A Brief History of the Middle East & U.S. Relations

Chapter III: Zionism in the 1800s

A Dusty Outpost

In his 1869 work, Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain said Palestine was sitting in sackcloth and ashes; it’s hallowed history attracted the pious and vulgar. (Troy, 2019). Palestine, the land of divine revelations, prophets, and miracles seemed to have surrendered the glory of ancient Israel to the sands. Imperialists and nationalists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, however, saw opportunity in the ancient terrain, and they were willing to fight for it. Jerusalem, a holy city for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, did not glisten with grandeur as it did when Soloman’s temple stood. Instead it was a maze of tangled streets that wove around churches, mosques, and synagogues. Its old neighborhoods were filled with dilapidated homes and residents relied on cisterns and aqueducts for water, which was often scarce and a source of cholera (Kimmerling, 2002)

In the 1800s, the US traded cotton cloth, rum, timber, and weapons for Turkish figs, carpets, raw wool, and opium. It also sent missionaries to convert Muslims (Turgay, 1982). At that time, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Balkan Peninsula to Northern Africa, and to Tigris and Euphrates River valleys. It included portions of present-day Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and all of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. The Ottoman Empire crumbled rapidly in the 1800s, as non-Turkish residents of the empire desired their own ethnic nations. While they sought their independence from the empire, Britian, France, and Russia sought control over vital Ottoman shipping routes along the Mediterranean and Black Sea and coveted land passages to India and Persia.

At this time, Jews living in Europe were subjected to discrimination and terrorism. This followed precedents of persecution. The First Crusade called by Pope Urban II in 1095 sanctioned massacres of pagans, Muslims, and Jews. Ostensibly, it was fought to capture the Holy Land and deliver it from “savage” Muslims. In reality Urban rallied the masses to quell civil wars and coups that brought the Byzantine Empire to the brink of destruction (Frankopan, 2013, pp. 1–11). As crusaders worked their way across Europe, they pillaged Jewish communities to fund their mission and systematically slaughtered Jews, who they condemned as enemies of Christ (Poliakov, 1965, pp. 41–43). Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were tortured and executed as agents of Satan. They were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1497. They were blamed for the Plague that killed millions in the Middle Ages. Martin Luther preached that Jewish synagogues and homes should be burned because Jews sought to destroy Christianity (Probst, 2012, pp. 39–58). In Russia and Poland, Jews were subjected to pogroms, (riots, murders, and forced removal). It was not until 1965 that the Vatican formally renounced its teachings that Jews were Christ-killers and devils (Paul VI, 1965).

The Zionist movement was a response to persecution and it was also an expression of resistance to complete assimilation into the national cultures of their European homes. Zionism celebrated Judaism, its unique culture and history; it was a movement to remind Jews of what made their identity sacred in a world that did not welcome them (Conforti, 2021). Zionists felt a special relationship to Palestine. Even though the Israel of David and Solomon was conquered like so many kingdoms in the Ancient Near East, the idea of Israel lived on as an ideal— a place where Jews could truly be Jews in the cradle of their ancestors (Friesel, 2024).

Dreaming of a Homeland

Zionism has often been described as Jewish nationalism, but scholars have observed that Zionism and nationalism are not necessarily the same thing. Zionism is an awareness of and reverence for Jewish history; it  is devotion to the ideals that make Judaism unique, and these things can thrive without the existence of a Jewish state (Friesel, 2006). Nationalism is staunch loyalty to a nation state that is often accompanied by the beliefs that the belief that one’s nation is superior to other nations, and so its needs and interests are more important than those of other nations. Zionism did not envision a Jewish state in which all Jews had equal footing. This is because Zionism emerged in the milieu of 19^th century Europe, where Germans, Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, and other European Jews swam in the cultural stew of Enlightenment philosophy, imperialism, capitalism, industrialism, modern science, and Marxism— ideas and experiences that were not as prevalent in the Sephardic and Oriental Jewish populations.

The Jewish population of Palestine prior to 1880 was primarily Oriental, (often called Arab Jews) whose families remained in the Middle East for hundreds of years while Diaspora Jews left the region. Oriental Jews had a language and culture that differed from the Sephardic Jews who lived in Northern Africa, Spain, and Portugal, and that also differed from Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Europe. These differences were often the source of conflict between the groups. The Ashkenazi Jews were generally more educated than the Oriental and Sephardic Jews, and they had a better understanding of how power operated in the Western world. The Ashkenazi experience of persecution in Europe fired a yearning for the rebirth of Israel, a Jewish nation in Palestine where Jews would not be subjected to the persecution of Christian Europeans.

The Ashkenazi desire to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine was amplified by the Russian pogroms during the reign of Czar Alexander III (1881-1894). Hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to leave their villages and subjected to discrimination and unfettered violence during Alexander’s reign (Cassedy, 1994). The plight of these Jews reached America, where clerics and statesmen resolved that a homeland for the Jews was the only relief from persecution. In March 1891, a group of ministers, elected officials, judges, and corporate executives (including J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller) signed a petition asking President Benjamin Harris to use his influence to gather the leaders of several countries and empires including Great Britain, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine (Ariel, 1989). The initiative was led by William Blackstone, an evangelical methodist preacher, who believed that the restoration of Israel would hasten the return of Jesus Christ. Harrison sent the petition to the State Department where it found little interest and the U.S. took no meaningful action on the matter. The apparent indifference to a new Israel would be dramatically reversed fifty years later as the Holocaust came into focus around the world.

Created by Theodore Herzl in 1897, The World Zionist Organization was a response to rampant anti-Semitism in Europe. Many Jews believed that the only way they would be treated with respect, have equal opportunities for economic prosperity, and have protection under the law was to create their own nation. The idea of a country of Jews and for Jews inspired many, but not all visions for such a state were identical. Some wanted a Jewish state that welcomed Arabs and non-Jews who would live in peace and cooperation in a democratic Commonwealth. Others wanted to create a sovereign Jewish state in the Holy Land that would be populated only by Jews. The state would rely on the patronage and protection of powerful Western allies in exchange for services to protect Western interests in the region (Kayyali, pp. 103–104, 1977). Some posit that the Zionist vision was implicitly anti-Arab, imperialist, and expansionist. Historians have observed that many Zionists never intended to confine the Jewish state to boundaries in a designated section of Palestine, but were determined to possess the Sinai, all of Palestine and Lebanon, and portions of present-day Jordan and Syria (Raz, 2024, pp. 15–16).

Herzl, who many esteem as the Father of Modern Zionism, advocated a vision for a Jewish homeland that was riddled with concerns and conflict at its inception. First, Herzl believed that a Jewish state would protect Jews from anti-Semitism. This was to be a serious challenge as the modern world was becoming more interdependent and more international in its political and economic development, which could expose the Jewish state to the prejudices of its neighbors. Herzl’s vision was also in part redemptive. He wrote essays, books, and plays filled with stereotypes of Jews from greedy entrepreneurs to the physically repulsive people, to cunning beggars, and the self-deprecating. He wanted a homeland that would make Jews into heroic, self-sacrificing people who lived for the common good and who were the engineers of their own destiny. The template for such virtuous achievement incorporated the best of Western civilization (Kornberg, 1980, pp. 230– 37).

Ashkenazi Perspectives

As Zionism was led by Ashkenazi Jews,  Zionism  was European in its outlook and became the standard by which Sephardic and Oriental/Arab Jews were to be assimilated in the new Jewish state (Avruch, 1987). The duress imposed on Sephardic and Oriental/Arab Jews to accept an Ashkenazi concept of the Jewish state suggests that Judaism alone did not define Jewish nationalism, and that devotion to Mosaic law and the Talmud alone was not the definitive tie that bound Jews together in a single agenda or ethos.

A second source of conflict in Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state was that not all Jews saw Zionism as he saw it. Many believed that the original and authentic conceptualization of Zionism was religious, not secular. Some held that the principle basis for Zionist claims to Palestine was the covenant between God and Abraham (Jacobovits, 1982). Some held that the true mission of Israel was to recognize the truth of Judaism through the admiration of the Jewish example of righteous conduct (Kurzweil, 1960). Some saw Herzl’s agenda as colonial enterprise and a departure from the traditional liberal Jewish world view that the ideal world united all people in universal values and humanitarianism. Zionism was problematic to the extent that it suggested that sometimes exceptions to universal of valuing of human well-being and life was necessary to preserve a Jewish identity and/or the Jewish state. (Navon, 2003). These concerns and conflicts intensified as Jewish immigration to Palestine proceeded. They became especially acute following the creation of Israel in 1948.

By 1914, there were 20,000 Zionists in the U.S.. When Supreme Court Justice Louis Bradeis  converted to Zionism in that year, membership shot up, but internal divisions caused fluctuations in membership. By 1930. Zionism was  a well-established lobby in Washington, D.C. and a philanthropic movement that raised money to colonize Palestine. As fascism seized control of Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain in the 1930s, the urgency of creating a Jewish state in Palestine grew as did donations to relocate Jews from America and Europe to Palestine. By the early 1940s, there were nearly 600,000 members in the American Zionist Movement, and donations had soared from about one million dollars a year to over $100 million (Halperin, 1960).

By 1945, 80% of American Jews favored Zionism, and Zionists thus increased efforts (public meetings, union literature, and propaganda) to win the favor of non-Jewish Americans. Getting the support of the Gentile population meant getting political leverage, as the Gentile vote could influence presidential and congression support for the creation of a Jewish state, and perhaps influence the kind of support that the U.S. would be willing to provide the nascent nation. By 1948, a critical mass of Americans favored Jewish resettlement in Palestine (Huff, 1972).

Many Jews who trickled into Palestine prior to 1920 during the First and Second Aliya (wave of immigrants), 1881–1903 and 1904–1914 respectively, were not motivated by nationalism and modern Jewish statehood was not their priority. These individuals were typically from Yemen, Spain, Morrocco, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. They sought a utopian community where a diverse population of devout Jews would live in cooperation and focus on their well-being rather than on national power and global influence (Friesel, 2024). The Ashkenazi who arrived did not regard Oriental and Sephardic Jews as equals. They often had more education and wealth than local Jews, and  they were condescending to Oriental Jews, whom they regarded as lazy, poor, and happy to take charity and low-paying jobs (Shumsky, 1955). Ashkenazi Jews discouraged the Oriental Jews from speaking Arabic and associating with Arabs beside whom they had lived for generations (Kline, 2014; Massad, 1996).

The Ashkenazi approached Palestine as a settlement colony in which Ashkenazi would insinuate a new dominant culture, one that would impact Sephardic Jews, Oriental Jews, Arab Christians, and Arab Muslims. By 1891, their numbers alarmed Muslim and Christians living in Palestine. Leading Muslims in Jerusalem and their Christian advocates registered their protest to the Ottoman Court against Jewish immigration in 1891, and asked it end the immigration of Russian Jews. Anti-Zionism reflected not only friction between Ashkenazi and Oriental Jews and Muslims, but fear that the new arrivals would take over the local economy (Kimmerling, 1993, p. 74).

World War I was a pivotal point in Palestinian history. France and Britain saw an opportunity in the war to wrest territory from the Ottomans, and so solicited the aid of Arabs yearning to end Turkish dominion over them. To win Arab and Jewish support for the Allied forces, Britain made promises to both groups in exchange for their help in the war. Those promises were foundational to the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East that produced costly wars and eventually spread terror and death across the globe.

References

Ariel, Yitzak. An American Initiative for a Jewish State. William Blackstone and the Petition of 1891. Studies in Zionism, 10(2): 125-37. (1989).

Avruch, Kevin. The Emergence of Ethnicity in Israel. American Ethnologist, 14(2): 327–39. (May 1987).

Cassedy, Steven. “Russian-Jewish Intellectuals Confront the Pogroms of 1881: The Example of” Razsvet”.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 84(2/3): 129-152. (1993).

Conforti, Yitzhak. “The cultural origins of Jewish nationalism: Early Zionism and the weight of the pre‐modern tradition.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 21(3) 225-239. (2021)

Friesel, Evyatar. “Zionism and Jewish Nationalism: An Inquiry into an Ideological Relationship.” Journal of Israeli History 25, no. 2 (2006).

Friesel, Evyatar. Zionism and Jewish Statehood as Expression of Modernization. Israel Affairs, 30(3): 381-403. (2004).

Halperin, Samuel. Ideology or Philanthropy? The Politics of Zionist Fund-Raising. The Western Political quarterly, 13(4): 950–73. (December, 1960).

Huff, Earl D. A Study of a Successful Interest Group: The American Zionist Movement. The Western Political quarterly, 25(1): 109–24. (March, 1972).

Kimmerling, Baruch and Joel S. Migdal. Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press, 1993.

Klein, Menachem. “Arab Jew in Palestine.” Israel studies 19(3): 134-153. (2014)

>Kornberg, Jacques. Theodor Herzl: A Reevaluation. Journal of Modern History, 52(2): 226–52. (June 1980).

Massad, Joseph. “Zionism’s Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews.” Journal of Palestine Studies 25(4): 53-68. (1996).

Paul VI. Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, 1965. Vatican Archive. Nostra aetate.

Probst, Christopher. Demonizing the Jews : Luther and the Protestant church in Nazi Germany. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012.

Troy, Gil. Center field: Mark Twain’s ‘Innocents broad’ Explains Our Israel Obsession. The Jerusalem Post, October 29, 2019. Https://www.jpost.com/opinioin/center-field-mark-twain-innocents-abroad-explains-our-israel-obession-606338.

Chapter IV: Palestine & the British Mandate: 1920-1945

Jewish Immigration During the British Mandate

By 1939, the onset of World War II, only about 3% of the world’s Jews lived in Palestine (Friesel, 2024, p. 389). The first steps toward building a Jewish state in Palestine drew activists together to acquire land and fund the immigration of Diaspora Jews (Jews whose ancestors moved to Europe and beyond). The second steps regarded the organizations of settlements, the defense of settlements, and the expansion of lobbying and creation of supportive organizations that would advocate for a Jewish state in Palestine.

Figure 4:1 illustrates Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1920 and 1946. Fluctuations in the numbers reflect changes in immigration policies and the implementation of genocidal, ethnic cleansing policies in Nazi Germany. The figure represents only authorized Jewish immigration to Palestine, and so does not reflect the 115,000 Jews who entered Palestine illegally under covert operations orchestrated by the Haganah between 1934 and 1945 (Hadari, 1991, pp. 3–5).

Prior to World War II, there were five waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, also known as Aliyah. The first Aliyah, 1881-1903 consisted mainly of Eastern European and Yemeni Jews who settled Palestine for agricultural interests. The 67,000 who settled during this period were a mix of Oriental and Ashkenazi Jews. The second Aliyah, 1904 saw the arrival of 40,000 Jew from Russia and Poland, many of whom were poor socialists who wanted to settle on a kibbutz (collective farm communities) and had to learn much about their new environment to be successful farmers. From 1919-1923, there were 37,000 immigrants in the third Aliyah from Poland, Russia, and Hungary. They too were draw to Palestine by life on the kibbutz. Merchants and artisans were in the majority of the 82,000 who immigrated during the fourth Aliya, 1924-1929. The fifth Aliya, 1930-1939, consisted of 250,000 Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany. Many were brought out of Europe via covert Haganah transport networks and were brought to either Haifa or the Syrian-Palestinian border. They were all fleeing persecution and escaping the path of the Nazi war machine (Panza & Zylberberg, 2024).

Jewish immigration to Palestine during the British Mandate (1920-1948) was complicated by the reality that the Jews did not always respect British limitations on immigration nor the British oversight of settlement development. In addition, the British did not want to create a British colony dominated by Jews who were intent on creating their own state by leveraging British support. As noted earlier, the idea of having a British outpost in the Middle East was strategically desirable, but there was a fine line between maintaining a semi-autonomous mandate and losing control over a population and territory. The matter was also complicated by the reality that the British approach to administering Palestine neglected the needs and concerns of Arabs. Its approach also focused largely on what was good for Britain’s imperial interests, was highly reactive rather than proactive, and while supportive of Jewish settlement, was  profoundly limited in its grasp of Zionist ambitions and its ramifications for British ambitions (Reynold, 2014, pp. xv–xxiii).

Nationalism Rising

World War I awakened Arab nationalism and the Arabs and Oriental Jews believed that they should be the ones to determine the fate of Palestine after the fall of the Ottomans. This did not square with how the British and the Ashkenazi Jews saw things. From the perspective of Arabs and Oriental Jews, both the Diaspora Jewish immigrants and the British were colonial intruders (Said, 1981, p. 12). Until 1920, the people of Palestine never considered themselves “Palestinians” in the sense of an ethnic group with national borders. The Oriental Jews, Arabs, and Christians who lived in Palestine up to that point regarded Jerusalem as  capital city and they lived on land inhabited by their ancestors, but the threat of losing their land and autonomy forged a new sense of identity. Out of that identity arose the desire to become a sovereign nation that would preserve the values and traditions that they found effective for their survival. This vision, however, was never shared by Zionists. Herzl himself had declared that the Zionists would appropriate Arab lands, exile Arabs, find work for them outside Palestine, and deny them work in Palestine itself. The sentiment was echoed by Yosef Weitz, head of colonizing activities in the National Jewish Fund, who in 1940 stated that there was “no room for both peoples together in this country,” and that all Arabs must be transferred out of the Jewish state, and “not one village, not one tribe should be left” (Gilmore, 1980, pp. 40–41).

The 1920s were characterized by terrorist outbursts as Arabs attacked Jewish settlements and Jews attacked Arab settlements. The confrontations bore witness to the reality that the Jews, despite the fact that they were a minority, had certain advantages. Not only did they have the support of the British Empire with their weapons and administrative infrastructure, but they also had the support of wealthy benefactors in Europe and the U.S. The Palestinians got guns from Iraq, but they lacked leadership with experience in mass mobilization, and its key administrators were fearful that uprisings would terminate their access to British officials (Sayigh, 1979, p. 50).

 In 1920, prominent Palestinian  families and members of Arab organizations formed the Arab Executive Committee. Its mission was to prevent the Zionist take-over of Palestine. It denounced the British Mandate and Zionist immigration. In the same year, Zionists created the Haganah, a military organization that defended Jewish settlements and participated in attacks against Arab villages. The Irgun, a branch of the Haganah was especially brutal and used torture and bombing of homes to extract information about where Arab caches of guns were hidden. Jewish immigrants now had their own militia and Britain on their side.

In March 1921, Winston Churchill, British Secretary of the Colonies, visited Palestine and met with Palestinian leaders who petitioned the British for an independent Arab state. Churchill indicated that British commitment to the Jewish cause was immovable. Palestinians protested by closing their shops. In August, Palestinians again met with British officials to demand they assist in the creation of a Palestinian state and cancel their plans to create  a Jewish state. They called for an end to both Jewish immigration and the British Mandate. The Palestinians were seen by some Arabs — in particular, the Hashemite leaders who sought a kingdom in Syria and Palestine — as ineffective leaders and representatives of the Arab cause (Ayyad, 1999, p. 95). This was a significant indicator that Arab nationalism was compromised by divisions among Arab leaders inside and outside of Palestine.

During the British Mandate, the Zionist vision for a Jewish state was taking shape. Traditionally, Zionists sought a nation based on Marxist and socialist principals. To that end, the Palestine Communist Party (later the Jewish Communist Party) and other socialist groups and unions including the Ahdut HaAvoda vied for preeminence. On May 1, 1921. These two groups held marches near Jaffa, which triggered riots. Local Arabs attacked Jewish shops and homes, and murdered men, women, and children indiscriminately. Jews retaliated the next day by destroying Arab homes and shops and killing men, women, and children. After a week, the riots ended with at least 100 dead and hundreds injured (Kessler, 1921).

The Jaffa riots drove Churchill to review the situation. He issued the Churchill White Paper, (June 3,1922), which assured that Britian was still committed to the Balfour Declaration, but insisted that a Jewish nation would not impose Jewish nationality on all in that nation. The report called for limitations on Jewish immigration, which outraged Zionists who saw it as a barrier to their goals. Further, it was wholly rejected by Arabs as it did not renounce the Balfour Declaration and did not resolve the matter of Palestinian refugees.

British Colonialism vs. Zionist Colonialism

The British mandate permitted Jews to develop its own limited administration and army, but Arabs were not given the same. The Mandate, a new form of territorial administration, was designed to facilitate a transition from being part of an empire to becoming an autonomous nation. At the time, the British and the Americans were not especially keen to create  a Jewish state in Palestine, yet plans to organize Jewish governance and security of settlements continued. In 1923, Arabs boycotted the elections that the British sponsored to create a legislature in Palestine. The boycott did  little to alter British support for Zionism and Arabs realized that regardless of how well they cooperated with and negotiated with Zionists and the British, they would always be marginalized in decisions about their own fate. At this time, the British were also convinced that it was it was highly unlikely that concessions to both the Jews and Arabs would bring them together in harmonious and shared statehood (Gilmore, 1980, p. 49).

Widespread violence erupted again in 1929, as Muslims feared that Jews were encroaching on property of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The massacres that occurred in Jerusalem, Safed, and Hebron differed from Palestinian attacks of the past. Previous attacks focused on resisting Jewish settlement of Palestine, and the 1929 attacks were  motivated largely by a desire to preserve Islam and one of its holiest sites. At week’s end there were 133 Jewish fatalities and 116 Arab fatalities (Strickert, 2023). The destruction of homes, shops, synagogues, and entire villages motivated British officials to revisit the wisdom of their support for Zionists.

In 1930 the Passfield White Paper (British) expressed grave concerns about Zionist settlements practices that discriminated against Palestinian workers and the sale of Palestinian land to Jews. The report stated that Arab employment should be a factor in quotas for Jewish immigration. The British clearly understood the adverse impact of Jewish settlement on the Arabs’ economic well-being, but the Passfield Report’s recommendations were never implemented as Zionist lobbying cried that they violated the Balfour Declaration and they had the contents revoked (Segev, 2000, pp. 335–336). Some argue that Britian was compelled to support Zionists out of a sense of honor and consistency in policy (LeVine, 1995). In Palestine, however, those who faced displacement and discrimination saw little honor in support for Jewish nationalism.

