population fled their homes during the war of 1948, of whom only a small fraction were allowed to return after the end of hostilities. While the Jewish population has grown more from immigration than from natural increase since that time, the Arab population has grown mainly through high birth rates, which are markedly higher than among Israel's Jews, and through the addition of about 66,000 residents of East Jerusalem, captured from Jordan in 1967 and later annexed by Israel. Overall, the population is youthful, with about one-fourth being 15 years old or younger. Life expectancy is among the highest in the world: some 80 years for women and 77 years for men.
Israel's lawmaking body, the Knesset, or assembly, is a single-chamber legislature with 120 members who are elected every four years (or more frequently if a Knesset vote of nonconfidence in the government results in an early election). Members exercise important functions in standing committees. Hebrew and Arabic, the country's two official languages, are used in all proceedings.
The country's prime minister, who is directly elected by separate popular ballot in each national election, is the head of government and is entrusted with the task of forming the cabinet, which is the government's main policy-making and executive body. Israel has a strong cabinet, and its members may be—but need not be—members of the Knesset.
The president, who is the head of state, is elected by the Knesset for a five-year term, which can be renewed only once. The president has no veto powers and exercises mainly ceremonial functions but has the authority to appoint certain key national officials, including state comptroller, governor of the Bank of Israel, judges, and justices of the Supreme Court.
The state comptroller—an independent officer elected by the Knesset before being appointed by the president—is responsible only to the Knesset and is the auditor of the government's financial transactions and is empowered to enquire into the efficiency of its activities. The comptroller also acts as a national ombudsman.
Israel's civil service gradually has become a politically
neutral and professional body; previously, it tended to be drawn from,
and to support, the party in power. The government's extensive responsibilities
and functions have acted to enlarge the bureaucracy.
The nation of Israel is the world's first Jewish state in two millennia. It represents for Jews the restoration of their homeland after the centuries-long Diaspora that followed the demise of the Herodian kingdom in the 1st century CE. As such, it remains the focus of widespread Jewish immigration, and more than one-third of world Jewry now lives there.
The country, barely half a century old, was born in the midst of war. It took Israel three decades and numerous conflicts, large and small, to achieve its first peace treaty with a neighbouring Arab country, Egypt. That process has been complicated by Israel's relations with the Palestinians, many of whom were displaced by the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 or came under Israeli rule following the Six-Day War in 1967. Only since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 has an inclusive peace settlement with other Arab states and with the region's Palestinian Arabs been a possibility.
Israel's national security policy has been dominated by the prime minister and shaped by coalition politics—often disrupted by social and religious issues—that have characterized the state since its creation. While the country's two major parties, the left-wing Labour and right-wing Likud, often found a consensus on security issues, especially during crises, they retained an important difference that dates to the early years of Zionism. Both parties affirm Jewish rights to the biblical land of Israel (an area only slightly larger than the U.S. state of Vermont), but Labour has been ready, as the price of peace, to cede sovereignty to the Arabs of part of the area it occupied after the 1967 war, while Likud has insisted that control of that territory is vital to Israel's security. Neither political party, however, has been prepared to accept the return to Israel of large numbers of Palestinian refugees. Despite extensive peace talks following Oslo, and a peace treaty with Jordan (1994) Israel has not been able to come to an amicable peace with Syria or Lebanon or with the Palestinians. Persistent bouts of violence have dimmed hopes for peace.
Domestically, Israel moved steadily from an economy directed
by the state to one that was more market oriented. A novel feature of the
earlier economy was the kibbutz, a collective settlement movement that
exemplified the Labour-Zionist movement's ideals of sacrifice and leadership.
After Labour lost political power to the nonsocialist Likud opposition
in 1977, the kibbutz ideal began to wane and with it the socialist and
secular beliefs so strong at Israel's birth. The huge influx of Sephardic
Jews in the 1950s and Russian Jews in the 1980s and '90s forced more political,
social, and economic changes, as these groups acquired increasing power
and influence. A crucial unresolved question remained: the relationship
between religion and state.
In the 1880s, however, a rise in European anti-Semitism and revived Jewish national pride combined to inspire a new wave of emigration to Palestine in the form of agricultural colonies financed by the Rothschilds and other wealthy families. Political Zionism came a decade later, when the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl began advocating a Jewish state as the political solution for both anti-Semitism (he had covered the sensational Dreyfus affair in France) and a Jewish secular identity. Herzl's brief and dramatic bid for international support from the major powers at the First Zionist Congress (August 1897) failed, but, after his death in 1904, the surviving Zionist organization under the leadership of Chaim Weizmann undertook a major effort to increase the Jewish population in Palestine while continuing to search for political assistance.
These efforts could only be on a small scale while the
Ottoman Turks ruled what the Europeans called Palestine (from Palaestina,
“Land of the Philistines,” the Latin name given Judaea by the Romans).
But in 1917, during World War I, the Zionists persuaded the British government
to issue the Balfour Declaration, a document that committed Britain to
facilitate the establishment of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. Amid
considerable controversy over conflicting wartime promises to the Arabs
and French, Britain succeeded in gaining the endorsement of the declaration
by the new League of Nations, which placed Palestine under British mandate.
This achievement reflected a heady mixture of religious and imperial motivations
that Britain would find difficult to reconcile in the troubled years ahead.
