Conflict in Israel and Palestine: Crash Course World History 223 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World
History, and today, we're going to talk about
Israel and Palestine, hopefully, without a
flame war.
John from the past: Yeah, yeah big ask, Mr.
Green, I mean, that fight goes back thousands
and thousands of years.
John: Except, thousands of years ago... there
wasn't an Islam yet, so, yeah, no.
Also, let me submit that very little of this
conflict between Israel and Palestine over
the last several decades has been about, like,
theological differences between Islam and
Judaism.
No one's arguing about whether the most important
prophets descended from Abraham's son Isaac,
or his son Ishmael, right?
It's not about whether to fast during Yom
Kippur or Ramadan.
It's about land.
Portraying the conflict as eternal or as religious
makes it feel intractable in a way that frankly,
it isn't.
So instead, let's begin as most historians
do in the late 19th century.
And instead of talking about religion, let's
follow the lead of historians like James Gelvin
and discuss competing nationalisms.
[Intro]
Ok, so in the late 19th century, the Ottoman
Empire ruled over what we now know as Palestine.
The population there, according to Ottoman
records from 1878, was 87% Muslim, 10% Christian
and 3% Jewish.
Everybody spoke Arabic as the daily language,
and in Jerusalem the religious populations
were roughly equal.
To give you a sense of life in Ottoman Palestine,
an Arab Orthodox Christian musician named
Wasif Jawhariyyeh grew up in Jerusalem in
the first decade of the 20th century learning
the Quran in school and celebrating both Passover
and Eid with his Jewish and Muslim neighbours.
Ottoman Palestine was, in short, a place in
which people of different religious faiths
lived peacefully together.
Alright, let's go to the Thought Bubble.
The late 19th century was the Golden Age of
nationalism in Europe, and no place was crazier
than the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire
in which at least 10 different nations all
wanted their own state.
And in that hyper-nationalistic empire lived
a Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl who
had hoped that Jews could assimilate into
European nations but soon became convinced
that the Jewish people needed to leave Europe
and settle in their own state.
The concept of Jewish nationalism came to
be known as Zionism.
It's important to keep in mind that most Zionists
were secular Jews, so they imagined Israel
as a state for Jews more than a Jewish state.
In 1917, the British government, hoping to
gain the support of Jewish people, issued
the Balfour Declaration, promising, quote,
"The establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people," a bold promise
considering that Palestine was still technically
Ottoman, as they hadn't yet lost World War
One.
Of course, they would soon, but it turned
out that the British were overpromisers when
it came to Palestine, because a year before
the Balfour Declaration, the British had secretly
promised the French that they would divide
up the Arab territories and the Brits would
keep Palestine.
Furthermore, in 1915, other British officials
had promised the ruler of Mecca, Sharif Hussein,
that he would rule over an Arab state including
Palestine if he led an Arab revolt against
Ottoman rule, which Hussein promptly did,
so basically the Brits had promised Palestine
to the Meccans, to themselves, and to the
Zionists.
What could go wrong?
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So shortly after the end of the war, the British
established a colony in Palestine with the
idea that they'd rule until the Palestinians
were ready to govern themselves, at which
point the people living in Palestine were
like, "Well, now seems good," and the British
were like, "Yeah, but maybe not just yet."
Meanwhile, the British established separate
institutions for Christians, Jews, and Muslims,
making it difficult for Palestinian Christians
and Muslims to cooperate and easier for the
British to, quote, "divide and rule" the inhabitants
of Palestine.
Again, what could go wrong?
Meanwhile, the British did attempt to honor
the Balfour Declaration's promise to, quote,
"facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable
conditions."
Between 1920 and 1939, the Jewish population
of Palestine increased by over 320,000 people.
In fact, by 1938, Jews were just under 30%
of the population of Palestine.
And the growing Jewish population focused
on purchasing land from absentee non-Palestinian
Arab landowners and then evicting Palestinian
farmers who were living and working there.