As Jewish refugees increasingly sought entry to various nations in the face of Nazi persecution in the 1930s, they confronted immigration quotas and anti-Semitism in many nations. The addition of new Jewish settlements meant  Arab displacement and discrimination against Palestinians which led to the Great Revolt of 1936. Palestinian attacks against the Jews and British were a means of punctuating the raw anger Palestinians experienced as they were made into refugees and second class citizens by Zionist policies. As Jewish immigrants settled in Palestine, there was a shift in land ownership and economic upheaval in Palestinian life. In Palestine, “between 1933 and 1936, 62.7% of all the land purchased by Zionists belonged to landowners residing in Palestine, 14.9% to absentee landlords, and 22.5% to small peasants, whereas between 1920 and 1922, the figures were 20.8% from resident landlords, 75.4% from absentee landlords and 3.8% from small peasants” (Kelly, 2015, p. 21). While Zionists promised that laws passed during the British Mandate would protect Palestinian peasants against being evicted or forced to sell, in reality, there was no protection for them. Laws prohibiting Arabs from working for Jews send thousands of poor agricultural workers in to cities such as Haifa and Jaffa to compete for scarce jobs.

In mid-April 1936, Arab terrorists killed two Jewish drivers in a convoy of trucks. On April 25^th, National Committees in Arab villages in Palestine created the Arab Higher Committee, which coordinated a strike that shut down economic activity across Palestine. Bands of Arab guerrillas attacked British forces and Jews in the West Bank and Galilean hills. The British responded by training Jews in special tactics to terrorize, torture, and kill Palestinians. They created “night squads” that burst into homes, ransacked them in search of hidden weapons, and battered and shot men, women, and children. The brutality was so extreme that British officials terminated the night squads because they were out of control (Hughes, 2015, p. 592).

In 1936, the British Peel Commission investigated the causes of the uprisings and concluded that it was time to partition Palestine as there appeared to be no way to reconcile differences between Arabs and Jews. Arabs were incensed that the commission failed to respect their petitions to nullify the Balfour Declaration and stop the immigration of Jews. They took up the rebellion with greater passion, attacked Jewish villages, burned homes and synagogues, and massacred scores of inhabitants. The British met the Arab terror with machine guns and arial attacks that shot herds of livestock; they tossed bombs in to groups of school children, and tortured Arabs by forcing them to eat oil-stained sand until they vomited or choked to death (Hughes, 2015, pp. 598–599). The Woodhead Report, 1938 nullified the Peel Commission Report by declaring that a partition of Palestine was simply untenable. The British White Paper of 1939 then recommended a quota on Jewish immigration to Palestine, restrictions on Jewish purchases of Palestinian land, and that an independent state of Palestine be established that would be home to both Arabs and Jews who would share governance and ensure that the law would not discriminate against anyone. Zionists rejected the recommendations and the British retreated from enforcing it.

During the revolt, 5,000 Palestinians were killed, about 15,000 were wounded, and 416 Jews lost their lives (Winder, 2026). The revolt ended on August 26,1939, six days before Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II. By 1939, it was clear that the British could not control violence and lawlessness in their own Mandate. The British resolve was fast slipping into an exit from Palestine that would leave the matter of who “owned” Palestine to civil war — a civil war in which one side of the conflict were not even regarded as full citizens and legitimate residents of the land seized by Jewish immigrants.

War & Holocaust

By the time World War II began, many nations around the world made it clear that they had little empathy for Jewish refugees and victims of Nazi Germany. Britain set refugee quotas in 1939 at 75,000 over a five-year period, Portuguese immigration laws discriminated against Jewish refugees, as did Turkey. In 1941, the Struma, a Romanian ship filled with 769 Jewish refugees steamed toward Palestine without entry certificates. They arrived in Turkey — a neutral nation —where the ship’s engine failed and could not be repaired. The refugees waited on board the ship for two months before the Turks towed the crippled vessel out of port. When it reached open waters, it was blown up by a mine or torpedo. There was only one survivor (Wyman, 1984, P. 158).

In 1939, the U.S. immigration quota for Germans and Austrians was 27,000. While American officials declared sympathy for Jewish refugees and promised aid, the  State Department was rife with anti-Semitism that made it difficult for Jews to enter the U.S. Many believed refugees were actually spies (Gross, 2015). Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary of State, was especially instrumental in obstructing Jewish immigration to the US as he lied about the urgency to assist Jewish refugees, slowed the process of obtaining visas, and denied visas for trivial and irrational reasons, thus reducing the number of Jews the U. S. could have saved during the war (Friedman, 1973, pp. 116–119). In 1939, the German ocean liner, The St. Louis, attempted to dock in Miami with 937 people aboard. Most passengers were Jewish refugees and the U.S. refused to receive the ship. The St. Louis returned to Germany where one half of the Jewish refugees on board were taken to concentration camps and killed. In January 1944, under the leadership of Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Department issued the scathing  Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews, that charged the State Department with “gross procrastination,” using “Government machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews,” and lying about their activities to cover up their guilt (Mashberg, 1977). The report resulted in the creation of the Refugee Board in 1944, which worked with international agents to get Jews out of Europe. Many in the U.S. lamented the effort was “too little, too late” (Wyman, 1984, pp. 155-60).

The humanitarian crises of the loss of life, psychological and spiritual wellness, property, and social security that the Holocaust caused laid grief and guilt on Western consciences. In the immediate years following World War II, public demands for international indictment and punishment of Nazi war criminals resulted in the Nuremberg Trials. The post war years also saw nations struggling with their own humanitarianism as Holocaust survivors sought refuge in nations other than the ones that had persecuted them and sent them to death camps. During the post-war years, animosity between the U.S. and Soviet Union solidified and led to the Cold War wherein these adversaries competed with each other for greater control of international political and economic affairs.

The Cold War required a massive buildup of arms and the maintenance of strategic ports and military bases our side the U.S. and Soviet Union, which intensified interest in controlling as much of the world’s oil supply as possible. In 1929, British and American oil companies joined to create the Bahrain Petroleum company, which was the first to discover oil outside Iraq and the first to open a refinery in the Persian Gulf region outside Iraq. In 1933, the Arabian-American Company was formed, and in 1934, the British and Americans founded the Kuwait Oil Company. In 1938, British Petroleum and Gulf (an American company) struck oil in Kuwait, which sat on about 10% of the world’s oil.

World War II taught nations that no nation would be able to dominate global events or create a new world order without oil. Oil was the blood of modern armed forces and it was the resource that made industrialization and mass consumerism possible. After the war, nations wrestled with the fate of Palestine. When Israel was created in 1948, nations would continue to debate whether Israel was an asset or an obstacle to peace in the Middle East and beyond.

References

Ayyad, Abdelaziz. Arab Nationalism and the Palestinians, 1850 – 1939. Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs. 1999.

Balfour Declaration, 1917. University of Delaware. 14balfour.pdf.

Beckerman-Boys, Carly. The Reversal of the Passfield White Paper, 1930–1: A Reassessment. Journal of Contemporary History, 51(2): 213-233. (February 2015)

Chomsky, Noam. Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. New York: Vintage. 1974.

Edelheit, Abraham J. “The Holocaust and the Rise of Israel: A Reassessment Reassessed.” Jewish Political Studies Review (2000): 97-112.

Friedman, Saul S. No Haven for the Oppressed. United States Policies Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1973.

Friesel, Evyatar. “The Holocaust. Factor in the Birth of Israel.” Major Changes within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust, Jerusalem,519-544. (1996)

Friesel, Evyatar. Zionism and Jewish Statehood as Expression of Modernization. Israel Affairs, 30(3): 381-403. (2004).

Gendzier, Irene. Forward. In Noam Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Gilmore, David. Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians. London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1980.

Gross, Daniel A. The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies. The Smithsonian, November 18, 2015. The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies

Hadari, Zeev. Second Exodus: The Full story of Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine, 1945-1948. London: Valentine, Mitchell, & Co. Ltd. 1991.

Kelly, Matthew Craig. The Revolt of 1936: A Revision. Journal of Palestine Studies, 44(2): 28–42. (Winter 2015).

Kessler, Oren. 1921 Jaffa riots 100 years on: Mandatory Palestine’s 1st ‘Mass Casualty’ Attack. The Times of Israel, May 1, 2021. 1921 Jaffa riots 100 years on: Mandatory Palestine’s 1st ‘mass casualty’ attack | The Times of Israel

Kimmerling, Baruch & Joel S. Migdal. Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press, 1993.

Levine, Mar, The discourses of Development in Mandate Palestine. Arab Studies Quarterly, 17 (1/2): 95–124. (1995).

MacDowell, David. Palestine & Israel: The Uprising and Beyond. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1991.

Mashberg, Michael. Documents Concerning the American State Department and the Stateless European Jews, 1942-1944. Jewish Social Studies, 59(1/2): 163-83. Spring 1977.

Reynold, Nick. Britain’s Unfulfilled Mandate for Palestine. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2014.

Roberts, Nicholas E. “Building Communalism in Palestine: Muslim–Christian Relations Under British Rule.” In Palestine’s Christians and the Nationalist Cause, pp. 117-141. Routledge, 2024.

Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage. 1981.

Saleh, Mohsen M. British-Zionist Military Cooperation in Palestine, 1917-1939. Intellectual Discourse, 11(2): 139-63. (2003).

Sayigh, Rosemary. Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries. London: Zed press, 1979.

Stein, K. W. (1984). The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924–1939. Middle Eastern Studies, 20(2), 190-205.

Strickert, Fred. Western Wall Riots. EBSCO, 2023. Western Wall Riots | History | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.

Winder, Alex. Great Arab Revolt: 1936–1939. Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question. interactive encyclopedia of the palestine question – palquest | great arab revolt, 1936-1939. Accessed April 9, 2026.

Wistrich, Robert S. Israel and the Holocaust Trauma. Jewish History, 11(2): 13–20. (1997).

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews : America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon. 1984.

Chapter V: Aliyah & World War I: 1900-1919

Leveraging British Imperialism

The father of political Zionism, Theodor Hetzl, reasoned that Jews were not a religious group, but a “separate nation, a special race, and that the modern Jew who denies this is not only an apostate, a religious renegade, but a traitor to his people, his tribe, his race” (Stewart, 1974, p. 64). The rhetoric suggests that Jewish identity has ethnic elements and that Jewish solidarity is tied to both religion and shared oppression. With the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine during the waves of Aliyah (immigration) at the end of the 19^th century and prior to World War I, an infusion of European culture and attitudes took hold in Palestine.

British interest in Jewish immigration to Palestine coincided with new Middle Eastern economic opportunities made possible by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Britain had substantial control of waterways leading to the canal, and the canal cut weeks off travel time from Britian’s most reassured colony, India. Britian knew that a Palestine populated by Jews who were more or less cut from the same capitalistic cloth would be in its interest, as its proximity to the Suez Canal was of strategic value. The Jewish state could be a “rampart of Europe against Asia.” Britain’s jewel in its imperial crown, India, was not likely to come under Chinese attack, but Britain wanted to take all measures to control all it could of the opium trade in Asia (Welty, 1984).

With the arrival of the Ashkenazi to Palestine came a social hierarchy in which Ashkenazi was at the top, Oriental and Sephardic Jews were in the middle, and Arabs were at the bottom. The ethnic stratification emerged as Ashkenazi thought their European culture and identity was superior to those of Arabs and Oriental Jews. Culturally and linguistically, Oriental Jews and Arabs had much in common and for generations they lived in Palestine like cousins. Ashkenazi Jews did not share the Oriental Jewish affinity with Arabs and subjected Oriental Jews to the same prejudices and discrimination as they visited upon Arabs (Smooha, 1976).

Hertzl died in 1904. Two years later, David Ben-Gurion, a Polish Jew who had taken up Hertzl’s ideological mantle, moved to Palestine in 1906. He became the founding father of Israel and its first prime minister. His vision for Israel was uncompromising: Israel would encompass all of Palestine and be home to Jewish nationalists. Prior to the rise of fascism and Nazi persecution of Jews, he insisted that Zionists did not include Oriental Jews and that only immigrant Jews from the Diaspora could be Zionist (Feldstein, 2006; Khazzoom, 2003, Cohen, 1987, p. 1).

Ben Gurion’s position differed from the Ottoman position on Jewish immigration. The Ottoman Empire welcomed Jews and took a liberal position on religious tolerance. When the Ottoman empire fell in world War I, so did its attitudes towards Jews. Whereas Jews once flocked to the Ottoman realm, after 1919, when the Republic of Turkey was established, they were not as welcomed (Toktaş, 2006). Ben Gurion encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine, but did not to turn Palestine into a state that shared governance with Arabs. He led Zionists in a fierce struggle to create Israel by any means necessary, against any adversary, even if that turned out to be Great Britain and indigenous Arabs who claimed Ottoman territory when the Ottomans were defeated.

Ben-Gurion’s Zionism was largely secular and he believed that “choseness” and “messianism” were secular concepts — symbols of a material state and its institutions that deliver people from oppression and enable national greatness (Cohen, 1987, p. 206). This view of Zionism clashed religious Zionism which held that the existence of Israel was a prerequisite for Jesus’ return and the final judgement of all souls. Many social and political Zionists scorned rabbinic teaching that Judaism was not about nationalism. They opined that Jewish orthodoxy was ignorant and an obstacle to emancipation and illumination (Avishai, 1985, pp. 20-21).

Ben Gurion’s idea of best governance mirrored Herzl’s view, which maintained that the state can only be governed well by an elite group of people who understand the needs of the state far better than the common people (Cohen, p. 70). His views echoed Plato’s Republic which argued that the rule of exceptionally wise individuals was superior to democracy (Segev, p. 6). The lofty democratic characteristic of early Zionism lost altitude as Zionists rejected the equality of Arabs and Oriental Jews even before the creation of Israel. The Arabs and other Palestinians living in Palestine thus became oppressed peoples in their own homeland (Pappé, 2011).

World War I

At the dawn of the 20^th century, Ben Gurion was optimistic about the Turks’ willingness to allow Jewish immigrants into Palestine. He presumed the Ottoman Empire would survive the waves of ethnic nationalism that devoured the empire one rebellion at a time. He presumed that Palestine would be safe and sound under Ottoman protection (Kurzman, 1983, p. 105) However, when war broke out in 1914, the Turks seized Jewish property and deported 500 Jews. As Turks called for jihad against infidels, Jews in Palestine became targets of violence. Ben Gurion held fast to the belief that the Jews belonged in Palestine and went to the U.S. to recruit Jewish soldiers to fight on behalf of the Turks (Kurzman, p. 112). When the U.S. joined Britian and the Allied nations in war against Germans and Ottomans, Zionists concluded that the Allies were likely to defeat the Axis powers, and so abandoned their support for the Ottomans and joined the Allies (Kurzman, p. 121).

Colonial ambition drove the British to draw both Jews and Arabs into their war against the Ottoman Empire in World War I (1914-1918). The Middle East was a special prize to Britain because of its proximity to India and the Far East. It was also of interest to industrial nations as oil was discovered in Persia in 1908, triggering the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. By 1914, the Ottomans controlled the Anatolia Peninsula, Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian territory, the Red Sea coastal strip on the Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian Gulf strip of land on the Arabia (see map above).

The McMahon-Hussein Letters (1915-16) proposed that Arabs throughout the Ottoman Empire help Britain defeat the Turks in exchange for the establishment of an Arab kingdom that would be carved from Ottoman Palestine. The epic film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean,1962) depicts the struggle to win and keep the Arab’s trust of and commitment to the British. Concurrently, to win the support of Jews in their war against the Turks, the British indicated its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration, 1917, written to Lord Rothchild, who represented many powerful Jews in Europe. The declaration anticipated conflict in the event of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and asserted that the homeland was forbidden to do anything “which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” The declaration, however, did not specifically say what was meant by a “homeland,” where the boundaries of the homeland might lie, and whether the homeland would be shared and co-governed by Jews and Arabs. Neither the Arabs nor Jews were promised the city of Jerusalem. The matter of what would happen to Palestine once the Turks were defeated was further complicated by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916, whereby France and Britain agreed to split territory of the defeated Ottomans. All of these matters were menacing to Zionists who stubbornly regarded the Balfour Declaration as the definitive  “juridical basis of Zionist claims to Palestine,” and a document that superseded all other agreements between Britian and Arabs (Said, 1981, p. 15).

Following the war, victors gathered to discuss the spoils and conditions of peace. Determined to prevent the creation of  a Jewish state in Palestine, Christian and Muslim associations opposing colonialism and favoring Arab nationalism met in Jerusalem in 1919 at the first Palestinian Arab Congress. The group declared opposition to the Balfour Declaration and considered strategies to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine.

During discussion at Versailles, the Arabs argued that they deserved to have complete independence. Instead, A British Mandate was established in Palestine, Transjordan (which became the Kingdom of Jordan in 1946) and Iraq. A French Protectorate was created in Syria and Lebanon. Among the many representatives of colonies and developing countries that appeared at Versailles Peace conference was Emir Faysal (sometimes spelled Faisal), son of Hussein bin Ali, Grand Emir of Mecca. Faysal led Arabs against the Turks and was instrumental in the Arab occupation of Damascus. Faysal intended to create an Arab kingdom in Palestine that would embrace present-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel. In 1920, the Syrian National Congress elected him king and rejected the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon. A year later the French exiled Faysal and in 1921 the British arranged for him to be the king of the newly-formed Iraq.

Between 1872 and 1945, over half a million Jews immigrated to Palestine, displacing thousands of Arabs (Andreen, 2025). For the next two decades, Jewish immigration to Palestine proceeded at a steady pace with little regard for Arab objections. As Figure 4.1 illustrates, before and after the British mandate as established in Palestine, and at the time of Israel’s creation (1948), Arabs were the clear majority in Palestine. Leaders in the West generally held that Palestinians’ quality of life would improve  either by way of European colonialism or Zionist settlement. (Said, p. 15). Many in the West imagined that Arabs were little more than primitive, dirty, ignorant, and corrupt Bedouin. They did not appreciate the diversity of the Arab world, Arab culture, and Palestinian systems that kept the diverse population of Palestine viable for generations.

Palestine was ruled by British Mandate after World War I until 1948. During that time, conflict and skirmishes between Zionists and Arabs were frequent, and British attempts to keep the peace were met with Arab and Zionist non-cooperation. During this time, Zionist colonial settlement was fueled by the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe.

References

Andreen, Finn. The Jewish Immigration to Palestine. Palestinian History, April 24, 2025. The Jewish Immigration to Palestine – by Finn Andreen

Avishai, Bernard. The Tragedy of Zionism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1985.

Cohen, Mitchell. Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel. New York: B. Blackwell, 1987.

Khazzoom, Aziza. “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel.” American Sociological Review 68(4): 481-510. (2003).

Kurzman, Dan. Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.

Pappé, Ilan. The Forgotten Palestinians. A History of the Palestinians in Israel. New Have, CT: Yale University Press. 2011

Segev, Tom. A State at Any Cost. The Life of David Ben-Gurion. Tran. By Hiam Watzman. NY: Farrar, Strus & Giroux. 2019.

Smooha, Sammy. Ethnic Stratification and Allegiance in Israel: where Do Oriental Jews Belong? Il Politico, 41(4): 635–51. (December, 1976).

Stewart, Desmond. Theodor Hertzl Artist and Politician. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1974.

Toktaş, Şule. Turkey’s Jews and their Immigration to Israel. Middle Eastern Studies 42(3): 505–19. (May 2006).

Welty, Gordon A. Israel: Between colonialism and Imperialism. The Antioch Review, 42(1): 60–77. (Winter 1984).

Chapter VI: War, Holocaust, & Statehood, 1939-1949

The Crisis of Partition

The matter of who would rule Palestine was never a matter of the population’s demographics. If this were the case, then Palestine might have become a commonwealth wherein Jews, Christians, and Arabs were all welcomed at the parliamentary table, and equally protected by a single constitution; or, it might have become an Arab state that had Christian, Jewish, and Druze minorities. Despite the stream of Jewish immigration after 1882, the Arabs were always the majority, and in 1946, just prior to the creation of Israel, there were “608,225 Jews in a total population of 1,912,112,” roughly 33% (Said, 1981, p. 11). International agendas for Palestine and Zionist political pressure on Allied nations subordinated the matter of demographics to interests that did not represent the majority of people living in Palestine. Figure 6.1 illustrates the increase in Jewish Settlements from 1881 to 1947.

The British Mandate was unable to resolve the matter of how Palestine would be organized and governed, and the mandate was set to expire on May 15, 1948. Until then, the British were in charge of keeping the peace. Zionists saw the 100,000 troops stationed in Palestine and the British restrictions on Jewish immigration as an imperialistic barrier to their complete autonomy, and several strikes against the British punctuated the point. In 1946 the Irgun (a right-wing Zionist military organization founded in 1931) bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people including many British administrators residing there. The Irgun sabotaged infrastructure and terrorized Arab villages, which brought arrests and curfews. The British wearied of the costly Palestinian burden and sought ways to secure peace, to exit their role in Palestine, or at least shift the burden of Palestine to other nations (Explaining History, 2025).

In 1947, Britain, the Soviet Union, and their allies appealed to the United Nations to terminate the British mandate and partition Palestine. Abba Hillel Silver, rabbi and spokesman for the Jewish Agency for Palestine, addressed the UN General Council, citing that the Jews were living in Palestine for about 2,000 years before the Arabs conquered the territory in 684 ACE, and claimed the Jews had always yearned to return to their homeland because Palestine “offers to them that which they need the most, and cannot find anywhere else: the chance of a real home, the prospect of a life in congenial surroundings, the insurance of permanency” (Silver, 1947, p. 87).

Jamel el-Husseini, chairman of the Palestinian delegation at the UN, spoke to the General Assembly and asserted that the Jews had no rightful claim to Palestine. He said, “The Zionists are conducting an aggressive campaign, in fact an invasion. For no matter with what apparel it is clothed, religious, humanitarian, or political, the Zionist movement for the possession of Palestine is nothing but an invasion that aims, by force, at securing and dominating a country that is not theirs by birthright” (el Husseini, 1947, p. 75).