The most effective of the main, pre-state militias were associated with political factions from both the right and left wings of Zionist politics. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and its even more violent splinter group, Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), were affiliated with the ultraconservative Revisionist Party, founded by Vladimir Zev Jabotinsky. (The Revisionists withdrew from the main Zionist institutions in 1935 in protest against Jewish cooperation with the British mandate.) Another group, the Palmach, though technically an elite arm of the Haganah, was heavily influenced by a Marxist-socialist party, Achdut HaAvoda, and recruited many of its members from socialist-oriented kibbutzim. Members of these militias were to play an important role in Israeli politics for the next half century: Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin were high-ranking members of the Haganah-Palmach, Menachem Begin led the Irgun, and Yitzhak Shamir was a prominent member of the Lehi. Three of these men—Rabin, Shamir, and Begin—would later become prime ministers of Israel.
Britain encouraged Jewish immigration in the 1920s, but the onset of the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and the flight of refugees from Nazi Germany led to a change in policy. The British government proposed the partition of Palestine into mutually dependent Arab and Jewish states. When this was rejected by the Arabs, London decided in 1939 to restrict Jewish immigration severely in the hope that it would retain Arab support against Germany and Italy. Palestine was thus largely closed off to Jews fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe during World War II. Despite this fact, the majority of the Jewish population supported the Allies during the war while seeking, when possible, clandestine Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Jewish community, which was less than 100,000 in 1919, numbered some 600,000 by the end of the war. The Arabs of Palestine had also increased under the mandate (through high birth rates and immigration) from about 440,000 to roughly 1,000,000 in 1940.
The pre-Holocaust Zionist struggle to secure international
support, overcome Arab opposition, and promote immigration resumed with
special fervour after 1945, when the true extent of Jewish losses in Europe
became evident. In Britain, the newly elected government of Prime Minister
Clement Attlee, alarmed by growing violence in Palestine between Arabs
and Jewish immigrants, decided to end the mandate, but it was unable to
do so in a peaceful way. Attlee and his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin,
came under pressure by the Zionists and their sympathizers, especially
President Harry S. Truman in the United States, to admit the desperate
remnant of European Jewry into Palestine; they were equally pressured by
local and regional Arab opponents of a Jewish state to put an end to further
immigration. Both sides, Arab and Jewish, violently assailed the reinforced
garrison in Palestine of the war-weakened British. Finally, London turned
the problem over to the newly formed United Nations (UN), and on November
29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to divide British-ruled Palestine
into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. This decision was immediately
opposed by the Arabs who, under the ostensible leadership of Hajj Amin
al-Husayni, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, attacked Jews throughout Palestine
as the British withdrew. The fighting was savage, and many civilians were
slain: incidents cited include the killing of 250 Arab villagers by a group
of Irgun commandos in the village of Dayr Yasin and the massacre of 77
members of a Hadassah medical convoy by Palestinian Arabs.
The Israeli forces, desperately short of arms and training, still had the advantage of having just beaten al-Husayni's irregulars, and their morale was high. David Ben-Gurion, the new prime minister, had also, soon after independence, unified the military command, although this process was bloody. When an Irgun ship called the Altalena attempted to land near Tel Aviv in June 1948 under conditions unacceptable to Ben-Gurion, he ordered it stopped. Troops commanded by Yitzhak Rabin fired on the vessel, killing 82 people (Menachem Begin was one of the survivors). The Irgun and Palmach finally consented to the unified command, but relations between the Labour movement Ben-Gurion had established and its right-wing opposition, founded in Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party, were poisoned for years.
The Arab invaders far outnumbered the Zionists but fielded only a few well-trained units. In addition, some Arab logistical lines were long, making resupply and communication difficult. The most formidable Arab force was Transjordan's British-led Arab Legion, but the Jordanian ruler, King 'Abdullah, had secret relations with the Zionists and strongly opposed a Palestinian state led by his enemy al-Husayni. Other states, such as Egypt and Iraq, also had different objectives, and this internal strife, disorganization, and military ineptitude prevented the Arabs from mounting a coordinated attack.
Small numbers of Israeli forces were able to keep Egyptian, Iraqi, and Jordanian units from entering Tel Aviv and cutting off Jerusalem from the rest of the newly founded country during the crucial first month of the war. In June all sides accepted a UN cease-fire, and the nearly exhausted Israelis reequipped themselves, sometimes from secret sources. Notable was the clandestine effort by Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, which offered Israel both arms and an airfield—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had decided that the Jewish state might be a useful thorn in the side of Britain and the United States, his Cold War enemies.
Fierce fighting resumed in early July and continued for
months interspersed with brief truces. The Israelis drove back the Egyptian
and Iraqi forces that menaced the south and central parts of the coastal
plain. However, the old walled city of Jerusalem, containing the Western
Wall, the last remnant of the ancient Temple destroyed by the Romans and
held holy by Jews, was occupied by the Jordanians, and Jerusalem's lifeline
to the coast was jeopardized. The Egyptians held Gaza, and the Syrians
entrenched themselves in the Golan Heights overlooking Galilee. The 1948
war was Israel's costliest: more than 6,000 were killed and 30,000 wounded
out of a population of only 780,000.
Israel's victory in the war did not bring peace. The Arabs,
who were humiliated by defeat and still bitterly divided, refused to recognize
the Jewish state. In early 1949, the Arab nations announced a state of
war with Israel and organized an economic and political boycott of the
country.