By controlling both the land and the labor,
they hoped to establish a more secure community
within Palestine, but of course, these practices
heightened tensions between Jewish people
and Arab Palestinians between the 1920s and
the 1930s.
Along the way, Palestinian Arabs began to
think of themselves as the Palestinian nation,
and that growing sense of nationalism erupted
in 1936, when the Palestinians revolted against
the British.
With the help of Jewish militias, the British
brutally suppressed the Palestinian revolt,
but in the aftermath, the British issued a
white paper, limiting Jewish immigration to
Palestine, and calling for the establishment
of a joint Arab and Jewish state in Palestine
within ten years.
This managed to leave no one happy.
The Zionists were angry at Britain for limiting
Jewish immigration at a time when Jews particularly
needed to leave Europe, and the Arab Palestinians
were unhappy about the prospect of waiting
ten years for a state.
And then came World War II, which was actually
quite a peaceful time in Palestine.
But then it ended, and tensions resumed, and
the British realized that colonies like Palestine
were far more trouble than they were wroth,
so they handed the issue of Palestine over
to the newly created United Nations.
They were like, "Oh hey there, United Nations!
For your first problem..."
So in November of 1947, the United Nations
voted to partition Palestine into separate
Palestinian and Jewish states.
The Partition Plan called for two states roughly
equal in size, but the borders looked like
a jigsaw puzzle.
I mean, you do not look at this map and think,
"Yeah, that's gonna work!"
Sure enough, it didn't, and soon after the
plan was announced, the cleverly named 1948
Arab-Israeli War broke out, with Israel on
the one side and the Palestinians and many
Arab states on the other.
The Israelis won, and when an armistice was
signed in 1949, Israel occupied a third more
land than they would have had under the UN
proposal.
Meanwhile, Jordan controlled and later annexed
the West Bank and the old city of Jerusalem,
and Egypt controlled the Gaza strip.
Over 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes
and became refugees in the surrounding Arab
countries.
To Israelis, this was was the beginning of
their nation; to the Palestinians, it was
the nakba, the catastrophe, as they became
stateless.
Over the next 18 years, nothing changed territorially,
and then, in 1967, Israel and several Arab
states went to war again.
It was called the Six-Days War because -- get
this -- it lasted six days.
Israel won, and then gained control over the
West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula,
and the Golan Heights.
So the 1947 proposal looked like this; by
1967, things looked like this.
Then the UN passed Resolution 242 - man, they
are good at naming resolutions! - which outlined
a basic framework for achieving peace, including
Israel withdrawing from the territory acquired
in the war, and all participants recognizing
the rights of both a Palestinian and an Israeli
state to exist.
This of course did not happen.
After the war, the broader Israeli-Arab conflict
morphed into a more specific Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and this is a nice moment to note
that not all Muslims are Arabs, not all Arabs
are Palestinians, and not all Palestinians
are Muslims.
Like, there's a significant Christian minority
of Palestinians, for instance.
Palestinian is a word used to describe the
ethnic identity of those who have historically
lived in Palestine.
There were, for instance, lots of Christians
in the Palestinian Liberation Organization,
or PLO, formed in 1964 and led by Yasser Arafat.
The PLO oversaw guerrilla groups that attacked
civilians, but also used nonviolent approaches
to try to achieve a Palestinian state, and
meanwhile, the Israeli government began to
establish Jewish settlements in what had been
Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,
the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
There are now over 350,000 Jewish settlers
in the West Bank, and over 200,000 in East
Jerusalem, and these settlements are illegal,
according to international law, but Israel
counters by saying that they aren't really
illegal because Palestine isn't really a state.
By the late 1980s, Palestinians launched the
first intifada, which literally means "shaking
off."
And this began with, like, boycotts of Israeli
products and services and refusing to pay
Israeli taxes, but when the Israeli armed
forces cracked down on protesters, violence
ensued.
And the first intifada also saw the founding
of Hamas, which launched the first suicide
bombing against Israel in 1993.
Hamas gained support partly because of its
militancy, but mostly because of its social
welfare projects in Gaza.
It built and staffed schools, mosques, and
clinics.