The claims perplexed historians and archaeologists. If Zionist claims rested on the assertion that the Jews resided in Palestine for 2,000 years before the Arabs took control of the region and so they have “dibs” on the land, what about the descendants of those who lived on the land thousands of years before the Israelites? The Natufian civilization, for example, thrived in Palestine as long ago as 15,000 years before the Common Era. Their society cultivated plants, used microlithic tools, carved symbolic images into stone, and left evidence of permanent settlement (Bar-Yosef, 1998). Historical and theological arguments were made on behalf of Jewish statehood, but politics ultimately carried the day.

United Nations Resolution 181

The United Nations’ General Assembly Resolution 181 (November 29, 1947) is routinely cited as the document that monolithically intended to and created Israel. The reality is that Israel’s birth was not so immaculate. The UN Charter, Chapter XII, Articles 75–85, describe UN authority to create trusteeships/mandates for the purpose of administering territory until the inhabitants of such territory completes the process of establishing  independence and self-governance. The trusteeships/mandates were responsible for preventing violence in the process of establishing these things, and to prevent interference with inhabitants’ rightful pursuit of their interests (Hammond, 2010).

 In 1947, the UN created the Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) and tasked it with developing a pathway to Palestinian autonomy and self-governance. It proposed a Palestinian partition whereby 55% of Palestine was to be given to the Jews who represented a third of the Palestinian population, and who owned less than 7% of Palestinian land. It proposed steps required for independence of both Israel and an Arab state, and suggested that a commission oversee the process for both Jews and Arabs. The Jewish and Palestinian states had to establish a militia for defense and formulate plans for elections and autonomous governance. The process of creating new governments and the new nations themselves were explicitly forbidden by UN rules to practice discrimination ethnic and religious groups (Bennis, 1997). UNSCOP’s Resolution 181 indicated that the UN would maintain peace between nations in regions subject to the document.

Resolution 181 was a recommendation that carried no weight without approval of the Security and General Councils. Opposition to it was immediate. The General Committee created  an ad hoc Committee on the Palestine Question which rejected UNSCOP’s Resolution 181 because the General committee was “not competent to recommend, still less to enforce, any solution other than the recognition of independence of Palestine, and the settlement of the future government as a matter solely for the people of Palestine” (Hammond, 2010, p. 3). In addition, the Arab Higher Committee opposed the plan and declared it was “contrary to the letter and the spirit of the United Nations Charter” because it clearly threatened Palestinian sovereignty (Hammond, 2010, p. 5).

The UN Palestine Commission regarded the Arab Higher Committee’s response as obstructionist and called for the UN Security Council to proceed with the partition plan and the transfer of governing authority from the British Mandate to the governing bodies under the plan. It also requested that the Security Council provide armed forces to enable the Palestine commission to discharge its duties. This prompted the country of Columbia to introduce a resolution asserting that the UN Charter “did not authorize the Security Council to create special forces for the purposes indicated by the United Nations Palestine Commission.” Warren Austin, U.S. delegate to the UN, responded that the UN Security Council had the authority to intervene in matters where international peace and internal security were threatened (Hammond, 2010, p. 6). Austin’s argument seemed convoluted, since the issue that was most likely to disrupt the peace in the first place was the partitioning of Palestine.

Prior to 1945, the U.S. was relatively tepid on the matter of Zionism. It was cautious about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and favored the extension of the British Mandate during which time Palestinian inhabitants, Jews and Arabs alike, would be able to reach an agreement about governance that was pleasing to both. In the State Department, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Dean Rusk favored a Palestinian state that was neither Jewish nor Arab and that had a single, shared government. In the Defense Department, James Forrestal cautioned that support for Israel could trigger adverse consequences in U.S. relations with oil-producing Arab nations. The British found solace in U.S. caution as it opposed UNSCOP’s plan for partition. Having administered a mandate for 20 years and witnessing the extreme animosity between Jews (particularly the Ashkenazi) and Arabs, the British were unconvinced that a two-state solution was in the best interest of the Arabs (Fraser, 1989, pp. 26–32).

Truman was besieged by lobbyists as were congressional members across the U.S. They were flooded with telegrams, phone calls, and letters expressing support for the partition and the creation of Israel. The American Federation of labor and the congress of Industrial Organization lent their support as well. Lobbyists including Chaim Weizmann, founder of the British Zionist Organization and Israel’s first president, Rabbi Stephen Wise, founder of the Federation of American Zionists, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, member of the Allied Jewish Campaign and spokesman for Zionism at the UN met with Truman to press their objectives. The Zionists favored the partition and what had been proposed at the 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York, which called for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, immigration controlled by the Jewish Agency, the rejection of the British White Paper of 1939, the establishment of a Jewish military force, and the cultivation of U.S. sponsorship for Israel (Fraser, 1989, p. 24).

Truman wrote in his memoirs that the Jewish lobby was “extensive and continuous,” and that he regretted that the matter of Palestine has become a political issue in his administration. As he pondered his position on the matter, the 1948 election was on the horizon. The Jewish vote was significant and the vast majority of Jews wanted Israeli statehood. Truman’s support for the partition was in part motivated by his desire to be re-elected (Divine, Watson, & Wolz, 2008, p. xi; Hassan, 2016). He pressed those who hesitated to support Israel and unleashed a wave of pressure on other UN members. In some instance, nations were reminded that by not supporting the U.S. on the matter of partition, they could be experience negative consequences in their relations with the U.S. (Fraser, 1989, pp. 30–35).

The UN voted in favor of Partition on November 29, 1947, and while Jews all over the world were jubilant, others simmered in resentment. Historian T. G. Fraser penned, “If American policy satisfied Jewish hopes for statehood, in almost every other respect it was based on an illusion,” as the U.S. assumed that the two states would be as friendly as the three thousand-mile boundary between the U.S. and Canada. Arab rhetoric roundly demolished such optimism and asserted that the boundary would be “a line of blood and fire” (Fraser, 1989, p. 35). The partition plan left the two sides, Palestinians and settlement Jews, to fight over which side would prevail in determining the fate of Palestine. The plan and the process that brought the plan to fruition were blatant violations of Palestinian autonomy and self-determination grounded in the assumption that “Arabs would simply acquiesce to leaving their land taken from them and voluntarily surrender their majority rights including the right to self-determination” (Hammond, 2010, p. 12). The assumption suggested that the UN favored the more Europeanized Ashkenazi over Arabs. The U.S., a dominant member of the UN, demonstrated such favor with economic and military aid for Israel over the next several decades that dwarfed it aid for Palestinians.

At the time of the partition, the Palestinian and Jewish state existed only in the abstract, but the Jewish state had a substantial head start. Not only did Israel have international funding for settlement, but it had also created the Haganah in 1920 (for defense and national security) and the Histadrut (Jewish Federation of Labor) in the same year. The Histadrut was the cornerstone of Israel’s economic development. The Histadrut owned a construction company, a bank, a credit union, and co-ops for commercial enterprises and marketing of manufactured goods and agricultural products. Israel also had a clear map for how the nation would be governed.

The Palestinians had no road map. Their Arab neighbors quarreled with each other over who should lead the Arab world, and Palestinians lacked a strong centralized bureaucratic infrastructure for a state. It had no superpower willing to shepherd an Arab state in Palestine into existence. The Arab League that was formed in 1945 to advance the security and well-being of Arab nations and to resist Western domination of the Middle East was fraught with spats over leadership and lacked consensus on plans for Palestinian statehood. Further, when el-Husseini became the Prime Minister of the Government of Common Palestine in 1948, the UN did not recognize it.

The debate over whether the UN should partition Palestine and establish Israel was contentious and revealed a variety of motives for and against the move. Some, including British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Lord Balfour, favored Zionism for religious reasons (Alexander, 2017, pp. 208–209; Krammer, 1973). Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union, supported the Arabs during the 1929 and 1936 Palestinian uprisings, but came to see Jews as allies in the fight against fascism and Israel itself as a means of removing the British from the Middle East (Gorodetsky, 2010). Some saw Israel as a destination for Jews that they did not want in their countries, and many believed Israel had to exist for the sake of providing refugees and Holocaust survivors a safe haven.

U.S. approval of Resolution 181 bears witness to the reality that Cold War dynamics were already afoot in 1947. While many in the Truman administration cautioned the president not to support the partition, others saw an opportunity to use Israel as an ally against Soviet expansion in the Middle East. The hegemony that both the Americans and Soviets wished to exert across the globe required massive amounts of oil to feed their industrial militaries. Palestine was strategically located to give whoever controlled it an excellent position from which to stage interventions in the event that access to oil was threatened. Though Truman’s critics saw his support for partition and the increase of Jewish immigration to Palestine as a betrayal of commitment to the Arabs, Truman did not see that supporting one negated support for the other (Ottolenghi, 2004).

The Arab Higher Committee Delegation for Palestine, (after 1947 the Arab Higher Committee) officially represented Palestinians during formal proceedings concerned with partition, boycotted the UN Special Commission on Palestine, as it saw efforts to create a Jewish state against the will of the majority of Arabs in Palestine, against the UN’s own principles, and against the natural rights of people already established in the territory (Arab Higher Committee, 1948). Israel was created despite the fact that no Arab nation voted for the partition. This left the UN to face doubts about its credibility as a neutral international organization for peace and cooperation. It also set Jews and Palestinians on a tragic collision course. It also appeared to have emboldened Israeli assertions that Palestinians were unworthy of basic human respect. Twenty years after the partition, Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir said of Palestinian claims against the state of Israel, “There was no such thing as a Palestinian people… It was not as though there was a Palestinian people considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist” (Giles, 1969).

Statehood & The Holocaust

The Holocaust did not cause the creation of Israel, but it added urgency to demands for a Jewish homeland and is regarded as a catalyst of its creation (Edelheit,2000). Professor of the Humanities Ronald Aronson wrote, “The Holocaust is what distinguished the Jewish project from the old settler-colonialism,” and what  made the question of Israel into a “complex moral dilemma.” He stated that the Holocaust is the source of Israeli righteousness and of American Jews’ indifference to the “displacement and subjugation of Palestinians” (Aronson, 1980, p. 61–62).

Historians have acknowledged that while the core of U.S. support for Israel has always been strategic, elements of sympathy and the desire to protect a people who suffered persecution and genocide throughout the 20^th century have never been eclipsed (Mearsheimer & Walt, 20007, pp. 57–58). As people learned about the scale of inhumanity and death that Nazis brought to the Jews, they reasoned that a Jewish homeland was justified and an expression of humanitarianism. Many of the horrific details of the Holocaust became known as a result of the Nuremberg Trials (1945–46), during which an international tribunal put Nazi officials on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The U.S. conducted an additional 12 trials of Nazi officials and industrialists (Heller, 2011, pp. 3,4, 92–94,100). The revelations of plaintiffs and defendants were very much on the minds of those who brokered the UN partition of Palestine.

While the role of the Holocaust in the creation of Israel is often debated, most scholars maintain that it influenced public opinion and diplomatic thinking on the matter (Edelheit, 2000, Friesel, 1996). Some argue that Zionism was forceful enough to create Israel without the Holocaust, and others say that political Zionism perverted the original intentions of Zionism by dwelling on antagonism between Jews and Gentiles and by exploiting the “guilt of nations” to obtain special treatment and “immunity from criticism” (Wistrich, 1997, pp. 11, 13).

When the UN announced its plans to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947, Jews accepted it and Arabs did not. At the time, Jews in Palestine represented one third of the population, yet the UN plan granted the proposed state of Israel 56% of the land, including the most arable acreage in the territory (see Figure 6.2). Prior to the proposal, Jews owned only about 7% of Palestinian land (Khalidi, 1988). Palestinians were outraged and retaliated in protest.

In February 1948, the Arab League blockaded the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, cutting off supplies to Jews living in Jerusalem. The Jews were reduced to food and water rations while Arabs razed whole neighborhoods, looted, murdered men, women, and children, and destroyed synagogues, shops, and homes. Jews argued that, since the UN  placed Jerusalem under its protection, the UN should have come to aid the Jews in Jerusalem; and, since the UN did not aid the Jews, the UN agreement about Jerusalem was null and void (Gold, 2004, p. 51). It was a curious argument. Arabs had already concluded the UN partition was null and void because it rejected Arab sovereignty and Arab objections to giving Arab territory to Jews. In 1948, the matter of what was “null and void” was drifting toward the will of those who could force their opinions with superior fire power.

By mid-April, Haganah soldiers seized the Arab quarter of the city and pillaged the homes of wealthy residents. Thieves took everything — furniture, clocks, clothing, dishes, bedding, books, radios and lamps; they removed hinges from doors, stole the doors and tiles form the floors. The booty drew mobs of Arab and Jewish thieves who proliferated during attacks against villages and who sold their loot in the black market (Raz, 2024, pp. 63–81). In less than six months, reaction to the partition mapped the horizon of conflict for the next seven decades.

Arab-Israeli War, 1948

In February 1948, the Jews and the Arabs stood at the threshold of a war while colonial empires in Africa and Asia pondered their options for de-colonization. Zionists had been preparing for the withdrawal of the British and by the spring of 1948 had plans on how to protect themselves from what they believed would be certain assaults by Palestinians. Historian Walid Khalili wrote that Zionists in the 1930s presumed that Palestinians would contest a Jewish state, and in correspondence with international allies and colleagues  discussed “transferring Arabs” to Transjordan (present-day Jordan). He noted that the Peel Commission  (1937) opened the door to the forced removal of Arabs as it acknowledged that any settlement would require  and exchange of population, and that “it should be part of the agreement that the last resort the exchange would be compulsory” (Khalidi, 1988, pp. 10–11). By March 1948, Zionists had the “fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate that Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently of its native population” (Pappe, 2006, p. 16).

The first parts of the Zionist plan were concerned with defensive tactics such as surveillance, assessing potential threats to Jewish villages and property, and determining how to respond to actual attacks. They also included punitive actions against attackers including the murder of Palestinian political leaders and military officers, damaging Palestinian transportation, poisoning Palestinian wells, and attacking villages that they believed were “likely” to attack. The plans to safeguard the Jews were peppered with controversy as they eventually called for Plan Dalet or Plan D, which was the systematic removal of Palestinians from areas the UN designated for a Jewish state (Pappe, 2006, p. 26). Weeks before the British withdrew from Palestine, the Haganah put Plan D in motion.

As with all blueprints for military operations, Plan D was often interpreted and implemented in the heat of danger and confrontation by soldiers who passionately believed that they held the safety and security of the state in their hands, and had to defend and protect that state at all costs by any means without regret. Under these conditions, extreme acts of depravity and sadism are common, and the extent to which authorities condone, ignore, and excuse these acts reveals much about the original intentions of the plan itself.

One of the first operations of Plan D was to secure the road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. All Arab villages along the way were vulnerable to Haganah and Irgun attacks. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun and Lehi attacked Deir Yassin, an Arab village about 18 miles west of Jerusalem. The assailants descended on the village with armored vehicles and mortars. They tossed grenades into homes, killed 25 pregnant women, 52 mothers with babies, and 60 girls; they raped and murdered and mutilated the dead (Rui & Wenliang, 2020). Soldiers looted homes and shops, blew up cars, while residents tried to flee the carnage. The Jews appropriated the remains of the village, and the news about the mayhem and ferocity of the Deir Yassim massacre that shot through Arab villages motivated many Arabs to abandon their land and homes before they were attacked.

On May 15, 1948, the British withdrew from Palestine. Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iraq declared war on Israel. Having received thousands of Arab refuges in the wake of Haganah attacks, and perceiving the Zionists as a form of European imperialism, they were poised to defend the Palestine of Oriental Jews and Arabs. The conflict between the Jews and the Arabs from this point forward was thus not a civil war, but an anti-colonial war in which newly formed Arab states (carved from the Ottoman Empire) took the Palestinian side. Many of those Arab states owned seas of oil beneath their sands, which presented the possibility that those Arab states would use access to oil as a weapon against nations who took Israel’s side.

At the onset of war, the 600,000 Jews living in Palestine faced the might of 40 million Arabs in the region. The Jews had a fighting force of about 68,000, but the Arabs had only about 40,000 troops. Arabs held the advantage in terms of weapons, but that shifted as Israel was able to smuggle weapons into the country with the aid of Czechoslovakia, various European allies and the mafia (Bregman, 2000, pp. 15–17). Machine guns, artillery, planes, and tanks made their way to Israel via the US, Latin America, and Italy and money for equipment was often laundered. (Duir, 2020). The Israelis also used biological warfare against the Arabs by dumping typhoid bacteria into Arab wells and into the wells of Jewish villages that they believed would fall to the Arabs (Morris, 2022).

In July 1948, the Haganah attacked Lydda and Ramle, two Arab villages located outside the boundaries of territory that the UN gave Israel. Around 70,000 Palestinians were violently driven from their homes and forced to leave behind what they could carry. They were forced to walk to refugee camps and robbed along the way. About 250 were murdered as they sought sanctuary in Lydda’s mosque (Pappe, 2020). As the refugees were leaving, several trucks arrived to the Lydda with scores of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who quickly moved into the vacant homes and shops that hours before belonged to Arab families. Many Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacres and expulsions of Arabs were horrified by how their own conduct mirrored that of Nazis who persecuted and slaughtered the Jews (Trimlett & Muhtaseb, 2017, 0:55:00-0:58:00).

The Haganah also attacked Nazareth, a predominately Christian city in the Palestinian zone. The Jewish commander, Ben Dunkelman, who was ordered to expel everyone from the city refused his orders. He was repulsed by the order and refused to follow it. He was then replaced, but his appeals to authorities ultimately convinced Ben Gurion that the city’s inhabitants should remain (Kidron, 1988). In the south, Beersheba was not so lucky. After Jewish forces attacked the city, the Arabs were brought to Gaza, which by that time had become a massive refugee camp.

The UN formally brokered an end to the war January 7, 1949 and separate agreements were reached with Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. In May, the UN officially welcomed the Nation of Israel into the Middle East (Figure 6.3). The war claimed the lives of over 6,000 Jews, roughly 15,000 Palestinians, and hundreds of soldiers from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. The Arab Palestinian villages that numbered 500-700 before the war were reduced to around 100. As a result of Israel’s victory in war, nearly one million Palestinians became refugees and Israels borders expanded, leaving it with 77% of Palestine.

References

Arab Higher Committee Delegation for Palestine. The Great Betrayal of the United Nations. February, 1948. New York: Arab Higher Committee Delegation for Palestine.

Aronson, Ronald. Never Again? Zionism and the Holocaust. Social Text, No. 3, 60-72. (Autumn, 1980).

Bar‐Yosef, Ofer. “The Natufian culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews: Issues, News, and Reviews 6(5): 159–77. (1998).

Bennis, Phyllis. The United Nations and Palestine: Partition and Its Aftermath. Arab Studies Quarterly, 19(3): 47–76. (1997).

Bregman, Ahron. Israel’s Wars, 1947–93. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Divine, Michale, Robert P. Watson, & Robert J. Wolz. Israel and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman. The Truman Legacy Series, Vol. 3. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008.

Duir, Boaz, Saving Israel. The Unknown Story of Smuggling Weapons and Winning a Nation’s Independence. Cliford, CT: Stackpole Books, 2020.

Edelheit, Abraham J. “The Holocaust and the Rise of Israel: A Reassessment Reassessed.” Jewish Political Studies Review, 12(1): 97-112. (2000).

El-Husseini, Jamel. “Palestine Should Not be Partitioned.” In Myra Immell (Ed) The Creation of the State of Israel, pp. 74–82. Greenhaven Press, 2010.

Explaining History Podcast. “The End of the British Mandate: How Imperial Withdrawal Shaped the 1948 War.” November 15, 2025. The End of the British Mandate: How Imperial Withdrawal Shaped the 1948 War – Explaining History Podcast.

Fraser, T. G. The USA and the idle East Since World War2. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Giles, Frank. “Golda Meir, ‘Who Can Blame Israel?’” Sunday Times, June 15, 1969, p. 12.

Gold, Dore. Tower of Babble: How the United Nations has Fueled Global Chaos. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004.

Gorodetsky, Gabirel. The Soviet Union’s Role in the Creation of the State of Israel. Journal of Israeli History, 22(1): 4–20 (June 2010).

Hammond, Jeremy R. The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel. Foreign Policy Journal, 26. October 26, 2010.

Hassan, Shamir. Politics of the Zionist Lobby in the United States of America. Proceedings of the Indian History Conference, 77: 846–54. (2016).

Heller, Kenvin Jon. The Nuremberg Military Trials and the Origins of International Criminal Law. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011.

Krammer, Arnold. Soviet Motives in the Partition of Palestine, 1947–48. Journal of Palestine Studies, 2(2): 102–19. (1973).

Kidron, Peretz (1988). Truth Whereby Nations Live. In Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (Eds.). Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. Verso

Little, Douglas. The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and Israel, 1957-68. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 25: 563-585. (1993).

Mearscheimer, John and Stephen Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar Strauss, and Giroux. 2007.

Morris, Benny & Benjamin Z. Kedar. Cast They Bread: Israeli biological Warfare During the 1948 War. Middle Eastern Studies, 59(5): 752–76. (January 2022).

Ottolenghi, Michael. Harry Truman’s Recognition of Israel. The Historical Journal, 47(4): 963–88. (December 2004).

Pappé, I. (2020). An Indicative Archive: Salvaging Nakba Documents. Journal of Palestine Studies, 49(3), 22–40. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2020.49.3.22

Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2006.

Raz, Adam. Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property. London: Verso. 2024.

Rui, Chen, and Zhao Wenliang. “The impact of the Deir Yassin massacre on the Arab-Israel conflict.” Frontiers in Educational Research 3 (3): 14–16. (2020).

Said, Edward. “Remarks on Palestine.” In The Palestinians, Selected Essays, pp. 49-59. H. I Hussaini & F. E. Boghdady (Ed.). Washington, D.C.: Arab Information Center. 1976.

Silver, Abba Hillel. “Palestine should be Partitioned.” In Myra Immell (Ed) The Creation of the State of Israel, pp. 84–92. Greenhaven Press, 2010.