Israel's first regular election in 1949 returned Ben-Gurion to power but did not give his Mapai (Labour) Party a majority. This set a pattern, and every Israeli government since independence has been formed as a coalition. Ben-Gurion sought a centrist position, condemning those to his left as pro-Soviet and those to his right as antidemocratic. He buttressed these arrangements by adding the Zionist religious parties to his largely secular coalition in what became known as the “status quo.” The Orthodox Jewish religious parties backed Ben-Gurion on security issues, while Ben-Gurion supported an Orthodox monopoly over the control of marriage, divorce, conversion, and other personal status issues. Part of the status quo, however, included rejecting the idea of drafting a written constitution or bill of rights, and the Jewish content of the Jewish state thus would be defined by the rough-and-tumble of Israeli politics and the evolution of Israeli society.
During the early years, Israel had to absorb a major influx of immigrants, including several hundred thousand nearly destitute Holocaust survivors and a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Arab states, who felt increasingly insecure in their home countries following the Arab defeat in 1948. As a result, the Knesset passed the Law of Return in 1950, granting Jews immediate citizenship. This law, however, proved to be controversial in later years when the question of “who is a Jew?” raised other issues in the Jewish state, including those of the immigration of non-Jewish relatives, religious conversion, and, in light of the Orthodox monopoly over such matters, the issue of who is truly qualified to be a rabbi. Ben-Gurion's coalition was also frequently disturbed by quarrels over education and the role religion was to play in it. Orthodox support for the government often faltered over what they saw to be state interference in a religious domain.
No less serious was the question of ethnicity. The Sephardim, or Oriental Jews, were mostly from urban and traditional societies, and after arriving in Israel they encountered an Ashkenazic, or European, Zionist establishment intent on creating a new Israeli culture and settling these predominantly urban newcomers in rural and isolated villages and development towns. The Sephardim soon grew to resent what they regarded as a patronizing Ashkenazic elite, and eventually this was to hurt Labour at the ballot box.
Israel was impoverished, and its economy emerged from
severe austerity only after 1952 when the country began to obtain substantial
international aid, including grants from Jewish charities, revenue from
the sale of bonds, and U.S. government assistance. Beginning in 1953, Ben-Gurion
secured economic aid from what was then West Germany, a highly controversial
act that was seen by many as reparations for the Holocaust. This action
brought about violent protests led by members of Menachem Begin's Herut
Party (the successor to the Revisionists), who felt that any such aid would
be an abomination.
The Israelis intensively cultivated the land on their side of the border, while the Arabs tended to leave their side barren—hence the phrase “green line,” referring to the border between the two sides. The green lines themselves were difficult to defend; only 12 miles (19 km) separated Jordanian army positions from the Mediterranean, and the road connecting Jerusalem with the rest of the Israel was within rifle range of Arab sharpshooters. Israel's potential allies, including the United States, were preoccupied with the Cold War and were willing to placate Arab leaders in order to limit Soviet influence among the Arab states, especially Egypt, which looked to Moscow for help against Britain and France, the remaining colonial powers in the region.
Israel's best chance for peace was King 'Abdullah of Jordan, but in 1950 Palestinian and Arab opposition forced him to abandon a secretly negotiated nonbelligerency agreement. When the Egyptians tried unsuccessfully to establish a rump Palestinian state in Gaza under al-Husayni, 'Abdullah announced the annexation of the West Bank, which his country had occupied two years earlier. Then, in July 1951, the Jordanian king was assassinated on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. His grandson, the future King Hussein, barely escaped injury and was to continue 'Abdullah's policy of clandestine contact with Israel but, like his grandfather, never felt politically strong enough to make a separate peace.
In the period 1949–53 Arab attacks killed hundreds of
Israelis, four-fifths of whom were civilian. In early 1953 Israel decided
to take the offensive against Arab guerrillas who were infiltrating from
Jordan and the Egyptian-run Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
escalated retaliations, fighting pitched battles not only with guerrillas
but with regular Jordanian and Egyptian army units. The Israelis also launched
undercover operations, one of which, the so-called Lavon affair, was a
botched attempt by Israeli intelligence to hurt Egypt's reputation in the
United States by staging attacks on U.S. facilities in Egypt and blaming
Arab extremists.
Ben-Gurion, exhausted by political struggles, had left the premiership in late 1953 to Moshe Sharett, who hoped that vigorous international diplomacy might relieve Israel's insecurity. It did not. Ben-Gurion had a different approach, and returning as prime minister in late 1955 after the Czech-Egyptian arms deal, he soon began to plan a preemptive attack against Egypt before that country's new weaponry gave it strategic superiority. The preparations for an Israeli attack coincided with the Anglo-French decision to regain the Suez Canal, which Nasser had nationalized in July 1956 despite agreements putting it under international control. The French brokered a secret alliance with Israel and Britain, and in October IDF troops, under the leadership of Moshe Dayan, swiftly broke the Egyptian lines in the Sinai. The Israeli attack provided the cover for a ruse in which the British and French invaded the canal zone under the pretext of protecting it. This duplicity infuriated American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who compelled the British and French governments to withdraw their troops, effectively ending much of the influence of those two countries in the region. Israel was also compelled to return to the old armistice lines, but not before the United States had agreed to placing a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai. American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also promised in writing that the United States would treat the Strait of Tiran as an international waterway and keep it open.
These arrangements did not lead to peace negotiations,
but they did impose a calm over Israel's southern border for nearly a decade.
A regional arms race began in the absence of any movement toward peace,
and Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion's deputy defense minister, found France to
be a willing supplier. The French-designed nuclear reactor in Dimona was
widely suspected of being the kernel of an Israeli nuclear weapons program,
while French Mirage jets became the backbone of Israel's air force. The
Israelis also obtained a large indirect supply of arms from the United
States, with West Germany as the intermediary. Israel, under the leadership
of IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, turned its military into a highly
professional organization.