The most important legacy of the First Intifada
was the emergence of peace talks between Palestinians
and Israelis.
This led to the Oslo Accords, and the peace
process, based on our old friend, United Nations
Security Council Resolution 242.
But there were a lot of issues to resolve
- I mean, putting aside the question of, like,
how to make two states that don't look like
a jigsaw puzzle, there was the question of
the Jewish settlement, and the right for Palestinian
refugees and their descendants to return to
Palestine.
Water rights, which are a big deal in that
part of the world, and so on.
It's very complicated!
So then came the Clinton talks.
Oh, it's time for the Open Letter!
But first, let's see what's inside of the
globe.
Oh, look!
It's a collection of philandering American
presidents.
An Open Letter to Bill Clinton:
Hey, Bill, so your talks probably came closer
than any other time in recent history to an
actual peace deal between the Israelis and
the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was willing
to give up more land currently claimed by
Israel than at any other time in the past;
even Yasser Arafat was surprised.
Although not all the questions got addressed,
you were definitely closing in on something.
But in the end, it didn't happen, and since
then, not to criticize you, things have gotten
kind of worse and worse and worse.
Worst of all, that was your big legacy moment.
Now all you've got is the conflict in Northern
Ireland getting resolved while you were president.
In short, it could have been amazing, but
instead it was kind of... neeeeh.
Kind of like your presidency, actually!
At least you always have those vodkas-soaked
hugs with Boris Yeltsin to look back on.
Best Wishes,
John Green.
So the Clinton talks failed; Ehud Barak's
government was undermined, and then, in September
of 2000, Prime Minister candidate Ariel Sharon
led a group of 1,000 armed guards to the Temple
Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem.
To Muslims, this is known as the Al-Aqsa Mosque,
and it's the third-holiest site in Islam,
behind only the Kaaba in Mecca and the Prophet's
Mosque in Medina.
And it's the holiest site in Judaism, so in
short, it's a pretty touchy place to march
to with a thousand armed guards.
So the events sparked a massive protest, which
eventually led to the much more violent Second
Intifada, in which more than three thousand
Palestinians and one thousand Israelis were
eventually killed.
In 2002, the Israelis, claiming to act in
defense of civilians, began construction of
a wall around the West Bank, but instead of
following the borders established after the
1967 War, the barrier was built to include
many Israeli settlements on the Israeli side.
To Israelis, that was about self-defense;
to Palestinians, it was an illegal land grab.
Then, in 2005, Yasser Arafat died, and in
an election shortly thereafter, Hamas won
a majority of the parliamentary seats.
Since then, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority
have sort of divided how to govern Palestine,
and it's also sort of been poorly governed.
In the past ten years, Hamas has frequently
launched rocket attacks into Israel; Israel
has responded with extended and extremely
violent invasions of Palestinian territory
that have seen thousands of Palestinians killed,
many of them militants, but also many not.
Both parties claim to be responding to the
provocations of the other, but much of the
conflict reflects the consistent failure on
all sides to understand the legitimacy of
the other's narrative.
To Palestine, the Palestinian people have
been denied a state not just since the formation
of Israel, but also for decades before that,
and now they live under what amounts to a
military occupation.
And that's all true.
To Israel, the Jewish people clearly need
a homeland, which the United Nations established.
And they certainly aren't the first nation-state
to consolidate and increase their territory
via military victory.
And they need to protect their nation against
the many active threats made against them
by their neighbors.
That's also true!
It's important to understand the internal
logic of these competing nationalist visions.
For both Zionists and Palestinian national
visions to eventually work, it's necessary
to understand the right of each to exist and
the legitimacy of each's historical narrative.
But these problems aren't thousands of years
old, and they aren't intractable.
They emerged in the British Mandatory Period.
But let's hope that by understanding this
isn't an endless religious war, that we might
be closer to seeing its end.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you next week.
Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and
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so thanks to you all.
By the way, if you want to learn more about
Israel and Palestine, our friends at Thought
Café have made a series of videos; you can
also find a link to them in the video info
below.
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