Trimlett, Andy and Ahlam Muhtaseb (Directors). 1948: Creation and Catastrophe. [Film] Clear Cut, Inc. Distributed by Factory Film Studio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwy-Rf15Uls.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947. The Avalon Project : UN General Assembly Resolution 181

Chapter VIII:  Terror in Search of the Messiah, 1967–1987

A Pivotal Era

In 1951, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian political theorist, completed a two-year tour and study of the US. He visited major cities in the U.S. and worked in Washington, D.C. and Colorado. The American culture he encountered was a mosaic of materialism, irreverence, contradiction, sexual immodesty, and strong support for Israel. He wrote vitriolically about the moral decay and decadence of America, and condemned its lack of devotion to God, intoxication, pornography, eating habits, and manners (Qutb, 1951).

Americans who knew about Qutb’s report made little fuss. He was, after all, an intellectual, an Arab, and a Muslim, who carried no currency with oil corporations, senators, and bankers. Fifty years later, his name surfaced as Americans tried to understand why anyone wanted to crash jet planes into tall buildings and U.S. government real estate. Qutb’s writings became foundational to  the burgeoning Muslim Brotherhood over the decades, as Arabs found no justice for Palestinian refugees and Palestinians living in occupied territory, and as they sought justice through radical ideas such as those of Osama bin Laden (Von Drelhle, 2006).

The Six Day War was a turning point in several ways. As result of the war, Israel took control of old Jerusalem where the ancient temple stood and Israel tripled in size. Emboldened by their success, Israelis placed all Palestinians under their direct control. Victory for the Israelis in 1967 enabled them to add 36 new Jewish settlements, 80% of which were constructed in the West Bank. (Tenenbaum & Eiran, 2005). Victory also prompted Israel to ask the U.S. for more economic and military aid and American obliged. U.S. support jumped from $15 million in 1967 to $75 million in 1968 (Tivnan, 1987, p.69).

After 1967, the U.S. increasingly acted unilaterally on matters concerning Israel, and its interests were not always aligned with the UN. Policy analyst Phyllis Bennis observed that while the UN role and agenda in Palestine is humanitarian, the “overall U.S. concern in the Middle East, and especially regarding Israel-Palestine conflict, is strategic.” Further, while the U.S. appreciates the UN’s support for the basic survival of people in the Middle East, it does not appreciate UN involvement in “diplomatic and political decision-making” (Bennis, 1997, p. 50). After 1967, as both Israel and the U.S. felt emboldened to assert their wills, Islamic fundamentalists increased their ranks and Arab terrorists from both secular and religious organizations increased audacious acts of hijacking, kidnapping, bombing, and assassinating various targets around the world.

The war also altered the way journalists, historians, and political analysts looked at Israel and Palestine. Prior to 1967, historiography of Israel tended to paint glorious pictures of a persecuted people whose heroes fought a righteous battle to create a righteous nation. Criticism of Zionism and Israel was — and still is in many circles — taboo. After 1967 commentary and scholarship began to integrate more subjects into their narratives; they spoke about Zionists’ attitudes towards Arabs and were critical of how Israel regarded refugees, and they were willing to expose the impact that the Jewish lobby had on international policy-making (Gelber, 2007). The new journalistic and academic openness to the variety of perspectives and experiences of people living in Palestine became greater after the October War of 1973.

Israeli victory in the Six Day War announced that Israel was undoubtedly a home for the world’s Jews, and that the dream of 19^thcentury Zionists had come true. The success of Israel kindled Jewish interest in settlement for both secular and religious motives. The idea that the Messiah would come to redeem the children of Israel and the idea that Diaspora Jews had to settle in the Holy Land to prepare for the arrival of the Messiah was not new to Jewish conceptualizations of a Jewish state; that idea was soundly fixed in Jewish visions for a homeland by the mid-1800s. However, that aspect of nationhood did not figure prominently until after 1967. According to sociologist Chaim Waxman, the years following 1967 were the first in Jewish history wherein “messianism was used as a legitimization for action in defiance of a democratically-elected autonomous Jewish government” (Waxman, 1987, p. 185). The radical messianism insisted that the state was obligated to do all it could to create conditions ideal to the arrival of the messiah, even if it meant over-riding the will of the people and democratic processes. It also meant that any return of land seized from Palestinians was a religious infraction (Waxman, 1987).

By the 1970s, greater numbers of Jews saw Israel as a religious utopia characterized by a revival of Jewish orthodoxy. Up to that point, Israeli nationalism was primarily secular in its identity and religious Zionism represented a minority of Israelis. After 1967, sharper distinctions between the religious Zionist right and the religious Zionist left emerged and both sides amplified their vision for Israel. The religious right was particularly critical of modernity and wanted to fill all aspects of Jewish life with an “authentic overtly religious essence,” that represented religious conviction and messianic hope. The religious right were isolationist and created businesses, neighborhoods, housing, and schools that welcomed only like-minded Zionists (Finkelman, 2005, p. 22). The religious left were less critical of modernity, open to dialogue between secular and religious interests, and welcomed integration of all Jews in all aspects of life. The religious right held that to acquire God-given rights, Jews  had to exert their will, and to purify Israel and make it free of Arabs  (Sagi & Schwartz, 2019, pp. 51–57).

Refugees of 1967

Following the war, as refugees began another trek to safer ground, Arabs across the Middle East rioted in anger. Historian and ambassador Michael Oren reported:

Mobs attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco, burning synagogues and assaulting residents. A pogrom in Tripoli, Libya, left 18 Jews dead and 25 injured; the survivors were herded into detention centers. Of Egypt’s 4,000 Jews, 800 were arrested, including the chief rabbis of both Cairo and Alexandria, and their property sequestered by the government. The ancient communities of Damascus and Baghdad were placed under house arrest, their leaders imprisoned and fined. A total of 7,000 Jews were expelled, many with merely a satchel (Oren, 2022, p. 306–307).

In the decades following the Six Day War, Arabs continued to fight Israeli expansion, ill-treatment of refugees, and Israel’s apartheid policies. The next decades brought a new level of terror to Palestinian and Arab resistance. The scope of targets crossed into the international community, and its new tactics included kidnapping, hijacking aircraft, and bombing U.S. military installations. By the dawn of the 21^st century, terrorists had sleeper cells in various countries including the U.S. They blew up civilians in shopping malls and flew jetliners into tall buildings; they continued to plot dozens of attacks against Americans on American soil (Kurzman, Schanzer, & Moosa, 2011).

As the tragedy of Palestine continued to unfold, Cold War agendas East and West had to factor into their policies whether their actions would jeopardize access to oil. The oil exporting nations flexed their petroleum muscles during this era in the form oil embargos that penalized the U.S. for its unconditional support for Israel. Many American took umbrage at the tactic and wanted revenge. Others began to see the crisis of Palestine and its refugees from the Arab perspective.

In 1966, here were 1,317,749 Palestinian refugees. About 53.5% lived in Jordan, 23.2% in Gaza, 12.4% in Lebanon, and 10.6% in Syria (Kochavi, 2012). Their numbers included children and grandchildren of refugees displaced by the Arab-Israel War, 1948. The Six Day War produced 350,000 refugees, some who were already refugees who were forced to relocate and some who were not (Awwad, 1999). Living conditions for Palestinian refugees was grim and desperate. Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev reported:

By 1967, most Israeli Arabs were living in poverty and under precarious conditions. Although their circumstance had improved over the years, they suffered discrimination in practically every aspect of their life. Their average income was less than half of the general average in Israel. Seventy-four percent of Arab villages were not hooked up to the national water system, and 20 percent had no access to roads. No a single Arab village had paved streets, nor had a sewage infrastructure been laid. Public housing was seldom built for Arabs. Only three out of ten Arabs were insured by the national health fund, whereas eight out of ten Jews were. Fifteen percent of students in elementary schools were Arab, but the state allocated only 3 percent of its education budget to Arab education. An Arab farmer made between 30 and 50 percent less than a Jewish farmer. A Jewish construction worker made up to twice as much as an Arab.” (Segev, 2007, p. 69).

The UN anticipated the crisis of Palestinian refugees in 1948 and adopted Resolution 194. The document has been referenced in hundreds of petitions, manifestos, and political debates addressing the fate of Palestinian refugees and in debates concerning Israel’s obligations to Palestinian rights and wellness. It asserted that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible” (UN General Assembly Resolution 194, 1948). Israel’s Absentee’s Property Law (1950), which stripped refugees of their property, made the return of refugees nearly impossible and the UN never forced Israel to comply with Resolution 194.

The absoluteness of Israeli distain for Palestinians was revealed in 1949 when Prime Minister David Ben Gurion explained his rational for replacing  Arabic names of cities, streets, and public spaces with Hebrew names: “Just as we do not recognize the Arab’s political proprietorship of the land…so also do we not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names” (Shalbak, 2023).

In 1954, the UN Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) reported that it had 887,058 Palestinian refugees in their care, and that many had a negative attitude toward the objective of “rehabilitating” them because that meant accepting Israel’s forced relocation of them and Israel’s authority to determine their rights and the quality of their lives (Assistance to Palestinian Refugees, 1954). The UNRWA also questioned the feasibility of the UN project to rehabilitate the refuges as the project faced obstacles including poor conditions for agricultural development in new locations, lack of adequate water supplies, cost, and the challenges of diseases such as chronic dysentery, small pox, typhus, and malaria that gripped refugee communities. Israel’s treatment of refugees suggested that the moral reach of the UN where refugees were concerned was irrelevant to Israel’s agenda.

At war’s end in November 1967, the UN adopted Resolution 242, a peace proposal. It read that Israel should withdraw from territories occupied in recent conflict, and that all states should respect each other’s right to respect and sovereignty. It also affirmed the necessity for a just settlement for refugees (United Nations Resolution 242).

Zionists found petitions to repatriate refugees and compensate them for losses that were based on UN Resolution 194 were moot. After the Six Day War, Israel regarded its conquest of all of Palestine as nullification of previous agreements on armistice and contrary to common sense (Rosenne, 1978, p. 31–34). That Israel never applied UN Resolution 242 to its foreign and refugee policies and suggested that conquest was a legitimate means of solving problems related to territorial boundaries and national security threats. Further, from Israel’s perspective, the experience of the Suez Crisis “confirmed once and for all the lesson of the irrelevance of the United Nations to Israel’s serious security problems” (Rosenne, 1978, p. 9).

The relevance of the UN and its potency relative to peace-keeping came in to question as members were increasingly divided along Cold War sympathies. The division was in part the result of the expansion of the UN from its original 51 members in 1945 to over 121 nations (largely African and Southeast Asian) by 1965. Whereas the U.S. tended to dominate policy-making in the early years of the UN, new members brought developing nations’ perspectives to bear on discussions (Rowe, 1971). Moreover, the early years of UN policy-making focused heavily on preventing the Soviet Union from expanding its influence around the globe (Berkes, 1959). The post-World War II colonial wars for independence and civil wars that attended them drove nations to seek the aid of superpowers. This created political factions in the UN and gave powerful nations, such as the U.S. incentive to act unilaterally.

In peace talks, Israel kept the refugee crisis at a distance. Since much of the world knew little about the conditions of Palestinian refugees and about the impact of unconditional support for Israel, the issues were “kept alive and in the consciousness of people in the Middle East and the world at large only by the PLO activities and policies” (Pappe, 2001, P. 73). 1967 crystalized the Palestinians’ self-regard as refugees and resisters (Shalbak, 2023, p. 497). Indifference to Palestinian rights and oppression became the alchemy that transformed Palestinian outrage and suffering  to terrorism.

Terrorism After 1967

The antecedents of terrorism go beyond actions and conditions that provoke violence; they concern the mindsets, values, motivations, and psychological dispositions of both terrorist and victims of terrorists. The UN has identified elements and conditions that represent terrorism. It has petitioned states to be guided by the contents of its Security Council Resolution 1566 (2004), which characterizes terrorism as forms of extreme intolerance and a threat to international peace. The resolution asserts that  “terrorism seriously impair(s) the enjoyment of human rights and threaten the social and economic development of all States and undermine global stability and prosperity.” It declares that:

[C]riminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act…. are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature, and calls upon all States to prevent such acts and, if not prevented, to ensure that such acts are punished by penalties consistent with their grave nature… (United Nations Security Council, 2004)

The DNA of terrorism in the Middle East include strands of imperialism, nationalism, militarism as a means of conflict resolution, religious zealotry, and entitlement. Diplomatic correspondent  David K. Shipler’s Arabs and Jews reminds readers that mutual tolerance between Arabs and Jews and the will to live side-by-side in peace challenges both Arab and Jewish convictions about sacred space, nationalism, and religious certainty. Shipler avers that as details of the past come to light, the sources of terrorism will come into focus and its complexity will challenge prevailing myths about who is to blame. History already suggests that empires often stabilized tumultuous societies within their realm with terrorism and exploited the practice for economic and political interests (Deal, 2021).

The Six Day War prompted the Arab League to adopt the Khartoum Resolution (1967), which stated it would not negotiate with Israel, it would not recognize Israel, and it would not be at peace with Israel. It also escalated terrorist attacks and reprisals. Territory newly occupied by Israel required protection and Arabs were determined to interfere with new Jewish settlements on what they considered stolen land. Though on occasion Arab nations attacked Israel, terrorist strikes were conducted largely by three entities that eventually merged. The Fatah, created in 1959 by the Palestinian Diaspora and refugees living in the Gulf states, was a militant nationalist organization that consisted mainly of highly educated professionals. It was led by led by Yassar Arafat, a university student in Cairo, Egypt. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was chartered in 1964 vowed to prevent Jewish settlement of land gained in the Six Day War and called for reparations for Palestinians who became refugees in 1948 and 1967. (Singh, 2015). The Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was founded in 1967 by George Habash, a Palestinian Christian whose family was forced out of their home in Lydda just outside Jerusalem in 1948. The PFLP was a highly militant group who pioneered armed airliner hijackings.

The PFLP and Fatah formed a coalition with the PLO around 1969. It was funded largely by Arab governments and taxes imposed on Palestinians working in Arab states. The PLO also extorted businesses in ports they co-opted to fund schools, hospitals and care for care for families who lost loved ones in the resistance. From its ports, the PLO smuggled arms, drugs, and medical supplies (Singh, 2015, p. 138).

On July 22, 1968, PFLP terrorists hijacked an Israeli plane and forced it to land in Algiers, Algeria. The terrorists held 12 Israelis captive for 39 days while officials reached an agreement to release no less than 24 prisoners— all accused of attacks against Israelis— from Israeli prisons. During the crisis, Israel warned that if the Algerian government were in anyway supportive of the hijackers, it would face retribution from Israel (Levi, 2024). The hostages were released in exchange for the release of 37 Palestinian prisoners. On December 26, 1968, the PFLP hijacked Al El Flight 253. The Israeli airline was bound from Tel Aviv to New York. The hijackers boarded the plane when it was on the tarmac in Athens, Greece for a layover. They killed one Israeli. The hijackers were taken into custody. Israel retaliated with a raid on the Beirut airport, which destroyed 13 planes and much of the airfield. The UN condemned Israel’s “premeditated attack” in violation of peace agreement  in its Security Council Resolution 262 (United Nations Security Council Resolution 262, 1968).

By 1970, the presence of terrorist organizations in Arab countries had become a liability. The presence of terrorists gave Israel a reason to strike these organizations in self-defense even if they resided outside their own borders. In addition, Palestinian militants pressured their host nations, Jordan and Lebanon, to join a revolution against Israel. This led to civil discord and war.

Munich

In the summer of 1972, the world was spellbound by the shocking massacre of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Germany. The drama unfolded on live television. On September 5^th, members of Black September, a branch of Fatah, entered the Olympic compound and took five Israeli wrestlers and six Israeli coaches hostage. The terrorists demanded the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails. Israelis were absolute in their refusal to negotiate with terrorists. They neither wanted to give terrorists an incentive to repeat their strategy nor to leave hundreds of other international civilians vulnerable to an attack in Munich. This left West German authorities with the task of resolving the crisis.

The Olympic games proceeded as if the hostage situation and death threats were occurring in another world, and after the Olympic Committee was pressured to suspend the schedule, the committee halted the games. By then one Israeli athlete was dead. German police assaulted terrorists who were lured to the Fürstenfeldbruck airport on September 6^th where they expected to board a flight to Egypt and free the hostages. The police overwhelmed the hijackers, but the hostages had already been killed back at the compound. All but three terrorists survived and were held in a German prison until trial. Bodies of the five terrorists who had been killed were flown to Libya and received a military funeral with honors where 30,000 attended (Sonneborn, 2003, p. 52).

Retaliation for the Munich murders was deadly. On September 8^th Israel bombed ten PLO airbases in Syria and Lebanon, killing over 200 people including women and children (Large, 2012, p. 241). On October 29^th Lufthansa Flight 615 enroute from Damascus, Syria to Frankfurt, Germany was hijacked and terrorists demanded that Germany release Black September members from its prison. Rather than face another bloody standoff, Chancellor Willy Brandt released the three prisoners, and hostages were released (Large, 2012, p. 293–294).

The October War, 1973

There was, in 1970, a strong sense that war between Israel and its Egyptian and Syrian neighbors was inevitable, but the time and the provocation were unknown. For five years after the Six Day War, Arab-Israeli relations returned to its rut of no peace, no compromise. The U.S. resolved that its Middle Eastern policy would be built around two objectives: the desire to repel Soviet incursion and to defend its oil interests. By 1972, U.S. oil companies had a $6.4 billion dollar stake in the Middle East as the region represented 70% of Western-held oil reserves and the U.S. controlled half of that. In addition, U.S. financial firms including Mellon Bank, Lehman Brothers, and Kuhn-Loeb were active in Israel, as were other companies such as Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Ford, and Westinghouse. The U.S. grew closer to Israel after 1967, confident that they shared common enemies: Islamic militants and Soviets. It was also cozy with Iran as the Shah helped the U.S. maintain control of the Persian Gulf. (Rubin, 1973).

By 1967, Oil producing nations understood that oil could be weaponized to compel the U.S. to change its commitment to Israel and do more to help refugees and Arab development. In 1969, when Muammar Gaddafi became the leader of the Libyan Arab Republic, he threatened to decrease Libyan oil production in protest of Western exploitation and sought higher prices of oil and greater say in production and pricing strategies. In 1971, he nationalized half of Libya’s oil production. In 1969, Libya’s GDP was $3.8 billion and it was $13.7 billion by 1974 (Blundy& Lycett, 1987, p. 107). Members of OPEC took notice, and others nationalized all or part of their oil industry, including: The Congo and Equatorial Guinea (1971), Iraq (1972), Gabon (1975), Venezuela (1976), Nigeria (1977), Iran (1979), Kuwait (1980), and Saudia Arabia (1988).

Between 1967 and 1973, the U.S. sent $414 million in economic aid and $985 million in military aid to Israel. To all Arab countries in the region combined, except Libya, the U.S. provided $1.1 billion in economic aid and just $250 million in military aid during the same period (Ruben, 1973, pp. 6–7). Egypt had shown signs that it was ready to make peace. In 1970 it accepted the Roger’s Plan, a U.S. initiative for peace based on Israel’s withdraw from occupied territories and acceptance of pre-1967 boundaries. It called for mutual respect for Arab and Israeli sovereignty, UN mediation for peace settlements, and the creation of de-militarized zones. In 1972 Egypt expelled its Soviet advisors. Bechtel, an American engineering and construction company, got a $400 million dollar contract to build the Arab Petroleum Pipeline located in Egypt, and Brown and Root got a $117 million contract for construction and improvement of ports in the Persian Gulf (Ruben, 1993). Egypt expected that the U.S. would urge Israel to return the Sinai to them, but that did not happen. Egypt then turned to the Soviets for arms knowing they could rely on Saudi money to help them pay for weapons (Lacey, 1981, pp. 393–94).

The pretext for war came on September 13, 1973 as Israeli jets patrolling the Mediterranean coast violated Syrian airspace, and as Syria let loose additional MIG jets to defend them. Israel unleashed its air force and it shot down 13 MIGs. On October 6, (which coincided with both Ramadan and Yom Kippur), Egypt and Syrian launched a surprise assault on Israel while Jordan fortified a front east of the Golan Hights to prevent Israelis from entering Syria (Aker, 1985, pp. 5–9). The war lasted for about 18 days and at the end of it Israeli casualties included 2,656 dead and 7,250 wounded. Western sources put the Arab deaths at 8,528 dead and 19,540 wounded, while Israeli estimate asserted Arab deaths totaled 15,000 and another 35,000 wounded (Rabinovich, 2004, p. 497). Israel surrendered a strip of the Sinai east of the Suez Canal, Arabs unblocked access to the Red Sea, and Israel gained additional territory east of the Golan Heights. The U.S. and the Soviets were relieved as both dispatched over 45 war ships to the Mediterranean that contained nuclear warheads in anticipation of escalation that never came.

The October 1973 War is remembered for the oil embargo that it triggered. On October 19^th,  President Richard Nixon authorized a $2.2 billion dollar appropriation to Israel to purchase more weapons. Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal saw that this magnified Israel’s might and implied unconditional U.S. support for Israel. He led Saudi Arabia and OPEC nations in an oil that embargo lasted for six months. The price of oil and gas spiked. A barrel of oil that cost $1.80 in 1970 cost $11.65 in 1973. In 2023 dollars that would have been the equivalent of shifting from $14.00 to $80.00 per barrel (Yergin, 2023).

Prior to the embargo, the average cost of a gallon of gas at the pump was 38₵ (about $2.97 in 2026 dollars) and jumped to .55₵ ($3.68 in 2026 dollars) a year later (Homes, 2013). The cost of manufacturing plastics and materials made from oil increased as did heating fuel, and the transportation of agricultural produce and manufactured goods. The embargo energized interest in alternative sources of energy and in smaller, fuel-efficient cars. It spotlit the reality that American support for Israel had a negative effect on relations with Arab nations. It did not, however, shift America’s commitment to defend and support Israel.

In 1973, Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu assisted in the creation of the Likud Party in Israel, a right-wing Zionist entity that advocated central control in governance and that, perhaps ironically, was open to giving up occupied territory for the sake of peace (Pallis, 1992). In 2005, the Likud Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, withdrew about 8,000 Jewish settlers and all Israeli soldiers from Gaza. It ended a 38-year Israeli military rule over Gaza. Historians speculate that he intended to boost his popularity at home and abroad. Some see the move as a cunning maneuver that allowed Israel to  resolve conflict in the Knesset about how to manage Gaza while retaining Israeli democracy (Rynhold & Waxman, 2008). Subsequent military interventions into Gaza, including the Israeli invasion in 2023 raise questions about the authenticity of assertions that Israel had become ideologically committed to Palestinian autonomy.