In reaction, Eshkol mobilized the IDF and sent his foreign
minister, Abba Eban, on a futile trip to seek French, British, and American
aid. After Rabin suffered a breakdown from exhaustion, the coalition parties
forced Eshkol to appoint Moshe Dayan as defense minister and to create
a national unity government that included Menachem Begin, the main opposition
leader. The next day, June 5, Israeli planes destroyed the Egyptian air
force on the ground in a preemptive strike that began the total rout of
all Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian forces. Israeli troops captured huge
quantities of arms and took many prisoners. Six days later, Israeli troops
stood victorious along the Suez Canal, having overrun the Sinai Peninsula;
on the banks of the Jordan River, after occupying the entire West Bank;
and atop the Golan Heights, after driving the Syrians from that strategic
position. Most significant to all involved, Israel had captured the remaining
sections of Jerusalem not already under its control, including the Old
City and the Western Wall.
It was not clear how military victory could be turned into peace. Shortly after the war's end Israel began that quest, but it would take more than a decade and involve yet another war before yielding any results. Eshkol's secret offer to trade much of the newly won territory for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria was rejected by Nasser, who, supported by an emergency resupply of Soviet arms, led the Arabs at the Khartoum Arab Summit in The Sudan in August 1967 in a refusal to negotiate directly with Israel. The UN Security Council responded by passing Resolution 242 in November, demanding that Israel withdraw from “occupied territories” and that all parties in the dispute recognize the right of residents of each state to live within “secure and recognized borders.” The wording of this statement became crucial to peace negotiations for years to come. By not stating “all the occupied territories” in the English version—the only one accepted by Israel—the resolution left room for the Israelis to negotiate. The Palestinians, the residents of these territories, were mentioned only as refugees, it being presumed that Jordan would represent them.
Nearly two years of fruitless mediation ensued while Israel held the occupied territories with a minimum of force, relied on its air power to deter Arab attack, and—adhering to Dayan's light-handed occupation policy—disturbed the Palestinian population under military rule as little as possible. The Israelis left the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the local Arab institutions, and indeed the Jordanian legal code throughout the West Bank in the hands of the Palestinians, just as they left Egyptian regulations in place in Gaza.
The Israeli and Palestinian economies were to develop strong links over the next decades, as the underemployed Arab workforce in the occupied territories gravitated to Israeli industries that were chronically short of unskilled labour. Eventually more than 150,000 workers would make the daily commute to Israel, returning to the West Bank and Gaza at night. While the export of Israeli goods to the occupied territories became lucrative, it formed but a small part of the economic exchange between the two sides.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government moved to reclaim areas
in the newly occupied territories that had been settled by Jews before
1948, including the Etzion Bloc, an Israeli community on the approach to
Jerusalem that had been lost to Jordan after heavy fighting during Israel's
war of independence. After the Arabs rejected a quick peace, Yigal Allon,
a leading Labour politician and a hero of the 1948 war, devised a plan
to settle Jews in strategic areas of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the
Golan Heights. Israel also enlarged the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem
and developed new neighbourhoods in order to establish a Jewish majority
in the capital; and in the Old City, the government reconstructed the historic
Jewish quarter. However, except for East Jerusalem, where the Jewish population
increased dramatically in the years of Labour dominance, by 1977 only about
5,000 Israelis lived in these so-called strategic settlements. Other Israelis,
guided by the prominent Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, believed that settlement
everywhere in the biblical land of Israel would hasten the messianic era.
Israelis of this mind established the Gush Emunim (“Bloc of Believers”)
organization in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1968.
U.S. President Richard Nixon feared an eventual Israeli confrontation with Moscow and sent Secretary of State William Rogers to intervene with a complex cease-fire proposal, which was accepted by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan in August 1970. This plan specified limits on the deployment of missiles and revived a year-old diplomatic initiative (the Rogers Plan) that insisted on an exchange of territory for peace on all fronts.
The Egyptians and Soviets soon violated the agreement by moving their missiles closer to the canal. In Jordan, Hussein's acceptance of the cease-fire ignited savage fighting between the Jordanian army and several PLO militia groups. As the battles intensified, Syria sent tanks to aid the Palestinians, but coordinated Israeli, American, and Jordanian military moves defeated the Syrians and expelled the PLO, whose forces sought refuge in Lebanon.
Meir's gamble had succeeded: Israel's willingness to risk
confrontation, even with Soviet pilots along the canal, had strengthened
relations with the United States. Hussein's recovery of control in Jordan
demoralized Palestinian resistance while securing Israel's eastern border.
When Nasser died in September 1970, his successor, Anwar el-Sadat, did
not renew the fighting, seeking instead a partial Israeli pullback from
the Suez Canal. Israel eventually rejected this idea, but the crisis had
passed.
With Israel threatened by catastrophe, Prime Minister Meir turned to the United States for aid, while the Israeli general staff hastily improvised a battle strategy. Washington's reluctance to help Israel changed rapidly when the Soviet Union launched its own resupply effort to Egypt and Syria. President Nixon countered by establishing an emergency supply line to Israel, even though the Arab nations imposed a costly oil embargo, and various American allies refused to facilitate the arms shipments.
With reinforcements on the way, the IDF rapidly turned
the tide. A daring Israeli helicopter assault disabled portions of the
Egyptian air defenses, which allowed Israeli forces commanded by General
Ariel Sharon to cross the Suez Canal and threaten to destroy the Egyptian
Third Army. On the Golan, Israeli troops, at heavy cost, repulsed the Syrians
and advanced to the edge of the Golan plateau on the road to Damascus.