Lebanon

Lebanon’s diverse community of  Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Druze, and Jews was vulnerable to Israeli attacks because it received so many Palestinian refugees after the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. In 1967, the majority in Lebanon were Christians, and by 1985, it was Muslim. Lebanon sheltered many Palestinians who were attracted to Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism. The PLO had operated out of Jordan in the 1960s, but was expelled and after 1967 was headquartered in Lebanon, until Lebanon expelled it in 1982. In 1975 civil war erupted between Christian and Palestinian militants led by the PLO. The conflict lasted for 15 years and was provoked by disputes over whether Christians or Muslims should run the country, but it was also, in part, a revolution of the poor Muslims against the affluent Christians.

The war widened as the UN sent peace-keeping troops. Syria intervened and occupied northern Lebanon until 2005, Iraq supported the Palestinian Muslims, and Israel invaded in 1978 and 1982 with the U.S. as its ally. After the Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah and replaced him with the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, Iran also sided with the radical Muslims. Iranian revolutionaries emphasized their determination to rid the Middle East of American interference by taking 66 American hostages and holding 52 of them for 44 days. The U.S. agreed to the Algerian Accords in January of 1981 to set the hostages free. These stated that the U.S. would not interfere with Iran’s politics or military, the U.S. would not freeze Iranian assets and would lift the trade embargo sanction against Iran, both parties would drop litigation involving each other’s citizens and countries, and Iran would pay all debts owed to U.S. institutions (Algiers Accords, 1981). In the same year, the Shiite group al-Dawa, claimed credit for a suicide bombing in which a terrorist drove  a car to the Iraq embassy in Beirut and detonated himself, killing 61 and injuring 100 (Lappin, 2024).

 In 1982, Shia Muslims created Hezbollah (party of Allah), a militant Islamic organization dedicated to destroying Israel, ending Western influence in the Middle East and allying with Iran. Hezbollah filled the gap in militant Islamic forces that was created when Lebanon expelled the PLO in 1982. From August 1^st until the 12^th, Israel attacked West Beirut with phosphorous bombs, cluster bombs, and mortar, firing from tanks and jets in an effort to destroy what they believed were terrorists’ outposts. They targeted hospitals and Red Cross administrative offices. As the district caught fire, Israel cut off the water supply and then blockaded the area so no food or fuel could enter. About 500 civilians died in the assault (Hiro, 1993, p. 88). In April 1983, terrorists bombed the U.S. embassy in Lebanon killing 63. Later, on October 23^rd, an Iranian-sponsored suicide squad attacked barracks housing American and French forces in Beirut, killing 299 servicemen. Nineteen days later, the Israeli Defense Forces were attacked in their headquarters in Tyre, killing 60 (Hiro, 1993, p. 105).

In late August 1982, the PLO left Lebanon as part of a peace agreement that also removed UN peace-keeping forces from Lebanon. Israel suspected that Palestinian terrorists remained in Beirut and plotted with Syria to attack Israel. The refugees in the camps became extremely vulnerable. On September 14^th, Lebanese President Gemayel was killed by Syrians. Israel decided to invade Beirut and assigned Phalangists the task of searching the camps for terrorists and killing them. This left every Palestinian male between ages 14 and 60 open to accusations and summative execution. Hell was then unleashed on two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila (also called Chatila) on the outskirts of Beirut, where people lived in overcrowded buildings and in overcrowded neighborhoods and in small, hastily constructed shacks made from scraps and pre-fabricated materials. Solders blew up homes and buildings with residents inside, raped women and girls, and desecrated corpses.

At the end the war in Lebanon, refugee camps were in ruins. The true fatalities may never be known as records that survived often did not account for people who had been buried by falling buildings then bulldozed into open pits when the fighting stopped. One estimate is set at 2,000 (Hiro, 1993, p. 207) and another reported 3,500 (Kapeliouk, 1982). The summer of 1982 saw butchery in Lebanon that smacked of genocide. At least 20,000 Palestinians were dead and another 31,000 were injured or maimed— 84% were civilians (Naylor, 1983, p. 337). The massacres drew international outrage and criticism from some Israelis who Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon called “self-hating Jews,” rendering them just as irrelevant as Israel’s critics abroad who were always dismissed as “anti-Semitic” (Naylor, 1983, p. 338, 341). In 1983, Israel’s Kahan Commission investigated the war, concluding that Israel was not responsible for what Phalangists did to the camps and that while Sharon might have exercised more caution and oversight to the operation, Israel was not liable for the outcomes (Malone, 1984).

In September 1978, as civil war raged in Lebanon, Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Egyptian President Anwar Sadaat, and President Jimmy Carter met at Camp David, Maryland to discuss a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. The Camp David Accords, 1979 called for the return of the Siani to Egypt, Egypt’s recognition of Israel, the establishment of diplomatic relations, limited Egyptian armament in Sinai, free passage of Israel through the Suez Canal and Straits of Tiran, and  a demilitarized zone along the Israeli border. A second agreement called for Israel to work with Egypt and Jordan to establish Palestinian self-government in occupied Gaza and the West Bank (Camp David Accords, 1978–1979). In 1994, Jordan normalized relations with Israel and paved the path to the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in 2020.

The peace accords and the normalization between Israel and Arab nations were not welcomed in all corners of the Arab world. Palestinian and Islamic militants were unhappy about normalization because it did not contain any commitment to establish a Palestinian state or address the abuses of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. On October 6, 1981, while attending a ceremony to honor the Egyptian military, Sadaat was shot several times by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). The EIJ represented other Islamic fundamentalists and militants who believed that Sadaat betrayed the Arab world by making peace with Israel and getting too close to the U.S.

The Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990 with Beirut, once the “Paris of the Middle East,” in ruins and divided with Christians to the East and Muslims in the West. By this time, the PLO was forced to relocate, scattering themselves to Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria, and Iraq. The war ended with the National Reconciliation Accord (Taif Agreement) brokered by Saudi Arabia. It called for decrease in Christian powers of the president, equal representation in parliament of Christians and Muslims, de-armament of militant organizations (with Hezbollah refusing), and Lebanon would be independent while permitting Syrian military forces within its borders until 2005. Israel remained in South Lebanon until 2000, leaving a half a million casualties including 150,000 deaths. (Hiro, 1993, p. 214–16). The war did not resolve the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Christian Zionism

Concurrent with the wars and terroristic attacks of the 1970s and ‘80s was an increase in Christian Zionism’s political influence in the U.S. Christian Zionists believe that the state of Israel is a prerequisite for Jesus’ return, and even though Jews do not believe that Jesus is the messiah, they will convert once he arrives. For Christian Zionists, Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War was proof that Jesus’ return was imminent and that it was time to  “give history a push, to hasten the inevitable” (Mouly, 1985, p. 7). That meant increasing funding for Jewish immigration and lobbying for policies that support Israel’s defense and prosperity. In the 1970s, Christian Zionism’s influence in domestic and foreign policy increased. The movement’s secular objective was to ensure the safety and security of Israel, and its religious objective concerned the fulfillment of biblical prophecy concerning the apocalypse. Christian Zionists maintain that Israel’s restoration is vital to the world’s restoration (Michael, 2026). They object to a Palestinian state as it would cut into turf that is, by way of Abraham’s covenant with God, Israel’s property.

To evangelicals, the idea that God’s promise to the Jews was conditional, and posit that God has a special relationship with the Jews, as witnessed in the Old Testament: when the Jews broke the laws and turned their hearts away from God, they were punished but not extinguished; they were exiled but then restored. (Spector, 2009, p. 127–28).

Christian Zionism was part of evangelical revivalism in the 1970s—the born again movement that offered people an escape from the libertine ways of the 1960s and destruction of self that often came with drugs, free love, and street life. Reverend Jerry Falwell created the Moral Majority in 1979. It became a prominent face of evangelical revivalism and is credited with helping to create the political conservative tide of the 1980s and beyond.

Convinced that it would take political action to bring Americans back to their moral senses, Falwell backed Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1980. Reagan defeated the self-proclaimed born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter and secured 56% of the evangelical vote. Evangelical enterprises expanded and raised money to lobby Capitol Hill, broadcast television shows featuring diatribes against abortion, gay rights, pornography, and secular humanism. By 1981, the Moral Majority had 5 million members and an income of $5.77 million (about $21.5 million in 2026 dollars), 76% of which was dedicated to lobbying and publications (Winters, 2012, pp. 161–63; 244).

Folwell believed that the U.S. had to support Israel because God promised the land in Palestine to the Israelites, the creation of Israel would bring Jesus back to Earth, and that those who blessed Israel would be blessed (Winters, 2012, p. 100). Christian Zionists generally agreed that violence was justified when used in the course of advancing the will of God. For example, when Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, Falwell told Menachem Begin, “Mr. Prime Minister, I want to congratulate you for a mission that has made us very proud the we manufacture those F16s [fighter jets] (Mouly, 1985, p. 28).

Reagan appealed to the Christian Right and has been described as a Christian Zionist (Wagner, 1998, p. 44). He noted that Israel was a “reliable spot” for Armageddon and that as such the U.S was obligated to defend it in order to oblige destiny (Sizer, 2004, p. 88). Reagan’s actions, however, fell short of Zionist dreams. In 1982, in the ashes of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and massacre of Sabra and Shatila, Reagan proposed a peace plan that required Israel to give up some of the land it acquired in 1967 and to allow for greater autonomy of occupied territory. Both Israel and the PLO rejected it. Christian Zionist hopes that Reagan would allow Israel to annex every inch of Palestine as per their conception of ancient boundaries were dashed (Hunter, 1987).

Reagan’s administration learned that the evangelical vision for unconditional support of Israel was costly and impractical. Such support motivated terrorist attacks against the U.S. as illustrated by the 1979 Iranian kidnapping of Americans and the Palestinian bombing of US embassy in Beirut in 1983, the hijacking in 1985 of TWA Flight 847 enroute from Cairo to San Diego with 155 passengers aboard including 85 Americans and the April 1986, bombing of the LaBelle disco in Schoenberg, Germany in which three people, including two Americans, died and over 200 including 79 Americans were injured. The LaBelle attack prompted an American strike against Libyan military targets as Libya was supporting PLO terrorists (Whittaker, 2002, pp. 54–56). In addition, the presence of U.S. troops in Lebanon in the 1980s meant that America was not only selling weapons and giving aid to Israel, but it was also on the ground fighting Israeli battles—which, the context of the Cold War, had the potential to draw Soviet retaliation.

By the end of Reagan’s second term, it was clear to the US that effort to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians was futile because both sides were unequivocally opposed to the existence of the other. It was also clear that continued support for Israel made the U.S. a target of terrorism (Hunter, 1987). Reagan’s support for Israel’s campaign to rid Lebanon of the PLO force Palestinians to negotiate peace was lost wager (Laham, 2008, p. 9). It revealed that investing in an evangelical vision that required unconditional support for Israel was costly and unrealistic. It miscalculated Arab determination to shake Western imperialism off the backs of Middle Eastern nations. Evidence of that came in the form of the Intifada, the 1987 uprising of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza that lasted until 1993, and that resumed in 2000.

Christian Zionism remains a powerful element in U.S. Israeli relations. In 2024, research indicated that 44% of mainline denominations and 66% of evangelical denominations moderately or strongly support Israel (Ross, 2024). Christian Zionists are among the largest financiers of Israeli settlement and aid. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, for instance, raised $3.6 billion for Israel between 1983 and 2025— more than AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League combined (Butler, 2025).

The United Nations, 1967-1987

The addition of  new nations to the UN since 1945 brought representatives who were familiar with the effects of colonialism and oppression since they themselves lived in colonial possessions of European nations. They saw the plight of the Palestinians through the lens of an oppressed people and criticized things that previous members of the UN did not criticize. On November 10, 1975, the UN shocked the world by declaring that  Zionism was “a form of racism and discrimination.” The assertion surfaced frequently in subsequent discourse while some members opined that the “equation of Zionism to racism constitutes and attempt by the United Nations to deprive Israel of its ideological legitimacy” (Shattan, 1981, p. 337). The unresolved matter remains whether a racist ideology can be legitimate in the course of resolving international conflicts stemming from the people’s sense of identity.

In November 1975, the UN also created the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) that would promote Palestinian rights and seek a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both resolutions were grounded in the 1963 UN Declaration of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which resonated with the spirit of an era in which democratic, industrial nations held themselves up as leaders of “the free world” and as conduits of world peace through “third world” development and democratization. Critics of the CEIRPP claimed that the UN showed special favor to Palestinians and that the committee was formed to accuse Israel of wrong-doing (Muravchik, 2017). Israeli apologists have consistently countered criticism of Israel by asserting that: 1). They are unfair because they singled out Israel for harsh scrutiny, and 2). Israel’s policies are necessary and reasonable because they protect Israel

The new criticism of Israel in the UN put American leaders in a difficult position. Those who empathized with the suffering of Palestinians and who saw legitimacy in claims that Israel caused suffering by way of deprivations and denial of rights were chided by Zionists while those who defended Israel were revered by Zionists. In addition, Americans typically scoffed at idealists seeking peace. Carter’s foreign policy, for example, was characterized as a “moral crusade” that lacked the brass knuckles of Cold War pragmatism. He advocated the Israeli withdraw of territories occupied after 1967 and believed that if the right incentives were offered, all parties would agree to creating a Palestinian state. Critics fault him for not understanding that iron-clad opposition to compromise that leaders of the Middle East believed was what kept them in power (Stein, 2004).

The new criticism of Israel also put the UN in tough spot as appeared to pay more attention to the Israeli’s conduct than it paid to others. American historian Joseph Shattan observed: “In 1980 the Security Council met for seventy-seven sessions;  of these, fully thirty-eight were devoted to Israel and the Middle East. By contrast, the Security Council devoted only six sessions to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, only one session to the Hostage crisis in Iran, and no sessions at all to the Iran-Iraq War or to the situation in Poland.” (Shattan, 1981, p. 336).

The UN support for the Palestinian cause tread on thin ice. There was no question that Arab terrorism was savage and a threat to innocent life. The UN’s vigorous defense of a people’s right to self-determination and human rights was frequently challenged by the means that people took to meet these objectives. (Green, 1979). Many were perplexed and outraged when in 1974, the Arab League declared the PLO the official representative of Palestinians, and when UN Resolution 3236 invited the PLO to participate in UN activities as an observer. The idea that a terrorist organization had the same legitimacy as a sovereign nation violated the concept of nationhood. The UN justified these measures based on its recognition of the right of self-determination and the right of national liberation movements to present its case to the international community (Barakat & Amouri, 2022). The measures ask the international community to conceptualize democracy in an expanded framework for which many were not ready.

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Chapter IX: The 20^th Century at Dusk

No Closure Yet

The last years of the 20th century brought an end to the Cold War as communism collapsed in Russia but left its imperialism intact. The two superpowers, Russia and the U.S. continued to defend their hegemonies over global regions, still depended on oil for a great deal of their energy, still resolved conflicts with military force, and still competed against each other over which would dominate trade and security in the Middle East and Northern Africa (Hamzawy, 2024). Little had changed in the circumstances of Palestinian refugees. Little had changed in Israel’s determination to establish a fully homogenous Jewish state that annexed as much of Palestine as possible.

Always on the horizon was the growing might of China. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, China revolutionized its economy by rapid industrialization, expansion of exports, encouragement of limited entrepreneurialship, state-managed capitalism and openness to foreign investment. By 2025, the China held about 2% of America’ $37 trillion dollar debt. This was largely due to China’s purchase of U.S. Treasury Bonds, which have always carried the risk that if China wanted to damage the U.S. economy, it could do so by selling those bonds at discount prices (Bojnansky, 2025).

The last two decades of the 20^th century in the Middle East were troubled by fluctuations in global oil production, the Iraq-Iran War, the Intifada, Operation Desert Storm, and the Soviet-Afghan War. Christian Zionism remained financially committed to Israel. As partisanism in U.S. politics intensified, it crippled collegial discourse on domestic and foreign policy, but support for Israel remained constant throughout Democratic and Republican administrations. The new century saw more public criticism of Israel and support for it became more circumspect (Cavari & Nyer, 2014).

Shadows of Doubt Over Zionism

The Six Day War was viewed by many Jews and Christian Zionists as a sign of God’s favor with Israel. The resulting Jewish settlement in occupied territories grew rapidly. By 1977, there were 133,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and 5,000 in the West Bank, and by 1992, there were 192,000 settlers in the West Bank, 4,300 in Gaza, and 141,000 in East Jerusalem. By 2006, there were 269,000 in the West Bank and 190,000 in East Jerusalem (Reuveny, 2008, p. 330). Israel asserted that its expansion was within laws—laws that it wrote, interpreted, and enforced. It rejected the standards of international law because it believed that the “international society lacks impartial fact-finding procedures,” and thus lacks any authority to interpret the legal status and relativity of rights (Benevisti, 1990, p. n13).

The Israeli legal system has two tiers. The laws of the military government, which prioritizes national security, is supreme. It subordinates the second tier, laws that pre-existed Israeli occupation. Israelis justify preemptive strikes on the basis of self-defense, and regard expansion as an ancillary of the legal right to national security. This reasoning stood as long as the international community did not intervene.

Israeli economist, Rafael Reuveny, posited that the chief objective of Israel’s legal system as applied to occupied territories is “to equalize the status of Jews in the territories with that of other Israelis, without changing the legal status of the territories or that of the indigenous Arab population, and without shattering the myth of a military government that complies with international law” (Reuveny, 1990, p. 3). The desire to preserve the “myth” of compliance with international law indicates that Israel does not comply with international law and perhaps has no intention to do so. The objective also asserts that occupied territory will consist of two populations bound by two different sets of laws that will result in the privileging of one group and the disenfranchisement of the other. The reference to the  “equalization” of Jews is exclusively applied to Jews in the occupied territories who should achieve parity in legal status and standard of living with Jews who are not living in occupied territories. The objective is not to make Arabs equal to Jews.

Reuveny, concluded that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a form of imperialism, as the occupied territories have “exhibited standard colonial attributes, including segregation of settlers and Palestinians; settlers interacting with natives only economically; settler businesses are based on cheap local land, labor, and subsidized water; settlers and other Israelis looking down on Palestinians; Palestinians requiring Israeli permissions for daily affairs; hostility and violence between settlers and natives; and settlers taking the law into their hands, grabbing local lands, uprooting olive trees destroying native properties, and attacking natives” (Reuveny, 2008, pp. 331–32).

During the 1970s, the international community increased its public criticism and outrage over the plight of Palestinian refugees as the reality of Israeli apartheid and disregard for human rights came into focus. The UN was among several organizations that monitored human rights across the globe and its attention landed frequently on the Middle East. In 1967, UN Resolution 237 called for Israel to ensure the safe, security, and well-being of those living under its occupation, and to facilitate the return of those who fled the territory during the war in 1967. To monitor compliance with directives Geneva Conventions’ rules pertaining to human rights, the UN traveled to the area of concern and found that Israel had not complied. Israel disputed findings and refused to cooperate with subsequent monitoring (Amnesty Internal, 1975, pp. 77–78).

In 1975, the UN determined that Zionism was a form of racism (Resolution 3379) and reiterated its commitment to end colonialism and apartheid. In 1991, the UN repealed its assertion, finding that the association between Zionism and racism was a relic of the Cold War that represented Soviet attempts to discredit Israel (Neuer, 2024). Dancing around the lexicon did not alter Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

In 1977, the U.S. Senate held hearings on the colonization of the West Bank and the condition of refugees. Of central concern were the 3 million Palestinian refugees, many of whom were “double refugees having been driven out of Palestine in 1948 and again fleeing in 1967 when Israel further expanded as a result of the war in June of that year” (Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, 1977, p. 1). Its inquiry included interviews of eyewitness, prisoner accounts, documents pertaining to settlement expansion, and organizational reports of human rights. Many Israelis testified to the injustices they had observed.

Israeli engineer, Ibrahim Dakkak reported that Israeli police arrested Palestinians without cause, deported Arab professionals in engineering and medicine without criminal charges, removed the residents of whole Arab villages and confiscated adjacent farm land, and deforested part of the West Bank in order to allow more rainfall to seep into the National Water Carrier. He also asserted that Israel used deceptive language when representing its actions, pointing to the Israeli use of “unification” to describe its motives for settling in occupied territory instead of the word “annex” (Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationalization, 1977, p. 82–89).

Israel Shahak, President of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, testified at the Senate hearings so that the public  would know about Israel’s abuse and torture of both Israeli and Palestinian political prisoners. He revealed that, though Jews were less vulnerable to Zionist abuse because they had democratic rights, Jews who dissented from Zionism were persecuted. Shahak stated “Oppression follows naturally from Zionism. It is manifested in the large number of court cases for offences against state security. All these court cases do not imply the use of violence or armed struggle; to paint a slogan on a wall is regarded as an offence against security; to possess a Palestinian flag is a crime of high treason.” (Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, 1977, p. 93). He added that Israeli apartheid dismembered Palestinians families by way of “a policy which prevents a member of a family who is living outside the occupied territories from returning to live with his relatives… It is a very sure psychological weapon…” (Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationalization, 1977, p. 92–9).

Shahak noted that Palestinians who worked in Israeli factories were driven to and from the occupied territories to worksites by armed guards and not permitted to leave the factory during their work hours. During special shifts, workers had to stay overnight in outdoor tents. He also described how prisoners were tortured in Israeli jails, where officers stripped men bare and beat them or placed them in concrete solitary cells measuring one meter by two meters without blankets (Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationalization, 1977, p. 93).