At this point, the United States, alarmed by Soviet threats of direct military
intervention and on nuclear alert, secured a cease-fire in place.
Golda Meir's government resigned in April 1974, exhausted and discredited by the war. Still, the Labour Party won a narrow election victory in June by selecting Yitzhak Rabin, hero of the 1967 war and former Israeli ambassador to Washington, to lead its list. The first native-born Israeli to become prime minister, Rabin predicted a period of “seven lean years” until the West, including the United States, would end its heavy dependence on Arab oil. He argued that Israel therefore needed to trade space for time, to coordinate closely with Washington, and to encourage Egypt's new pro-American policy.
Rabin reached a second disengagement agreement with Egypt in September 1975, but little progress was made with Syria. On what had been the “quiet” front—the West Bank and Gaza—the Labour government's preferred strategy of negotiations with the more amenable King Hussein of Jordan (the so-called “Jordanian option”) was threatened in October 1974, when an Arab summit conference in Rabat, Morocco, declared 'Arafat's PLO to be the sole representative of the Palestinians. A year later, Rabin obtained secret assurances from Kissinger that the United States would not recognize the PLO as an entity representing the Palestinians unless that organization first ceased terrorism and recognized Israel's right to exist.
Meanwhile, the Gush Emunim movement on the West Bank gathered
force after the Yom Kippur War and between 1974 and 1987 planted small
communities near large Arab populations, greatly complicating Israeli policy
and arousing international opposition. The secular Israeli government opposed
such efforts but rarely used force to dislodge the settlers, who invoked
Zionist rights to the homeland in their defense. Still, they numbered fewer
than 4,000 when the opposition Likud government of Menachem Begin came
to power in 1977.
A further blow to Rabin fell when he visited Washington
in March 1977 to meet with the new American president, Jimmy Carter, who
advocated a "comprehensive approach" to Middle East peace instead of the
Kissinger step-by-step plan. Carter sought an international conference
to resolve all the major issues between Israel and the Arabs and advocated
a “homeland” for the Palestinians. For Israelis, this notion (and its similarity
to the wording of the Balfour Declaration) was a code word for a Palestinian
state, and they hotly opposed it—not least because it also implied a leadership
role for the PLO. Rabin, facing a major quarrel with the United States
and beset by a personal scandal (his wife had maintained an illegal bank
account in Washington from his days as ambassador), resigned in April,
and Shimon Peres became Labour's new party leader.
Carter spent the summer in futile efforts to convene an international conference, finally approving a Soviet-American communiqué in October 1977 that was intended to stimulate diplomacy; instead, it outraged both Israel and the U.S. Congress, many of whose members condemned Carter for concessions to Moscow. These mishaps convinced Sadat that American tactics were giving his erstwhile Soviet and Syrian allies a veto over any diplomacy, which could lead to a new war in which Egypt would likely pay the highest price. Secret negotiations were held between Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Sadat's personal representatives, after which the Egyptian president surprised the world by flying to a delighted Israel in November 1977, where he and Begin addressed the Israeli Knesset.
The two leaders could not agree, however, on the details
of a comprehensive peace, and the negotiations were complicated by events
in Lebanon. Following its eviction from Jordan in 1971, the PLO had established
itself there, exacerbating the volatile political situation in that country
and contributing to its collapse into civil war in 1975. Both Israel and
the United States had reluctantly consented to Syria's military intervention
in Lebanon that same year, but the result was a partitioned state with
the PLO dominating the south of the country, which was now a launching
point for terror attacks against Israelis living in the Upper Galilee.
In March 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO away from the border
but succeeded only partially in this goal before withdrawing from that
country, under international pressure, in June. This episode strengthened
Israel's ties with a Lebanese Christian militia known as the Phalange,
who benefited from Israeli weapons and training.
The Camp David Accords earned Sadat and Begin each a share of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace, but the subsequent peace process proved far more difficult than the parties expected. It took seven more months for Egypt and Israel to reach a final agreement, which was signed on March 26, 1979, and called for a three-year phased Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, limited-force zones, a multinational observer force, full diplomatic relations between the two countries, and special provisions for Israeli access to the Sinai's oil fields. The United States also agreed to provide large amounts of financial aid to both Israel and Egypt, part of which paid for the relocation of Israeli military installations. Israel's settlements in the Sinai were also evacuated, despite public Israeli protests.
Syria, Iraq, and the PLO were outraged by Egypt's actions
and joined diplomatic forces to suspend Cairo from the Arab League and
prevent any other Arab state from supporting the accords. Nearly all the
Arab states subsequently severed ties with Egypt. Jordan and the Palestinians
refused to negotiate autonomy, and a three-year attempt by Israel, Egypt,
and the United States to develop the plan on their own came to naught.
Meanwhile, Begin refused to halt the building of new Jewish settlements
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel faced a complex agenda in dealing with the United States when Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter as president in 1981. Reagan and his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, both strong supporters of Israel, promoted a strategic alliance with the Jewish state, but the effort was soon beset by quarrels over the U.S. sale of sophisticated air surveillance aircraft, known as AWACS, to Saudi Arabia. When Israel destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in a daring raid in June, Washington reluctantly supported a UN condemnation of Israel's action.