In 1977, the Swiss League for Human Rights published its findings on violations of human rights in the West Bank. It found Palestinian municipalities lacked or had minimal funding for services and infrastructure, as in the case of Bethlehem, which had a population of 35,000 and no fire-fighting vehicles. It noted that mayors of Arab villages were not permitted to travel even to meet with other mayors, and had no authority to contest the Israeli arrest of anyone within their city. The League determined that the scale of Israeli confiscation and demolition of Arab homes was motivated by political considerations rather than concerns for safety or code violations, and that Israeli soldiers often terrorized Palestinian villages at night by smashing windows and shooting rounds of bullets from automatic rifles into the air— all in an attempt to drive people out of the village. Witnesses told the League that Israeli prison guards used various types of torture on Palestinians including tearing fingernails out, submerging people in ice-cold water and boiling water, forcing prisoners to lap up food form the floor, sleep deprivation, suspension by one’s limbs, burning with cigarettes, and severe beatings about the head and genitals (Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, 1977, pp. 179–84).

Concerned Israelis formed the Israel Peace Movement in 1978. It held demonstrations and demanded that Israel evacuate from occupied territories and return occupied territory to Palestinians. In 1987 the Israeli organization The Twenty-First Year: Against Occupation was formed. It opposed Israel’s occupation of territory and it members refused to serve military assignments in occupied territory. It called for a boycott of products made by Israelis living in occupied areas (Handel, 2009).

The decades that followed the Six Day War revealed Israel’s relentless appetite for power and land. They also illustrated the resilient determination of Palestinians to hold onto their land and their lives in the face of apartheid and persecution. The decades saw an increase in anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism in particular. Neither peaceful protest, international appeals, religious petitions, or terrorist savagery resolved the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The twilight of the 20^th century saw an increase in Palestinian resistance that frequently took the form of terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism amplified its hatred of the West and, in particular, America. Oil-producing Arab nations increasingly used access to petroleum as a major factor in negotiations for peace and policy changes in the Middle East. The U.S. stubbornly held that its hegemony in the Middle East was the source of the region’s stability. It was unable —or perhaps unwilling— to absorb the various tragedies that its hegemony and world view produced and to respond with a new paradigm for humanitarian global relations (Gause, 2025).

Oil Boom and Brawl

At the close of the 20^th century, U.S. dependency on foreign oil led to an energy crisis as oil-producing nations manipulated the cost and availability of petroleum to articulate their displeasure with U.S. policies in the Middle East. In 1970, Libya successfully challenged the traditional fifty-fifty distribution of oil profits between oil producing nations and the companies that extracted and sold the oil. Gaddafi demanded 55% of the profits and he got them. The world’s dependence on oil had much to do with his success. In 1955, for example, 75% of European energy came from coal and only 23% came from oil. By 1972, 60% came from oil and 22% came from coal (Yergin, 1992, p. 500). The demand for oil in the U.S. was strident as Americans relied on gas-guzzling cars for transportation.

Libya represented the poor oil producing nations that wanted to press its buyers for more to develop their nations and their militaries. Those who favored small shares of profits, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, were wealthy and wanted to maintain lower hikes to preserve their dominance in the oil market. Libya’s success inspired others to ask for more and, at the time, buyers were willing to pay as the demand for oil was relentless. In 1970 Iran got 55% of oil profits and other Gulf countries got the same, while Venezuela got 60% (Yergin, 1992, p. 580).

OPEC’s oil embargo, 1973–1974 gave oil producing nations substantial power to control oil prices. Up to that point, oil companies themselves made those decisions and those decisions typically gave the companies the greater percentage of profits from oil extraction and sales. The oil embargo, however, caused industrialized nations to find alternative sources of oil outside the Middle East. In 1973, Americans began construction on the Alaskan pipeline which opened in 1977, bringing crude from Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic to Prince William Sound for transport to refineries along the U.S. West Coast, Hawaii, and Asia. Alaskan production of oil helped to offset the effects of OPEC’s oil embargo. At its peak, the pipeline carried 2 million barrels of oil a day, and between 1977 and 2017, it carried approximately 20% of oil produced in the U.S. (Reiss, 2017).

Between 1972 and 1977, OPEC nations enjoyed a period of sudden fortune, as their collective profits soared from $23 billion to $140 billion. At the same time in the U.S., inflation, unemployment, and the price of gas were up. When President Nixon called for the “cooperation of all the American people in sacrificing a little so that no one must endure real hardship,” people were irritated and fisticuffs broke out in gas lines at the local filling stations (Glass, 2018). By the time President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation about the energy crisis, festering irritation led to accusations that his message seemed preachy and punitive (Carter, 1977). Surveys in the late 1970s found that around 57% of Americans blamed oil companies “a great deal” for the energy crisis, while about one third found oil exporting nations were to blame “a great deal” (Bolsen, 2007). Many felt that the energy crisis was a matter of perception and held that crime, unemployment, and inflation were more critical issues (Farhar, 1994).

Few polls asked people whether they believed there was a relationship between the U.S. policies toward Israel and the oil embargo, but many government understood the connection. Senator William Fulbright (D-AR) chaired the Senate foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1974,  and was charged with evaluating whether foreign countries exercised inappropriate influence in U.S. policy-making. He stated that “Israelis control the policy in Congress. The emotional and political ties are too strong. On every test, in everything the Israelis are interested in, in the Seante the Israelis have 75 to 80 votes” (Skolnik, 2007). Fulbright lost his 1974 bid for re-election after AIPAC declared that he was “consistently unkind to Israel” (Jackson and Malcom, 2026).

In 1979, former Undersecretary of State George Ball penned a thesis that asserted reflexive support for Israel was not in America’s best interest as Israel’s objectives clashed with American desires to establish a just peace in the Middle East, and because U.S. support for Israel had an adverse impact on U.S. relations with oil producing countries. He observed that peace between Israel and the acquisition of territory during the Six Day War had not soothed Israeli anxieties about its security, but instead gave it more reasons to ask the U.S. for more aid and weapons. He wrote, “Distasteful as it must be to Israelis, the nation has ——become a ward— a kind of welfare dependent on America. The United States is providing annual subsidies out of the public sector that amount to the equivalent of $7,500 a year for every Jewish family …. and those subsidies will be substantially increased before America finishes paying the costs of Israeli withdraw from the Sinai.” (Ball, 1979, p. 246). He added that until we find a solution to the Palestinian problem, “We can expect to see our energy needs increasingly held hostage to our Middle East policies” (Ball, 1979, p. 249).

The oil boom created hardships for Arabs that most Americans never heard about. The money that flowed into Arab nations as a result of oil sales did not flow evenly into all pockets. Countries with great oil wealth were able to drench themselves with imported labor from other Arab and Muslim nations that were considered inferior. Migrant laborers were paid low wages, often abused by employers, and made to live in closely guarded compounds (Jureidini, 2010). The oil boom also brought modern technology into homes and industry, and filled markets with Western consumer goods which spurred an appetite for all things Western. In many instances, wealthy nations assisted poorer nations with development, but there was a negative side to such progress.

The rapid economic development caused social disruptions. It led to urban overcrowding, income disparity, serious inflation, and an increase in corruption. The wealth enabled the expansion of government jobs and as payrolls swelled, criticism of social values and leadership receded. The families that ruled Arab nations tended to be autocratic and intolerant of dissent. As autocrats drove open criticism of governance underground, mosques and religious organizations became spaces where such discourse was possible (Owen, 1986, pp. 646—47).

Anti-Americanism is one of the consequences of U.S. support for Israel. From the Arab perspective, U.S. support condoned Israeli treatment of refugees, Israeli use of disproportionate force in response to attacks against Israelis, and Israeli hypocrisy in its declared desire for peace and democracy and its desire to annex all of Palestine. Arab anti-Americanism is also linked to U.S. deployment of military forces in the Middle East and Muslim religious instruction in many Arab schools (Davidson, 2009; Lynch, 2007). Arab nations  have labeled American foreign policy as “Coca Cola colonialism” and American culture as the “Big Mac culture.” The label implies that U.S. foreign policy is anchored in America’s quest for new markets and profits and not so interested in the well-being and dignity of others, and that is wholly indifferent to respect for the will of God (El-Bendery, 2011, p. 4; 114).

Islamic Revolution and Two Gulf Wars

The 1978 Iranian Islamic Revolution send shock waves through the oil market and corridors of power in corporations and governments. When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, thousands of oil workers went on strike to demand higher wages, increased benefits, and equal treatment of all workers including subcontracted and temporary labor. Shortages of oil and fuel were felt immediately (Jafari, 2019). Oil production tumbled further after Saddam Hussein’s ascent to the Iraqi presidency and his subsequent invasion of Iran in 1980.

Hussein believed the new Islamic regime in Iran was fragile. He envisioned a victorious invasion that would leave Iraq in control of the Persian Gulf. Hussein’s ambitions worried Saudis who were uneasy about Iraq’s prowess  and believed that Hussein would attempt to disrupt oil transport in the Gulf states (Sterner, 1984). Hussein’s aggression was also deeply problematic for the U.S., as it saw the importance of having a strong Iraq to keep both Islamic fundamentalism and Soviet communism in check. (Tarock, 1998, p. 1). Iran entered the war determined to defeat Hussein and install an Islamic fundamentalist puppet in Iraq. Both sides were woefully undertrained and lacked an understanding of strategic battle-planning, which led to incompetence in the field and high casualties ( Woods, Murray, & Holaday, 2009, pp. 7–8).

The U.S. was initially and ostensibly neutral at the onset of the war, but after early Iranian victories, the Reagan administration determined that the U.S. had to ensure not only that the Persian Gulf not fall into the hands of Islamic militants, but that the Gulf states along the western shores of the Gulf were protected from assault. The matter of which side to support was complicated by the fact that Iran held American hostages and overt military support for Iraq could provoke not only Soviet intervention, but could result in the death of hostages. American hostages were released from Iran in January of 1981 following the U.S. release of the former shah’s assets to Iran, but the resolution did not remove mistrust between nations. Even after the U.S. declared its support for Iraq and its desire to prevent Islamic revolutions in Gulf states, Iraq and other Arab nations were uncertain about the extent to which the U.S. was serious about protecting Arab nations as it consistently supported Israel (Saunders, 1985).

The U.S. ultimately mollified both side with weapons. The U.S. sent money and arms to Iraq via Saudi Arabia. It also provided intelligence and dual-use technology to Iraq, and flew covert missions over the Gulf to attack Iranian ships (Friedman, 1993, pp. 33–42). U.S. weapons flowed into Iran well under the radar of Congress and the American public as a result of an agreement whereby the U.S. would sell weapons to Iran in exchange for freeing seven Americans held hostage by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Money from the sales would be given to Contras in Nicaragua who were fighting against the Sandinistas, who had overthrown the Samoza dictatorship in 1979 (Freidman, 1993, p. xvi). The financial transactions were facilitated by Israelis (Bahgat, 2006, p. 49). The arms deal was illegal according to the Boland Act (1982), which prohibited U.S. funding for the Contras, funding for covert actions, and circumventing congressional authority when taking initiatives. The breach of law was exposed during hearings related to the Iran-Contra Scandal. Inquiries into the scope of the scandal revealed that the U.S government was also orchestrating covert actions in the U.S. to manipulate both congress and the American public for the purposes of operating outside the law and securing American approval for policies based on specious assertions and propaganda (Parry & Kornbluh, 1988).

The war ended in a military stalemate with a cease-fire brokered by the UN. The war produced 1 to 2 million casualties, with 500,000 deaths of combined Iranian and Iraqis and including 50-100,000 Kurds murdered by Hussein in an effort to rid Iraq of what he believed were a threat to national unity (Iran-Iraq War, 2026). The war had a devastating effect on Iranian and Iraqi economies. Iranian production of oil dropped from 3,080 terawatt hours in 1970 to 1,365 terawatts in 1988, while Iraq production increased from 1,472 terawatts in 1978 to 1,590 in 1988 (Oil Production, 2025). Each terawatt represents about 588,440 barrels of oil. The decrease in production in Iran triggered a decrease of 40% in the average income of Iranians (Farzanagen, 2022).

The Iran-Iraq War left Iraq in debt and when OPEC flew past its planned limit of production, oil prices fell and cost Iraq about $1 billion in oil sales (Naser, 2004). The Soviets, who had in the past supported Iraq, had little to give as 1989 was a year of tremendous loss for them. Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary all achieved sovereignty and were no longer part of the Soviet Bloc. The reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika that Primer Mikhail Gorbachev initiated were unable to pull the Soviet economy from an abyss that contributed to the end of Soviet communism in 1991. Set on annexing Kuwait and seizing control of its oil fields, Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. This prompted the UN to impose military and economic sanctions against Iraq, with special intent to prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. UN coalition forces amassed to expel Hussein, and restore order to Kuwait. Led by the U.S., it included France, Great Britain, Canada, Egypt, and Syria. The war ended in February 1991 with a devastating defeat of Iraq.

The Persian Gulf War was the first “video war,” called such because live transmissions of the attack featured the exchange of and interception of guided missiles, which looked like a video game. The use of advanced technology made it possible for those who possessed self-propelled missiles, mortars, and rockets to destroy targets many miles away, as they could be programed to strike distant destinations with precision. Iraq’s primary target was Kuwait, but it also sent missiles flying over Jordan to strike Israel. Western technology and the coordinated assaults of the UN coalition overwhelmed Iraqi forces, and hundreds them retreated back to Iraq (Mueller, 1995).

The war was covered by live television reports that were largely told from an Anglo-American perspective, with aversion to the scale of death and destruction in progress (Taylor, 1992, p. 1, 53). To avoid the public criticism and disillusionment over this war that the one in Vietnam had generated, the government kept the press on a tight leash. Many Washington officials were still miffed about Vietnam’s defeat of the U.S. in 1972. The humiliation of losing to a nation of peasants was on President Bush’s mind as he addressed the nation prior to U.S. engagement, “I have told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam… Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back;” and, after the war, he stated that the war in the Gulf “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all” (Taylor, 1992, pp. 1, 3). Censorship during the Gulf War was rampant. Journalists understood that they were fighting their own government in order to tell the truth about the war and about what they learned from their experiences in the Middle East. Washington wanted a portrait of the war that aroused national pride and patriotism. It wanted images and sounds void of carnage, cries, and chaos— a spectacle that would awe the world and fill America’s enemies with fear and intimidation (Gottschalk, 1992).

At war’s end, roughly 212 Americans were dead and 458 were wounded. Iraqi losses are difficult to enumerate with confidence. Various sources including U.S. Pentagon officials, Iraqi witnesses, and others have wildly different estimates. General Norman Schwartzkopf, Central Commander of coalition forces in the war, said that Iraq lost 150,000 fighting personnel, other sources claim as few as 20,000 died. An estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths was 3,000 and an estimate of Kuwaiti civilian deaths was 500-700 (Meuller, 1995).

Iraq’s retreat from Kuwait left a deadly trail as soldiers littered the sand with 7 million land mines (Webster, 1998, pp. 220–222). They also blasted hundreds of oil wells and sent billows of smoke rich in carcinogenic particulates including carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and benzene, into the air. Over 600 oil wells were destroyed and roughly one third to one half of the oil released burned for months before they were extinguished. The rest of the oil landed on the sand where it often pooled and released toxic gases. Oil that reached swamps, marshes and beaches killed sea animals, crustaceans, birds, and plant life (Hirshmann, 2005, pp. 16–31). Studies of those exposed to the smoke for long periods of time had higher incidents of lung irritation and difficulty breathing (Bell, 2018, pp. 160–64).

Humanitarian outcomes of the Gulf War took on the face of a war unto itself. As a result of Iraq’s aggression, the UN imposed sanctions against it in 1991 that lasted until Saddam Hussein was forced out of office in 2003. UN Resolution 687 (1991) modified existing sanctions against Iraq and ordered Iraq to: 1) dismantle weapons of mass destruction and to cease its acquisition of resources used to build any form of nuclear device; 2) allow for inspections and verification of compliance with dismantling; 3) establish a plan to pay debts; 4) repatriate all Kuwaitis displaced by war; and 5) settle all boundary disputes with pre-war demarcations. The resolution also froze Iraqi assets and lifted some prior restrictions on sales of Iraqi oil so that it could buy food and medicine.

As a result of the sanctions, the per capital GDP in Iraq in the 1990s was less than what it had been in the 1950s, unemployment soared, children dropped out of school to work or beg, and thousands of skilled workers and professionals left the country. The UN International children’s emergency Fund (UNICEF) found that infant mortality was 117 per 1,000 in 1960 and that it was 40 per 1,000 by 1990. By 1998, however, the rate was 103 per 1,000. The estimated number of Iraqi deaths over the course of the sanctions is as high as 1.5 million. Lack of food, disease, and broken infrastructures contributed to these fatalities. Hussein exacerbated the crisis by controlling who had access to foreign trade deals, which had the effect of widening the wealth gap and leaving certain groups of people in greater poverty than others (Alnaswari, 2001, p. 214).

The Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and Persian Gulf War illustrated fractures in the Arab world that limited the Arabs’ capacity exert Arab will over U.S. hegemony and to reach peace with Israel. Though Arab solidarity was riddled with conflict, there remained robust agreement on two points. First, that Israel was a colonial power that never intended to integrate Palestinians into a Jewish state under a democratic government as equals. Second, that the U.S. had blood on its hands for supporting Israel. Failure to resolve the matter behind diplomatic doors brought rage and resistance into the streets and to America’s front door.

The First Intifada

Israeli journalist and military correspondent Zeev Schiff wrote of the Intifada, “Let there be no doubt about it: though it developed in to a statement of major import, the intifada began not as a national uprising to throw off the yoke of foreign domination but as a rebellion of the poor, an awesome outburst of the forsaken and forgotten at the bottom of the social heap” (Schiff, 1990, p. 79). This point is often lost to Americans who have been weaned on historical accounts that frame all conflicts as a contest of power and will, and minimize the role of economic deprivation and man-made poverty in civil strife.

The uprising was sparked by the deaths of seven Palestinians who were struck and killed by a truck driven by an Israeli in Gaza on December 9, 1987. It quickly developed into mass  resistance coordinated by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, a coalition of exiled PLO leaders in Tunisia and their colleagues left in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as members of the PFLP, Fatah, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

In the larger context, the Intifada protested not only the deaths of Palestinians and the Israeli oppression that impoverished them, but it was also Israel’s failure to seize moments for peace when it routed the PLO in Lebanon and when it did not negotiate with Jordan to resolve conflicts in the West Bank (Schiff, 1991, p. 11). Throughout the decades of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian land and it imposition of apartheid, Zionists maintained that the state of war and violence was the fault of Palestinians and Arab nations who supported them. Political scientist Jerome Slater observed:

Among the most enduring Israeli/U.S. myths about the Arab-Israeli conflict is that the Arabs bear the overwhelming responsibility for the conflict because of their refusal to accept the existence of the state of Israel and to reach a negotiated settlement with it. Because of this implacable Arab hostility and rejectionism (the mythology holds), there has been no one with whom Israel can discuss a settlement, the exceptions being Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt in the late 1970s and King Hussein of Jordan in the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, every Arab-Israeli war was unavoidable, forced on Israel by the rejectionism of its Arab neighbors (Slater, 2002, p. 81).

Leaders of the Intifada organized the Palestinians by circulating leaflets containing news about the community, explanations for actions, directions for how to engage in resistance, and assurance that God was with them. The Intifada consisted of strikes in which Palestinians refused to go to work for their Jewish employers, which meant loss of productivity in shops and on farms. Palestinians boycotted Jewish shops, sabotaged roads often traveled by Israelis and their soldiers, refused to pay taxes, refused to carry identification cards and obey curfews, threw Molotov cocktails at armored vehicles, and on occasion, they shot or stabbed Israeli soldiers and citizens. When riots erupted, Palestinians sometimes faced tanks, machine guns, and fire from helicopters with little more than stones, rifles, and homemade explosives with which to fight back.

Israelis responded to the Intifada by deploying 70,000 soldiers into the occupied territories, mandating curfews, increasing arrests and deportations, and demolishing Palestinian homes. By the end of the first three months of the uprising, tens of thousands of Palestinians had been injured, arrested, or killed (Pearlman, 2011, p. 1). Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization, estimated that 7% of children under the age of 18 were injured due to tear gas exposure, beatings, and being struck with bullets in the first two years of the Intifada (Pearlman, 2011, p. 114). Israel imposed curfews on Palestinians, blocked sales of Palestinian produce, closed Palestinian schools and universities, destroyed Palestinian homes, and when Palestinians refused to pay Israeli taxes, Israelis confiscated property, licenses, and imposed new taxes on cars and heavy fines on Palestinians who threw rocks at Israelis (Pearlman, 2011, p. 115).

The economic consequences of the Intifada were significant. From 1987 to 1990, Israel lost roughly $1 billion dollars (Rosen, 1990, p. 370). Israeli exports to the occupied territories fell by 30% between 1987 and 1988 and the cost of Israel’s military went from $225 million to $350 million. The highest losses were incurred in the area of construction and agriculture due to Palestinian labor strikes, and to a decline in tourism. When Israel learned that the PLO and other organizations were sending money to supplement the incomes of Palestinians, Israel reduced the amount of dinars that travelers could bring back from Jordan from 2,000 to 400 (Rosen, 1991, p. 381).

Palestinians suffered economically as strikes clipped family incomes. A serious blow to them came by way of King Hussein’s declaration in 1988 that Jordan would no longer officially represent Palestine. This meant that Jordan would no longer subsidize the West Bank’s development and Palestinians lost millions of dollars that paid for civil servants, teachers, and health care providers (Rosen, 1991, p. 381).

The First Intifada failed to secure steps toward peace. It cost the lives of over 1,200 Palestinians and left tens of thousands wounded; and it cost the lives of about 200 Israelis and left 1,300 wounded (Nasrallah, 2013, p. 61). In 1987, an offspring from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, was formed in Gaza. Hamas conducted at least 42 raids against Israelis during the First Intifada. Its militancy was nourished by the belief that God intended for Muslims to purge Palestine of Jewish infidels and its aim was to create an Islamic Palestinian state. It became notorious for its mantra that it aimed to “drive Israel into the sea,” and it was unapologetic about its use of violence to achieve justice for Palestinians. Hamas reasoned that if the state could use violence to impose its rights, then organizations could also use violence for the same reason (Tamimi, 2007, pp. x, xi, 2). Hamas scorned the secularism of the PLO and rejected PLO overtures for peace that were based on creating a Palestinian state that co-existed with Israel. It damaged the PLO’s cohesion, and it gained substantial power during the Intifada, adding  to the growing threat of Islamic terrorism in the Middle Eastern (Uddin, Saifee, & Fatima, 2022).

The Soviet-Afghan War, 1979-1989

For decades leading up to the Soviet-Afghan War, Afghanistan played no special role in U.S. foreign policy. America was chiefly interested in building a perimeter around the Soviet Union to stop the spread of communism, and it leaned on the ability of Iran and Pakistan for help to do that. The U.S. had little understanding of Arab culture, Islam, tribalism in Afghanistan, and the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and Arab resistance to American and Israeli imperialism. In many cases, Arab nations sought diplomatic relationships with the U.S, for the purpose of obtaining economic and military aid, and not because they yearned to remake their societies in the image of America. Americans did not always grasp the extent to which they revered their religious way of life and reviled the political elites who assimilated Western modernism and values. They resented how Americans treated Arab leaders who did not heel under Uncle Sam’s boot (Davidson, 2009).

The U.S. had a limited understanding of the Islamic world and tended to project its values onto Muslim countries when establishing foreign policies and relations. The Islamic world was “the other” treated with condescension , which led to hostility between the West and Islamic world (Asghar & Rafique, 2023). The U.S. consistently promoted democracy in the Middle East, but did not support the people’s choice if that choice was oppositional to U.S. interests. For example, in 2006, President George W. Bush encouraged Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, to hold elections. Bush did not understand the level of division and corruption in Palestinian leadership, and so Hamas, the radical Islamic party, was able to gain parliamentary power. Bush warned that Hamas and any who allied with it would be severed from U.S. support (Davidson, 2009). The message was clear to Arabs: The U.S. promotes democracy, but only on its terms.

Afghanistan, which bordered Soviet republics in central Asia (Figure 9.1), was thrust into the foreign policy spotlight in 1979 as the result of Soviet incursion. From that point forward, it played a role in the slow collapse of communism in Russia and the swift ascent of CIA opium and heroin operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Haq, 1996). Following the end of Soviet governance in Russia, Afghanistan’s appeal to U.S. investors focused on pipelines for natural gas and oil that would traverse the country from Turkmenistan to the Pakistan, where it could be shipped (Scott, 2010, p. 230).

In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan overthrew the Afghan monarchy, and Nur Takari replaced Mohhamed Khan as Afghan’s new communist leader. In the same year, various factions fought for control over the government, and 20 months of civil skirmishes and riots left over 5,000 dead. Hafizullah Amin, a communist who wanted to rule independent of Soviet directives, replaced Takari and had him executed. Soviet ambitions to make Afghanistan a satellite were dashed by endless civil disorder and formidable opposition to Soviet control. Amin requested Soviet assistance to keep Kabul out of rebel hands.

The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and killed Amin. This prompted President Jimmy Carter to declare the Carter Doctrine, which asserted that any attempt of an “outsider” to gain control of the Persian Gulf would be regarded as a threat to U.S. interests that would be met with military force (Hoodbhoy, 2005). In full Cold War stride, the U.S. extended support to Afghanistan, as did China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, which provided substantial funding and recruitment of Islamic jihadists from Arab nations to combat the Soviets. The mobilization of soldiers, money, and weapons conformed with the Reagan Doctrine, which said that the U.S. would support insurgents against communist rule.

In response to the Soviet invasion, Carter asked the Senate to suspend talks regarding the SALT II Treaty, an agreement with the Soviet Union to limit strategic missiles. He also pulled the U.S. out of the 1980 Summer Olympics, gave Pakistan $400 million in aid, and authorized Operation Cyclone, a CIA program to fund and arm mujahedeen (sometime spelled mujahidin) warriors. They were largely Pakistani Muslim fundamentalists.

Pakistan was given authority to manage the mujahedeen, train them, and oversee distribution of arms and money. Whether the CIA directly trained jihadist warriors, including Osama bin Laden, is disputed by historians. As there were many tribes and entities from all over the Arab world who coalesced in the mujahedeen, there was significant tribal competition for foreign arms, money, and technology. The Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan expected the Pakistanis to give them special consideration as they were among the most powerful of indigenous Afghani groups. However, most money went to Islamic fundamental groups favored by the Pakistanis (Hoodbhoy, 2005). Pakistan feared that Pashtun soldiers would attempt to retrieve territory lost to Pakistan in 1947.

 For the first five years of the Soviet War against Afghanistan, Soviets prevailed, but were often overwhelmed and foiled by Afghani guerrilla warfare. In 1985, the Reagan administration began selling Stinger missiles and long-range artillery to Afghanistan, which turned the tide of battle. Afghanis could strike the enemy and disappear into the caves and mountains and execute effective ambushes. Soviet moral waned as years of war passed. Recruiters told Soviet young men that they were going to fight Americans and Chinese, and were disappointed when they found themselves fighting the ragged but shrewd soldiers of the mujahedeen (Nawroz, 1995).

The Soviets withdrew forces in the spring of 1989. Like the American war against Vietnam, the ordeal was futile and brought discord at home. The Soviet dead numbered 15,000 and about 470,000 were injured or incapacitated by disease including hepatitis and typhoid (Nawroz, 1995). The Soviet loss contributed to Russian angst about the viability of communism and gave hawkish officials cause to plot against Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

Afghanis suffered not only combat casualties, but genocidal atrocities. Estimates of Afghani deaths range from 876,825 to 1.7 million, and about 2 million people became disabled as a result of the war, largely due to land mines (Khan, 2012). The war also created thousands of refugees. Out of a population of about 13 million, by 1984, there were 3,500,000 Afghani refugees in Pakistan and 1,500,000 in Iran (Galeotti, 1995). After the Soviets withdrew, fighting continued between the Taliban and ethnic minorities and the Northern Alliance which opposed the Taliban. The Taliban was founded in 1994 by Islamic conservatives in southern Afghanistan and sought to govern the country with a theocratic Shia rule. The Taliban poisoned wells, laid land mines, tortured people, raped women, boys, and girls, and forced thousands to flee the country (Khan, 2012). The Taliban ruled 90% of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, after which it was forced from power by the U.S. In 2001, the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan and established an autocratic, theocratic emirate that is not at present internationally recognized.

After the war, the Pakistani camps in which the mujahedeen were trained became training camps for Islamic terrorists, many of whom attacked their former sponsor, the U.S. and other opponents to Islamic fundamentalism. Among those attracted to jihad against the U.S., the West, and their Arab allies was Osma bin Laden, son of a Saudi construction magnate. His piety was deeply offended by both Western materialism and decadence, Arab corruption, and society’s drift away from devotion to Allah. Bin Laden went to Afghanistan and found a home for his vision of jihad. With his wealth, he funded training camps in Afghanistan that prepared jihadists to strike various targets in various ways. (Hoodbhoy, 2005) Bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda, represented the rage of Islamic people around the globe who felt abused by the West and disinherited by their own leaders who were subservient to Western interests. Although not all enraged Muslims participated in terrorist attacks, the ones who did were demonized to the extent that many in the West came to believe all Muslims were dangerous.

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Chapter IX: Requiem for Peace

Cold War Ashes & Eternal Flames

Jubilant celebrations that accompanied the restructuring of Europe following the 1989 peaceful revolutions that led to the independence of former Soviet Bloc nations of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were received with vitriol in Moscow. Hawkish communists blamed Premier Mikhail Gorbachev for the severance and blamed his policies of Glasnost (open discourse and transparency) and Perestroika (restructuring) for the economic crisis that gripped the Soviet Union. On August 19, 1991, eight ministers in Gorbachev’s cabinet and the director of the KGB arrested Gorbachev. The coup failed due to the unpopularity of hardline Soviet policies and to cresting popular demand for radical economic and democratic changes in the former Soviet Union. Nationalism in the Baltic states and Ukraine added to momentum against the old regime. Gorbachev resigned, and on December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag of hammer and sickle was lowered and the tricolor flag of the republic was raised.

In his resignation speech, Gorbach expressed no regrets about Glasnost and Perestroika. He lamented that “There is plenty of everything: land, oil and gas, other natural riches, and God gave us lots of intelligence and talent, yet we lived much worse than developed countries….” He noted, “The reason could already be seen: the society was suffocating in the vise of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race. It had reached the limit of its possibilities. The country was losing perspective… Everything had to be changed radically.” Gorbachev acknowledged that he could have ruled as a czar but refrained out of a commitment to replace totalitarian governance with a democratic government consisting of “Free elections, freedom of the press, religious freedoms, representative organs of power, a multiparty” system wherein  “human rights are recognized as the supreme principle” (Gorbachev, 1991).

Moscow’s mayor, Boris Yeltsin became the first president of the Russian Republic. He met with immediate chaos  and non-cooperation in parliament, and an economy in shambles. Corruption proliferated in business schemes as the collapse of the state’s centralized  economy opened the gates to well-placed oligarchs who created and then seized stocks in major industries. The mafia extended its preexisting criminal claws into banking, extortion, drug production and smuggling, gambling, counterfeiting, prostitution, contract killing, and sales of national resources such precious metals and oil (Galeotti, 2018, pp. 111–17; 158, 186, 228). By the mid-1990s, 40% to 50% of Russia’s economy operated in the black or gray sectors, astray from the law and enabled by law enforcers happy to profit from the largess of lawlessness (Glennary, 2008, p. 44–61).

During Gorbachev’s last year in office, he sought peace in the Middle East. To Gorbachev, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan underscored the folly of imperialism and Gorbachev held that it “buried the possibility of improving international relation for a long time” and “resulted in a new and more dangerous edition of the Cold War” (Gobrachev, 2000, p. 177). He also believed that ongoing hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians was largely the fault of Israel and that continued refusal to make peace threatened the security of both sides (Gorbachev, 2000, p. 200). The Soviets faced economic deprivations and Gorbachev’s plans to integrate capitalism into the economy required assistance from wealthy nations. In 1990 and 1991, however, the Soviet Union owed Western and Eastern  bankers billions of dollars and its instability made additional loans a high risk (Kieninger, 2019).

Had the developing nations that borrowed from Moscow—such as Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, and Somalia— been able to pay back their ailing communist ally, the Soviets would have collected $67 billion and not have needed loans in 1991 (Neu, 1991, pp. vi, x). The newly unified Germany floated an $80 billion loan to the Soviets, but President George H. W. Bush refused any amount until the Soviets ended their support for the Castro regime in Cuba, and permitted the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) to leave the Soviet Union (Kieninger, 2019, p. 282). Gorbachev could not comply without risking a coup.

Glasnost and Perestroika retired the Marxist-Leninist doctrines that were once the heart of Russia’s vision for the world, and that meant Gorbachev had greater latitude to work with the international community to realize visions of peace and cooperation. He took the side of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War hoping his affirmation of shared common interests would yield support for his wobbly empire. Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations that had been severed since 1938 and both nations hoped for joint ventures in markets for food, technology, and arms. In December 1990, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states granted Moscow a loan of over $3 billion (Fuller, 1991). By that time, as ethnic and Islamic nationalism and failures in the centralized economy proliferated, little could prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After the fall of the Soviet government, Chechnya, a small republic just east of Georgia in the northern Caucus Mountains, saw an opportunity to break away from the newly formed Russian Federation. With Moscow in chaos during the Yeltsin presidency, Chechnya descended into lawlessness and warlords gained control. In 1994, Russian troops invaded Chechnya with expectations that superior fire power would force a quick surrender. Instead, Russians were overwhelmed by guerilla warfare and Chechnya gained de facto independence.

After Afghanis and the mujahedeen drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989, Islamic militants turned their attention to other parts of the world where Islamic population struggled against infidels and the corruption of a Western ways of life (Speckhard & Akhmendova, 2006). Chechen Muslims were radicalized by Islamic militants who encouraged them to fight a holy war against infidel Russians for full recognition of their independence. Funding for Chechen Islamic jihad came from “Islamic sources mainly on the Arabian peninsula” and from “the drug trade, oil smuggling, the counterfeiting of U.S. and other Western currencies” (Bodansky, 2007, p. 167).

Visions of great wealth derived from oil fields on Chechen territory tempted warlords to press into neighboring Dagastan in 1999 (Shermatova, 2003). Russia’s second war with Chechnya, 1999-2000, was orchestrated by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who served as Yeltsin’s director of Federal Security Services. Putin used torture, terrorism, and kidnapping to subdue Chechens. He then installed Akhmad Kadyrov as Chechnya’s president. Kadyrov ruled the region as his own fiefdom while Chechen oil extractions were sent to Moscow. The Chechen War claimed between 50,000 and 100,000 civilian lives, about 4,000 Chechen military personnel and another 4,000 Russian soldiers (Soodalter, 2026). The war also galvanized Russian antipathy towards Islam as Islamic jihadists bombed targets in Moscow in 1999, killing and injuring over 300 people (Hughes, 2001).

The post-Soviet Russian Middle Eastern policy has been characterized by anti-Westernism and President Vladimir Putin’s resolve to maintain good relations with Iran, Syrian, Iraq, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia as they may be tapped for lucrative arms deals (Borshchevskaya, 2017). There is little indication that the fall of the Soviet government resulted in a Russian retreat from empire. Russia still has an interest in keeping Western hegemony in check, and it requires massive amounts of arms and oil to do so.

From Madrid to Nowhere

Ostensibly, the collapse of the Soviet government brought new possibilities for peace to the world. In theory,  the absence of the Soviet Union’s aggressive measures to impose its political ideology abroad meant that Russia could be guided by universal principles of peace and international justice. In the end, the theory was a mirage. It lived in the stratosphere of ideals and not on the dirty and gritty surface of pragmatism and realism where negotiations and diplomatic gestures are often window dressing for political ambitions, extortion, and lust for wealth. Communists had been driven from the Kremlin, but Russia never surrendered its desire for empire. Thus, attempts to resolve the Palestinian and Israeli conflict were just as troubled after the Cold War as it was during the Cold War.

The Madrid Peace Conference took place from October 30 to November 1, 1991. Held in Spain, it was co-sponsored by the Soviet Union and U.S., and it was the last major peace conference of Gorbachev’s administration. The conference aimed at creating a pathway for Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Palestinians to reach peace. By this time, the U.S. had openly urged Israel to end its expansion into occupied territory, which signaled that the hour of unconditional support for Israel was passing. The U.S. sought a dominant role in the protection of the Persian Gulf and to decrease Middle Eastern nations’ access to “unconventional weapons.” The cardinal proposal for peace between Israel and Palestinians based on “land for peace,”  whereby Israel would withdraw from territory it took during the Six Day War in exchange for Palestinian recognition and peace.

Among the sticking points was Israel’s request for a $10 billion loan to help it resettle Jews who were immigrating from the former Soviet Union. While Israel heavily lobbied Washington, President George H.W. Bush opposed the loan. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir objected to the linkage between Bush’s opposition to the settlements in occupied territory and the loan. In February 1992, Secretary of State James Baker told Congress that the administration would consider the loans only if Israel would agree to cease expansion in to occupied territory. Israel refused the condition. Shamir’s party, the Likud, blamed him for spoiling U.S.-Israeli relations and replaced him with Yizhak Rabin of the Labor Party (Lasensky, 2002). Once in office, Rabin pledged to end Shamir’s expansion policies and the U.S. granted Israel the $10 billion loan. In 1999, Shamir was asked in an interview whether the loan conflict impacted Israeli elections in 1992. He claimed that they did not impact Israeli elections, but damaged Bush’ chances for re-election (Lasensky, 2022, p. 101).

The multilateral negotiations that followed Madrid addressed water rights, Palestinian rights, refugees, and economic development, but no formal agreements were reached. After Israel agreed to work with the PLO as the official representative of Palestinians and the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, Israeli representatives met secretly with Palestinians to discuss peace in Oslo, Norway. There was no U.S. mediation, but there was the expectation that the U.S. and other nations would sponsor agreements once formalized. The 1993 Oslo Accords called for the withdraw of military troops from occupied territory, robust economic development of Palestinian territories, and transfers of jurisdiction in occupied territories from Israel to Palestinian authorities (Lasensky, 2002). The Gaza-Jericho Agreement (sometimes called the 1994 Cairo Agreement) called for a legal framework to secure Palestinian autonomy that would create a Palestinian police force and formally integrate Israeli and Palestinian economies. Peace existed on paper but not in the streets.

The Oslo Accords failed to address several critical issues including: 1) whether Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to their homes and how the reentry of refugees would be funded; 2) how the agreements would be enforced; 3) where borders between Palestine and Israel would be drawn; 4) what would become of Jewish settlements inside occupied territories. Israelis expected that it would receive an aid package to help with new security arrangements pursuant to the accords (Shlaim, 2013). Led by the U.S., the international community organized a donor conference wherein nearly $4 billion was pledge over five years. Donors included the U.S., the European Union, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Norway.

Many Jewish organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee —a major sponsor of Israel’s lobby in Washington—opposed the Oslo Accords and Yitzhak Rabin’s vision for peace (Lasensky, 2002). The Israeli lobby pressured Congress to pass the Middle East Peace Facilitation Act (MEPFA) in 1993, ostensibly so the U.S. could formally reverse its sanctions against the PLO, which had been declared a terrorist organization in 1987. MEPFA essentially stalled aid to Palestinians. Many Israelis rejected the Oslo Accords of 1993. They claimed that Israel never forced Palestinians to leave Palestine, and never occupied territories. They also resented the idea that they would have to pay for repatriating refugees and were anxious about what shape a new Palestinian country and government would emerge (Weiner, 1999). Others argued that Israel’s security would be seriously diminished if it released Palestinian prisoners and withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank (Quigley, 1997).

Six months after the Oslo Declaration of principles were signed, an Israeli extremist killed 29 Palestinians who were at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. Hamas retaliated with a suicide bomb that killed 8 and injured 34 Israelis, and a week later, a Palestinian suicide bomber exploded a device which killed 5 and injured 30 Israelis.

A second meeting between Israelis and Palestinians produced the Oslo II Accords, 1995. The agreements created three districts in the West Bank that would have limited self-governance and established a path to further negotiations that would address full Palestinian autonomy and other unresolved conflicts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress passed a second MEPFA in 1995 that required monitoring of compliance with the accords and stricter reporting requirements. The $500 million that the U.S. provided to assist Palestinians was not to be given directly to the Palestinian Authority out of fear that it might be channeled into terrorist campaigns. The measure obstructed Palestinians’ ability to determine the best way to use the aid (Lasensky, 2002).

The optimism generated by the Oslo agreements was shattered on November 4, 1995, when Yigal Amire, a Jewish conservative extremist, shot and killed Yitzak Rabin. Ten days later, Israel held its elections and conservatives took control of executive offices. Israeli political theorist, Yaron Ezrahi, reported that he was in a cab after the election and asked the driver why he was so happy that the Likud Party—known for its extreme Zionism— had won. The driver said “Because peace divides us. I am not afraid to quarrel with the Arabs. But I am afraid to quarrel with my son” (Rabinovich, 2018, p. 26). Ten years later, Bejamin Netanyahu spoke about speculations about what might have happened “had this or that man remained.” He said, “This is irrelevant. We will forever live by the sword” (Rabinovich, 2018, p. 27).

In July 2000, President Bill Clinton hosted a summit at Camp David where Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met with Arafat to discuss a Palestinian state and the future of Jerusalem. The summit failed to produce formal resolutions and representatives blamed each other for the lost opportunity for peace.

Political scientist Arie Kacowicz surmised that the failure to negotiate peace was due to a clash of narratives. Narratives, he stated, are culminations of beliefs, assumptions, mindsets, ideologies and world views that give individuals a sense of truth and understanding about what is reasonable, moral, and their place in solving social and political problems. He asserted that the Israeli narrative envisioned a gradual evolution of a Palestinian state that would peacefully co-exist beside Israel. The obstacles to this vision was the constant threat to Israeli security manifest in terrorism and breeches in promises for peace. The Palestinian narrative, however, saw Israeli efforts toward peace as proof of Israel’s legitimacy and right to carve up Palestinian land, give Palestinian property to Jewish settlers, and then dictate the terms by which Palestinians could live. The peace process was, for many Palestinians, flawed the minute it required them to embrace Israel as a legitimate nation (Kacowicz, 2005).

September 11, 2001

The four jet liners that were hijacked and smashed into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001 took the lives of nearly 3,000 people. Twenty-five years after the events, many historians speculate that the truth about who funded the operation and whether there existed a conspiracy of American and international power brokers to commit the atrocity might never be known (Griffith, 2004). Like many tragedies, 9/11 devastated the lives and fortunes of many while creating opportunities and generating profits for the few. Historians dare not ignore the fact that there are incentives to manufacture catastrophes (Risen, 2006, pp. 290–96). The historical record of 9/11 matters not only because it brought death and destruction, but because 9/11 changed America’s approach to domestic and national security by expanding the rights of the state at the expense of civil liberties, and magnified American’s belief that unilateral assaults against sovereign nations for the sake of preempting violence or changing regimes was righteous.

After the attack, several members of George W. Bush’s administration stated that their prior knowledge about the threat was sketchy. On September 14, 2001, FBI Director Robert Mueller said information about terrorist training in the U.S. (to fly airplanes) was new to him. On February 6, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet claimed that there was no way to prevent the attack because only about 4 people knew about it. On May 15, 2002, Bush recycled his often stated assertion that there were no warnings and so prevention was not forthcoming. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said nobody predicted the style of attack used on 9/11, and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden said the NSA had no indication that New York was a target (Thompson, 2004, pp. 54–58).

The landscape of preceding  events, however, was littered with vital clues and overt threats. They came in the form of attacks on American embassies, military facilities, and battle ships. They came by way of international interrogations of terrorists in custody, informants with ties to terrorist groups, the announcements of terrorists themselves, and they came from various U.S. experts and professionals —including flight instructors and FBI agents— who made critical observations and reported what they saw.

Osama bin Laden, a member of the billionaire bin Laden family who owns the Binladen Group, a construction company in Saudi Arabia, was at the center of the 9/11 plot. He was radicalized by the Afghan war against the Soviets and became an ardent supporter of Islamic jihad. He created Al Qaeda in 1989 and envisioned a renewal and healing of Arab nations under Islamic theocracies, but when he promoted his ideas in Saudi Arabia, his citizenship was revoked in 1994. He then funded terrorist training centers during the 1990s.