Begin's policies aroused strong international opposition
but aided his victory over Shimon Peres in the June 1981 elections. His
new government contained more Likud appointees, including Yitzhak Shamir
as foreign minister and Ariel Sharon as defense minister. Then, on October
6, 1981, Sadat was murdered by Muslim extremists. His successor, Hosni
Mubarak, reaffirmed the 1979 treaty but was prepared only for a "cold"
peace with Israel, and few of the bright hopes for trade and tourism promised
by the Camp David agreements materialized—even after Israel completed its
withdrawal from the Sinai in April 1982.
Sharon sent the IDF toward Beirut and well beyond the mandated 25-mile limit. With the Syrians in retreat, Israeli troops besieged 'Arafat and his remaining PLO units in the Lebanese capital. Israel's Maronite Christian allies, the Phalange Party, contrary to Sharon's expectations, did not act to secure the city as they had been expected to do, and a dangerous stalemate ensued. The pro-Israel Haig was forced from office, as a bewildered and angry Reagan, reinforced by U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, sought an Israeli withdrawal. Habib, working under the direction of Haig's successor, George Shultz, managed to insert a multinational peacekeeping force in Lebanon that allowed 'Arafat and a portion of his force to evacuate Beirut in August, following a final Israeli bombardment.
The Lebanese Christians, however, were not to benefit from the Israeli actions. Phalange leader Bashir Gemayel, the new president-elect, was assassinated by Syrian agents in September, and in the ensuing disorders, Israeli forces allowed the Phalangist militia into two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred hundreds of men, women, and children. The multinational force, withdrawn quickly after 'Arafat's departure, was reinserted.
Shortly before the massacres, President Reagan had announced a plan for Arab-Israeli peace that pointedly applied the Resolution 242 formula to the Palestinian issue. The plan was designed, in part, to appease Arab anger and to revive the Jordanian option, but it was rejected by an Arab summit and hotly opposed by an alarmed Begin. However, the embattled prime minister did not have much time left. An official Israeli inquiry condemned Sharon for negligence in the camp massacres, forcing him to resign. Grieving over Israeli losses and the operation's tragic outcome, Israelis mounted massive street demonstrations against the Begin government.
Under U.S. mediation, Israel and Lebanon reached a nonbelligerence
agreement in May 1983, and Israeli troops withdrew from the Beirut area.
An ailing Begin, devastated by his wife's death and the war's outcome,
resigned in September and retreated into a reclusive retirement, dying
in 1992. He was replaced by Yitzhak Shamir. On October 23, 1983, a suicide
bomber from the radical Shi'ite Muslim organization Hezbollah blew up the
U.S. Marine headquarters at the Beirut airport, which was part of the international
peacekeeping force, killing 241. Within a few weeks, Reagan began withdrawing
American forces, and after they had left, the Syrians and their local allies
forced Lebanon to renounce the agreement with Israel.
Under Peres, the Israelis began a phased withdrawal from Lebanon in June 1985, except for a security zone where an Israeli-sponsored Lebanese force waged intermittent warfare against the Hezbollah, who enjoyed Iranian and Syrian patronage. An economic recovery plan also was put into place, assisted by the United States. For the first time, Israel began to reform its economic structures, which until then had been controlled by the state and the labour federation, Histadrut.
As stipulated by the rotation agreement, Shamir became prime minister in October 1986, with Peres as foreign minister. Determined to regain the top spot through a diplomatic breakthrough, Peres met secretly with Jordan's King Hussein. The two reached an understanding known as the London Agreement in April 1987, but the agreement's vague formulations did not command a majority of votes in the unity cabinet, and Shamir retained control.
Shamir continued the Begin policy of settling Jews throughout
the West Bank, hoping to isolate the Arab towns and villages that might
form the basis for a Palestinian state. Few Israelis responded to this
initiative until Sharon, who returned to Shamir's cabinet as housing minister,
began subsidizing residential communities that were within easy commuting
distance of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where housing was scarce and expensive.
By 1992 the Jewish population in the occupied territories was approaching
100,000.
The Israeli military was caught by surprise and proved ill-equipped to deal with the revolt. A grinding contest of wills ensued that soon claimed many civilian casualties and altered the political landscape. In February 1988 Shamir invited Secretary of State Shultz to intervene, but he tried in vain to revive the diplomatic process. Meanwhile, King Hussein had finally abandoned his formal ambition to represent the Palestinians. Israel's international image was suffering as the media recorded scenes of Israeli soldiers beating young Palestinians in the street. Frequent closures of the areas also severely disrupted the Palestinian economy, and Israel began to replace Arab day labour with immigrant workers from outside the region.
The Israeli election in November 1988 gave Likud a slight
majority. Shamir was still forming a government when in December 'Arafat,
speaking at a special UN meeting in Geneva, reiterated a declaration that
he had made the previous month that he was ready to recognize Israel and
suspend terrorism provided the Palestinians obtained a state. The United
States promptly recognized the PLO and opened a dialogue with it.
The United States greatly feared that its focus on Iraqi aggression would be diverted by Arab grievances against Israel, and when the American-led coalition's attack was launched, Washington urged Israel not to respond to Iraqi provocations, even after Iraqi forces began missile attacks on Israeli cities. Accepting U.S. air-defense missiles, Israel held its fire while the coalition devastated the Jewish state's most dangerous Arab opponent. Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf states cut off their previously substantial financial support for the PLO.
Iraq's defeat and the rapid decline of the Soviet Union in 1991 suddenly opened the way for fresh diplomatic initiatives. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker succeeded in convening an Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid in October 1991, the first direct official talks between Israel and its neighbours since the Camp David era. Three “tracks” were created under U.S. auspices that sought to achieve peace treaties between Israel and Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; an interim Palestinian self-government for Gaza and the West Bank (the Palestinian team this time met the Israeli specifications); and European, Japanese, and Arab support for regional economic cooperation and arms control.
The talks, conducted in various locations, stalled after a promising start. The Palestinians demanded statehood rather than autonomy, and Shamir was not interested in reaching quick agreements. The Israeli leader remained faithful to his strategy of outlasting the other side while continuing to construct Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. However, Shamir's policy was hotly contested by the United States, and Bush refused Shamir's request for housing-loan guarantees to accommodate Russian immigrants unless Israel stopped expanding the settlements.
The Labour opposition, sensing an opportunity, put up
Rabin as their candidate for prime minister in the elections of June 1992.
He promised security but also flexibility, insisting that he would produce
progress in the negotiations. He also proposed that less be spent on settlements
and more on help for Russian immigrants. In a hard-fought election, the
Labour Party won a narrow advantage.
Rabin criticized the comprehensive approach implicit in the Madrid talks, concluding that the Palestinian-Israeli track held more promise for progress because both Israelis and Palestinians wanted to move beyond the status quo of the intifadah. To stimulate diplomacy and to patch up relations with the United States, he ordered a freeze on the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, which allowed the Bush administration to approve housing guarantees for Russian immigrants. (In fact, some previously planned construction continued in the territories, and the settler population grew from 100,000 to 135,000 during Rabin's term.)
Unexpectedly, the negotiations with Syria came to life
first, but after an encouraging start they had deadlocked by the summer
of 1993. Syria refused to specify what it meant by “full peace,” a key
Israeli requirement; and Israel refused to withdraw to the armistice lines
as they were prior to the 1967 war, which would have effectively placed
the border with Syria on Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee), Israel's largest
source of fresh water.
The Oslo Accords, in fact, comprised a series of agreements, the second of which, the Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and Jericho, was signed in May 1994. This pact enacted the provisions set forth in the original declaration, which had endorsed a five-year interim self-rule for a Palestinian authority to be executed in two stages: first in Gaza and the city of Jericho and then, after an election, throughout the remaining areas under Israeli military rule. Talks on final status were to begin after three years, with a two-year deadline for an agreement to be reached. Issues such as borders, the return of refugees, the status of Jerusalem, and Jewish settlements in the occupied territories were reserved for final status talks. The PLO recognized Israel's right to exist, renounced terrorism, and agreed to change the portions of its charter that called for Israel's destruction. Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
The accords embodied two basic sets of exchanges. First,
Israel would shed responsibility for the Palestinian population while retaining
strategic control of the territory. The Palestinians would be rid of Israeli
military rule and gain self-government, potentially leading to statehood.
Second, 'Arafat's disavowal of violence and his pledge to fight terrorism—through
the use of a domestic Palestinian police force—would improve Israel's security.
The Palestinians would benefit from the large amount of foreign aid it
would receive from the United States and other countries and from economic
agreements made with Israel that were designed to foster employment and
trade.
Not all Palestinians, however, favoured 'Arafat's course.
The Islamic group, Hamas, which was especially strong in Gaza, violently
opposed the Oslo Accords and launched a series of terror attacks on Israeli
civilians, killing scores between 1993 and 1997. Rabin retaliated with
border closures that prevented tens of thousands of Palestinian workers
living in the occupied territories from commuting to jobs in Israel. Some
Israelis sought revenge, such as the murder in February 1994 of some three
dozen Arabs at prayer in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs by an Israeli
settler. Despite Israeli protests, 'Arafat sought to co-opt rather than
repress Hamas. Israel therefore continued its own antiterrorism war, and
two Hamas leaders were assassinated in 1994–95, one in Gaza itself.
In the late 1980s the Israeli economy was buoyed by the influx of highly skilled Russian immigrants, a competitive high-technology sector, and the country's proximity to the European market. In the period 1990–95, Israel's rate of economic growth exceeded 5 percent annually, unemployment was cut nearly in half, and the annual inflation rate dropped from double to single digits. Foreign investment turned from a trickle into a flood, as Israeli exports to Asia also registered large increases and the Arab boycott eased.
By 1996 Israel's GNP was greater than that of Jordan,
Syria, and Lebanon combined, and its per capita income was approaching
European standards. All this made Israel an economic powerhouse in the
region and allowed its leaders to look at a future of decreasing dependence
on economic aid from the United States.
Although Oslo I had received strong parliamentary support, Oslo II was ratified by only one vote in the Knesset, signaling a significant loss of support for Rabin. Many Israelis were angry over 'Arafat's erratic cooperation on security, and others, especially the Likud—now led by Israel's former ambassador to the UN, Benjamin Netanyahu—hotly opposed withdrawals or further dealings with 'Arafat. Meanwhile, the Sephardic Shas Party had left the coalition in protest over the indictment of its parliamentary leader for fraud. Bereft of his coalition's balance, Rabin had to depend on the vote of the Israeli Arab members of the Knesset for his majority. He was also battered by demands from the Meretz Party and from Conservative and Reform Jews in the United States to loosen the Orthodox religious monopoly established in the early years of the state.
Shortly after Oslo II was passed in the Knesset, Rabin
decided on a public campaign to rally his supporters, and it was following
the first such rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995 that he was assassinated
by a Jewish religious fanatic. Israelis were horrified, and after a funeral
attended by many international leaders, including Arabs, a round of soul-searching
and recriminations began. Popular Israeli support for the peace process
surged, and with the Likud on the defensive, Shimon Peres, Rabin's successor
as prime minister, proceeded with Oslo II. By early 1996 nearly all the
Palestinians were under self-rule; Israeli forces, though withdrawn from
the major towns except Hebron, still controlled most of the occupied territories.
In January, 'Arafat easily won election as president of the Palestinian
Authority. The voters also selected a Palestinian Council, although its
powers were ill-defined. Peres also sought to accelerate an Israeli-Syrian
deal but soon concluded that such an agreement could not be reached quickly,
if at all.
Netanyahu, age 46, the first Israeli prime minister born
after the founding of the state, promised to accelerate economic reforms,
especially the sale of state-owned businesses, but he was quickly confronted
by labour union opposition, a slowing economy, and a large budget deficit.
He had been a severe critic of the Oslo Accords but, after Rabin's murder,
had promised to fix the agreements by insisting on Palestinian “reciprocity”
(i.e., strict adherence to the terms). Nonetheless, Netanyahu could not
bring himself to meet 'Arafat until September 1996 and raised doubts over
his willingness to proceed with the promised Israeli withdrawal from Hebron
and other unfinished aspects of Oslo II.
Netanyahu's cabinet narrowly approved the Hebron Agreement.
Part of the price for this action became clear when Israel began constructing
a long-planned but often delayed Jewish neighbourhood on the outskirts
of Jerusalem, which would effectively cut off the Arab villages on the
eastern side of the city from the rest of the West Bank. 'Arafat held his
protest of this project until the cabinet's decision on the first of three
projected Israeli withdrawals in March. When these withdrawals turned out
to be far less significant than 'Arafat had anticipated, the stage was
set for another round of protests that quickly escalated into violence.
Meanwhile, 'Arafat released Hamas activists from Palestinian jails and
suspended security cooperation with Israel. Netanyahu, fearing that his
cabinet would not approve any more interim steps, argued that Israel and
the Palestinians should begin intensive negotiations to determine the final
status of the territories. This proposal was quickly rejected by both 'Arafat
and the United States.
Netanyahu returned from Wye to face growing political
trouble. The Bank of Israel had been using high interest rates in a dramatic
effort to reduce Israeli inflation. While the policy succeeded overall
(the inflation rate was cut by two-thirds) it also precipitated a recession
and rising unemployment, which hit hardest in the poorer sectors of society—notably
the largely Sephardic residents of the development towns in the south.
Concurrently, the government's budget had been reduced, which hampered
the prime minister's ability to satisfy the demands of the various coalition
members. In early 1999, after a legislative defeat on the budget, Netanyahu
called for early elections and soon suspended the Wye agreement.
In Barak's view, new elements existed that made rapid progress toward peace possible on both the Syrian and Palestinian fronts. Like his predecessor, he wanted definitive talks with 'Arafat about the final status of the territories before vacating much more land, but he encountered heavy resistance to his plans from both foreign and domestic sources. The Palestinians would not agree to abandon the third and final troop withdrawal promised under Oslo II; 'Arafat put off the declaration of a Palestinian state but insisted on maximum American intervention and sought the most territory he could recover before the final negotiations. However, he did agree to Barak's deadline of February 15, 2000, to reach a framework agreement, which was to be preceded by another withdrawal. These new arrangements were incorporated in the so-called Wye II agreement, reached in September 1999. None of the deadlines was met.
As the prime minister expected and 'Arafat feared, the Syrians suddenly signaled their desire to negotiate in early December. Barak himself traveled to the United States to negotiate with Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shar', under Clinton's patronage. A second session in early January 2000, however, ended when Syrian President Assad broke off the talks, raising the old demand that Israel agree to a return to the borders that existed between the two countries before the Six-Day War as a precondition to further negotiations.
By early March, however, progress again seemed possible on the Syrian front. Assad agreed to a summit with President Clinton at Geneva, but to U.S. and Israeli surprise he yet again insisted on Syria's right to its pre-1967 positions on Lake Tiberias. Neither Barak nor a majority of Israelis would agree to this demand. Barak then carried out his campaign promise to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, even without an agreement with Syria, to a border demarcated by the UN.
Barak's willingness to concede to Arab demands and his
mishandling of his coalition destroyed his Knesset majority in June. Nonetheless,
he decided to attend Clinton's hastily arranged summit at Camp David in
July. This last-ditch effort to reach an agreement between 'Arafat and
Barak had been resisted by the Palestinian leader, who stated ahead of
time that he could not concede Palestinian rights. This proved to be the
case. Barak's unexpected willingness to share Jerusalem with the Palestinians
was not reciprocated by 'Arafat, who on this—as on the issue of the return
of refugees—refused to compromise, demanding nothing less than full Palestinian
sovereignty in East Jerusalem.
The failure of the Camp David summit and the outbreak
of what came to known as the Aqsa intifadah convinced a majority
of Israelis that they lacked a partner in 'Arafat to end the conflict.
Barak paid the political price, losing the premiership to Sharon in elections
held in February 2001 by nearly 25 percent of the vote.
On the economic front, Israel had only partially completed
its transformation from a socialist state into a more competitive market
system by the end of the 20th century. Israel's military, long a unifying
social institution, not only needed to counter new dangers from states
such as Iraq and Iran (which both had long-range missiles) but also had
to face the difficulties of changing to a more technical, less manpower
intensive force. Likewise, the political system badly needed reform following
the failed experiment with direct elections for prime minister. Against
this list of challenges, Israel could marshal its large and highly trained
workforce, a dynamic technical sector, a large per capita gross national
product, a record of absorbing large groups of immigrants, and a powerful
army.
Harvey Sicherman