In 1990, Al Qaeda supported El Sayyid Nosir, an Egyptian American who assassinated Rabbi Neir Kahane, leader of the Jewish Defense League. Nosir was found innocent and resurfaced again in 1993 during his role in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. In 1994, Al Qaeda operatives attempted to fly into the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and bombed a plane headed from the Philippines to Tokyo. One of the terrorists involved in the attack, Abdul Hakim Murad, was captured by Philippine authorities and questioned. Murda told interrogators that leaders of Al Qaeda had plans to hijack a plane and steer it into CIA headquarters (Thompson, 2004, p. 13).

Al Qaeda attacks against the US intensified: 1) In November 1995 it bombed the U.S. National Guard training center in Saudi Arabia killing 7; 2) On June 25, 1996 it bombed the Khobar Towers in Durhan, Saudi Arabia, where American soldiers lived killing 19 and injuring 500; 3) on August 7, it bombed the U.S. embassy in Kenya, killing 213 and injuring over 4,500, and then, 4) bombed the U.S. embassy in Tanzania killing 11 and injuring 85 (Thompson, 2004, pp. 16–21).

Concurrent with the acceleration of Al Qaeda attacks against U.S. targets, the U.S. received multiple warnings from international sources that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack against the U.S.:  1) In 1998 Indonesia told the U.S. that they had intelligence related to a plot to attack the U.S. on September 11^th; 2) In May 1998 the FBI received a memo of concern from Oklahoma City agents who observed an unusual number of Middle Eastern males attending flight schools and agents gave information to the Department of Weapons of Mass Destruction, but it was forgotten; 3)  In June 1998, the U.S. intelligence community learned that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on New York and Washington, D.C.; 4) In August 1998 CIA intelligence learned Arab terrorists want to fly bomb-laden planes into the World Trade Center; 5) In an interview on June 21, 2001, Al Qaeda announced that “important surprises” were coming soon; 6) On July 1, 2001, Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Shelby appeared on CNN and announced terrorist attacks were probable; 7) During the summer of 2001, the U.S. received warnings from Egypt, India, Great Britain, Argentina, France, Morocco, Jordan, Russian, Spanish police, and an Iranian prisoner in a German jail that an attack was forthcoming (Thompson, 2004, pp. 19–51).

Just 42 days after the Twin Towers fell, Congress passed the 137-page Patriot Act. It created a new category of federal crime, “domestic terrorism.” In its broadest application, it was used to silence criticism of governmental use of authority and punish dissent from the federal narrative about terrorism and foreign policy. The legislation diminished due rights to privacy, due process, and immigration; it lowered standards of “probable cause” to search one’s property, person, and digital archives, and authorized sharing between federal agencies. The legislation increased surveillance of private citizens by way of wire taps, access to phone records, computer searches, and library borrowing history —all for the sake of national security (Abdolian & Takooshian, 2003).

Reaction to the 9/11 attack left its mark on public trust of the media. Research found that many people did not believe the media did a good job of helping Americans understand who attacked the U.S. and why they attacked. In addition, the rhetoric of foreign policy promoted myths about terrorism, arguing that any Islamic resistance to the West was due to Arab backwardness and not legitimate complaints (Langville, 2009).

Academia was profoundly impacted by 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Prior to the attack, cultural wars were being fought in Congress, schools, universities, and state agencies that oversaw educational standards and funding. In particular, partisans argued about whether students should be taught about American racism, imperialism, class conflict, and all forms of discrimination. A classic text on this conflict, History on Trial (Gary B. Nash, Charlotte A. Crabtree &  Ross E. Dunn, 2000) found that liberals accused conservatives of indoctrinating students with the idea that America is and was always an exceptionally moral, democratic, and civically virtuous nation that is the envy of the world, and conservatives accused liberals of brainwashing children to believe that America was and is an arrogant, selfish, and bigoted nation that deserves no loyalty and ought to be hated.  After 9/11 professors who expressed empathy for people in the Middle East who suffered because of American policies, or who insisted on an objective analysis of the crisis, were sometimes labeled as “unpatriotic” and lost support for promotions and tenure. Some saw research dollars dry up while others were scorned by their peers (Brandt, 2006).

After 9/11, the U.S. continued to send economic and military aid to Israel in part because they shared a common enemy: Muslim terrorists. The U.S. was generous even in the face of increasing international disgust with Israel’s human rights record (Ali, 2018, p. 35). Enduring U.S. tolerance of Israel’s apartheid and violent repression of Palestinians became an open wound in its relationships with Arab nations. It made it difficult for the U.S. to build trust and cooperation with “rogue states” that supported terrorism. In 2004, former British officials petitioned Prime Minister Tony Blair to distance himself the policies of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon because they were “one-sided and illegal” (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006, p. 6). Critics of U.S. support for Israel charged that Israel was not a good ally because it ignored U.S. requests to stop the construction of new settlements in the West Bank and refused to end “targeted assassinations” of Palestinians (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006, p. 6).

On November 22, 2002, Osma bin Laden penned a letter to Americans. It plainly clarified the reason for the 9/11 attack. It said things that were new to many Americans, but not so new to those who studied the Middle East or who lived in the places where U.S. and Israeli policies had immediate consequences. Bin Laden’s response to the question of why Al Qaeda was attacked the U.S. spoke directly to the tragedy of Palestine:

Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

1. 1. 1. a) You attacked us in Palestine:

(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals….

(ii) It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites….

Bin Laden excoriated the U.S. for several other offenses against God and humanity, including the sanctions against Iraq which led to the deaths of 1.5 million people, the accumulation of great wealth through oil extraction that was not shared in ways that would lift millions of Arabs out of poverty, and the vulgar and immoral practices of objectifying women, gambling, consuming drugs and alcohol, and trading with interest fees. Americans were targeted, he wrote, because: their tax dollars paid for the planes that bombed Afghanistan, their taxes provide military aid to Israel, and because American civilians work in factories to make weapons that kill Arabs, and because American military bases are all over the Arab world and bring vulgar and immoral culture to them.

There was moral urgency in bin Laden’s manifesto, but it fell into heap of rubble and ash as most Americans found it unbearable, unreasonable, and un-American to even whisper that possibility.

Al Qaeda’s attack of the U.S. on 9/11 did not alter U.S. support for Israel and it was not an occasion most Americans received as an invitation for soul-searching and contrition. Instead, the president rallied around vengeance and gave the world an ultimatum, “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists” (Bush, 2001, para. 13).

Wars of Regime Change

The 9/11 attacks resulted in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Between 2001 and 2021, the U.S. and a coalition of Allies waged war against the Taliban, the conservative Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The objective was to capture and/or kill Osama bin Laden and to replace the Taliban government with a new republic that was friendly with the West. Victory alluded the U.S. as the Taliban fought with the same guerrilla tactics used by the mujahedeen against the Soviets.

Fatalities included 230,000 Afghani and Pakistani people, nearly 30% of which were civilians. The U.S. lost  6,241 including military personnel and contractors. The war cost the U.S. $2.3 trillion, and decimated Afghanistan’s infrastructure, leaving over 90% Afghanis with food insecurity and serious disruptions in their economic life (Shah & Romaiuk, 2023). As the U.S. withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, the Taliban retook several regions of the country and ultimately captured the capital, Kabul. Within a few months in 2021, it established another repressive Islamic republic. Osama bin Laden had been assassinated in Pakistan by U.S. navy Seals on May 2, 2011.

The 9/11 attacks also sprung the 2003 U.S invasion of Iraq that began an eight-year war. Operation Shock and Awe began with the televised bombardment of Baghdad. The assault mimicked the fury of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg and it also had the same objective, which was to rapidly establish dominance in combat.

The prelude to the U.S. invasion of Iraq began long before 9/11. In 1991, neoconservatives in President George H. W. Bush’s administration urged him to depose of Saddam Hussein while there was an opportunity to do so in the Persian Gulf War, but Bush declared with confidence that Iraqis themselves would do that (Hybel, 2014). In 1993, former President George H. W. Bush visited Kuwait. There, the Kuwaiti government arrested Kuwaiti and Iraqi suspects who were poised to kill Bush. The Iraqi assassins had ties to Iraq’s government (Teplitz), 1995). In 1994, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd proposed a joint covert operation with the U.S. to remove Hussein, an invitation that revealed their mutual conviction that Hussein posed a threat to Middle Eastern peace and their mutual interests in the Persian Gulf (Woodward, 2004). In 1998, Congress authorized $97 million in military aid to Iraqi militants seeking to overthrow Hussein, but nothing came of the investment. Neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Dick Cheney believed that global stability depended on U.S. hegemony and so were already discussing plans for a regime change in Iraq prior to George W. Bush’s ascent to the presidency in 2001 (Dumbrell, 2018).

President George W. Bush repeatedly told the world that the invasion was necessary to end the evil regime of Saddam Hussein and seize Iraq’s stash of weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, testified before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 that the U.S. had sound evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction The veracity of his testimony evaporated months later as credible sources proved that Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction in 2003 (Jamieson, 2007).

The cost of the invasion of Iraq and subsequent operations in Syria was estimated at $1.79 trillion. The cost of lives is between 550,000 and 580,000 people, including coalition military personnel and civilians. In addition, approximately 7 million people became refugees in Iraq and Syria. (Crawford, 2023). There were 4,492 U.S. military fatalities and 32,292 wounded. Civilian casualties in Iraq totaled 200,000 (Anastacio & Murray, 2023). Expenses piled up after the war ended. The costs of occupation, rebuilding, cleaning up the ruins of war, and meeting the needs of civilians displaced, hungry, and wounded were shouldered by taxpayers while corporations such as Haliburton, Blackwater, and Kellogg, Brown & Root made billions (Hartung, 2021). By 2013, seven years after Hussein was executed, the country was still in shambles with 31% poverty, millions lacking electricity and clean water, and corruption throughout Iraq’s administration (Associate Press, 2013).

The Iraq war smeared the U.S. reputation as a stalwart of morality. The World Tribunal on Iraq, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all found evidence that the U.S. violated International Humanitarian Law in the way it executed the war and failed to do all it could to prevent civilian casualties. An International Committee of the Red Cross also found that U.S. prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison were physically, psychologically, and sexually  abused by sadistic U.S. military personnel (Kramer, Michaloski & Rothe, 2005). Others believe that George W. Bush should be tried for leading Americans to war under false pretenses, and for war crimes and crimes against humanity including torture and murder (Bugliosi, 2008).

The Second Intifada, 2000-2005

A second wave of violent Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation erupted in 2000. On September 28^th former Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon along with 1,000 armed riot police went onto the grounds of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Sharon, a member of the militant Likud Party, was campaigning to be the next prime minister, and his presence on Temple Mount was perceived as a display of dominance, preeminence, and disrespect for Muslims and the mosque. The next day Palestinians unleashed their anger against Jews.

What followed was five years of terror mutually inflicted by Arabs and Jews. Both groups were knotted in frustration over persistent failures to achieve peace, and both groups resented each other’s presence (Pressman, 2003). The Second Intifada was a tragedy on top of a tragedy. From 1992-2000, Palestinian unemployment had increased from 3% to 28% and there was little to no compensation those impacted. Israeli settlements expanded into occupied territory during this time and Palestinians continued to be subjected to curfews, travel restrictions, and limited access to water. Years of oppression under Israeli rule drove many Palestinians to Islamic radicalism as they concluded that only violent confrontation would resolve their problems (Skare, 2025, p. 145).

The Second Intifada was characterized by suicide bombings perpetrated largely by Hamas (in particular its Qassam Brigade) and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Between 1986 and 1999, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad committed 420 attacks against Israelis. (Skare, 2025, p. 128). The viciousness of assaults during  Second Intifada bloodied hands on both sides. In October 2000, Palestinian authority police arrested two Israeli soldiers who strayed into Ramallah. A mob beat and disemboweled them, and set one on fire (Asser, 2000; Levy 2000). On Passover, March 27, 2002, Hamas’ suicide bombing of a hotel in Netanya (West Bank) where 30 Jews were killed and 140 injured as they were celebrating. From April 1-11, 2002, Israelis retaliated with an assault against Jenin, a refugee camp in the West Bank.

Jenin was a refugee camp of one square kilometer that was home to 13,000 in 2002. It had an elementary school, three mosques, and a hospital. It had fallen under Israel’s occupation in 1967 and in 1995, per Oslo Accords (1993), was administered by the Palestinian Authority. Jenin’s population was largely poor and 42% of its people were under age 15 (Baroud, 2003). Israel’s Defense forces hit Jenin with mortars fired from tanks and helicopters while snipers and ground forces tossed grenades into homes, shot unarmed civilians, and blocked efforts of medical personnel and other from reaching the wounded and tending their injuries. Israeli soldiers destroyed hospital, school, and administrative records— a form of purging the existence of human beings.

The savagery of Israel’s conduct was documented by survivors who told stories of their neighbors being grounded into unrecognizable carcasses by tanks, while Israeli soldiers bragged about their deeds. One soldier who operated a D-9 bulldozer reported that he was exhilarated by the task of destroying Palestinian homes. He said that bulldozers leveled homes with people still inside them and they remained under the rubble while he felt no remorse, only the desire to keep demolishing and killing. For him, every Palestinian was an anti-Semitic terrorist (Baroud, 2002, pp. 27–28). Many in the international community called the event a massacre—  wonton slaughter of innocent civilians by an armed force— while others said that Israel was only defending its security by legitimate means. Others derided Israel’s claim to self-defense as one of many Israeli efforts to bamboozle the world by distorting the truth of its deeds and the inhumanity of its motives (Baroud, 2002, p. 21). The true number of Palestinian deaths in Jenin may never be known, but many accounts say at least 63 died.

At by end of the Second Intifada, 215 Israeli and 1,542 Palestinian combatants were dead. In addition, 741 Israeli civilians had been killed along with 2,996 Palestinian civilians (Breakdown of Fatalities, 2007). During the Second Intifada, Yasar Arafat died in November 2004, leaving Hamas in a more conciliatory mood, but Hamas’ ranks were filled with Islamic radicals opposed to diplomacy and determined to “drive Israel into the sea.” In 2006, Hamas gained control over the Palestinian authority by way of election, then took control of the Gaza by displacing the PLO. This left the PLO with control of the West Bank and deepened divisions between resistance fighters in Gaza and the West Bank. President George W. Bush suspended economic aid to the Palestinian Authority, fearing that it would be directed to Hamas’ terrorist strikes (Morro, 2007).

The Second Intifada ended with the Sharm el-Sheik Summit between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, during which both sides agreed to deescalate the violence and pursue a pathway to peace that included a two-state solution. In addition, Israel released 900 Palestinian prisoners from jail and removed the additional soldiers it deployed form the West Bank during the Intifada. The Second Intifada failed to resolve the conflict and soured public opinion about the capacity of Palestinians to abandon violence. The UN, however, was reluctant to label Hamas’ attacks as terrorism because they were motivated by the legitimate desire to end oppression. The Second Intifada occurred when world opinion had shifted away from unconditional support for Israel and reflexive alignment with the U.S. This created an opportunity for the Arab League, the UN, and all Palestinian factions to build a monolithic strategy for peace, but that required solidarity not forthcoming. (Miskel, 2004/2005).

Arab Spring

While Palestinians continued their fight against Israeli oppression, Arabs in surrounding regions rebelled against their own oppression at the hands of Arab leaders. The initiation of Arab Spring revealed much about hopelessness and desperation in the Arab world. On December 17, 2010, a Tunisian street produce vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest of police harassment, abuse of the poor, and the confiscation of his wares because he lacked a permit—a document that at the time was not universally required for vendors (Abouzeid & Bouzid, 2011). Bouazizi, age 26, had been supporting his mother and seven siblings since his father’s death and was trying to work his way through college. Thousands of Tunisians took to the streets and demanded an end to the tyrannical rule of President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali, who resigned in January 2011. Social media mobilized thousands to participate in protests. It informed the public about daily abuses of power and the suffering of the poor, and it spread the movement for reform to other countries (Sofi, 2009).

Arab Spring saw citizens of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt depose authoritarian leaders and establish governments they believed would solve persistent problems including high unemployment, poverty, inflation, lack of civil rights and poor representation in government. Poverty was especially acute in Arab nations in 2010, as 40% lived on less than $2.75 a day (Yassin & Nahlawi, 2023). While Tunisian, Libyan, and Egyptian activists succeed in replacing their leaders, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, and Morrocco were all retained after they agreed to extend civil rights.

Tunisia’s revolution was replicated in Libya and Egypt where they too toppled autocrats. Protestors in Libya rose against Muammar al-Qaddafi, who had a reputation for enriching his own family by way of distribution of national wealth. Qaddafi brutally suppressed the uprising, which prompted NATO intervention (Mushtag & Afzal, 2017). A coalition of U.S. UK, Belgium, France, Canada, Spain, and Qatar enforced a naval blockade and no fly zone over Libya. The coalition’s stated objective was to end Qaddafi’s violations of human rights, but it was clear that the goal was overthrow him (Norton, 2016). Air sorties pounded Libya as the coalition chased Qaddafi and his loyalists across the desert, and Qaddafi was killed on October 20, 2011. Approximately 25,000 people lost their lives in the war and another 64,000 were injured (Mulholland & Deshmukh, 2011).

In Egypt, protesters brought down the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Rebels decried systemic corruption, police abuse, denial of economic rights, and persistent poverty. According to UN data, 846 died in the conflict (Goldberg, 2011). The crisis was resolved without NATO intervention.

In Syria, the peaceful demonstrations of January 2011 gave way to violent protests in March and a 14-year civil war. Pro-democracy insurgents called for the end of Bashar el-Assad’s repressive rule, and demanded social, political, and economic reforms. Assad responded by shooting and torturing protesters, and riots turned to civil war. Assad’s regime was replaced in 2025 by a transitional government tasked with creating a new constitution, and by then, nearly 14 million Syrians had become refugees (Council on Foreign Relations, 2019).

Syria’s civil war was the worst of Arab Spring. The use of cluster bombs, chemical weapons (sarin), thermobaric weapons, and ballistic missile ensured staggering numbers of the dead and wounded. Fourteen years of war claimed the lives of 656,493 people, roughly 30% of whom were civilians (Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, 2025). The war resulted in a catastrophic disruption of Syria’s economy, deterioration of health care, increase in corruption, and a sharp decline in the average income of Syrians (Kešeljevi´& Spruk, 2023). Further, Arab Spring discouraged foreign direct investments in the Middle East and North Africa, as corporations and banks could not predict the security of their loans and purchases during a time of political upheaval (Al Shammari, et al., 2023).

The Agony of Gaza

In May 2021, an Israeli court ruled that it was permissible for Israel to evict a group of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Subsequently, Hamas and other militants launched missiles into Israeli territory, which were countered by Israeli missile strikes of Palestinian regions. The attacks left 13 Israelis dead, over 250 Palestinians dead, and over 2,000 Palestinians displaced (Center for Preventative Action, 2026). The stage was set for revenge.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched 1,700 missiles into Israel, breeched the border, and kidnapped about 250 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Survivors of the attack posted pictures of death and devastation in social media, and provided interviews with journalists who themselves would be targeted for death and assault as they recorded and reported what they witnessed. Human Rights Watch published a report in July 2024 that exposed the scale of Hamas crimes against humanity including torture, rape, sexual humiliation, holding hostages, destruction of homes, and looting (Human rights Watch, 2024, pp. 6–12). Though a cease fire was effected in October 2025, skirmishes and assaults erupted well into 2026.

Hamas said the attack was “a necessary step and a normal response to confront all Israeli conspiracies against the Palestinian people,” and asserted that “If there was any case of targeting civilians; it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.” Hamas also explained that the attacks were in response to continued Israeli construction of settlements in occupied territory, the Judaization of Palestine, and the Israeli killing of thousands of Palestinians since 2000 (Hamas Says, 2024). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “We stress that the Palestinian people have the capacity to decide their future and to arrange their internal affairs… (Hamas Says, 2024). His statement was betrayed by limits on the Palestinian Authority.

Israel retaliated with unrestrained fury. Within 100 days of the war, there were 25,000 casualties and 45-56% of Gaza’s infrastructure had been pulverized. The war disrupted both Israeli and Palestinian economies, hitting the tourist industry hard and destroying businesses. Within the combat zone, it became nearly impossible to get medical and food supplies to Gaza, and water supplies were seriously damaged (Mbah, et al., 2024).

By August 2025, the scale of tragedy and agony were confirmed in horrific numbers. Life expectancy in Gaza declined to age 35, which resembled the effect of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, where life expectancy fell from 43 years to 12 years. By 2023, children in Gaza had undergone more amputations per capita than any other place in the world and more child deaths than any other combat zone (Vogli, et al., 2025). By 2024, over 12,300 children were killed in Gaza, representing 43% of all fatalities (Giroux, 2025).

Israel targeted hospitals during the war and killed over 1,400 health care workers and 295 UN staff members. This made it impossible for medics to respond to emergencies and provide consistent care of the sick and wounded. In Rafa, Gaza on March 23, 2025, Israelis attacked medics and emergency responders in plainly marked medical vehicles, killing 15. The dead were then bulldozed into a mass grave along with their vehicles, where UN rescue workers were unable to reach them for a week (Associated Press, 2025). In addition, medics, nurses, and other health care professionals were kidnapped and tortured. Testimonies from healthcare professionals who survived kidnapping and torture exposed the sadistic nature of Israel’s war against Palestinians and the inhumanity of executing people who try to rescue and help injured people (Healthcare Workers Watch, 2024).

As of October 2025, casualties were high (see Table 10.1), and still growing. The war spiked an increase in demands for healthcare in Gaza coupled with reductions in accessibility of healthcare due to destroyed facilities and shortages of medical personnel (Asfour, et al., 2025). The war caused massive unemployment in Gaza, a rise in child labor, and greater economic disparities. It caused disruptions in trade, inflation, and destruction of infrastructure related to communication and utilities (Batool, 2025).

At the onset of Hamas’ assault in 2023, Israel installed blockades that prevented food and supplies from reaching Gaza. The goal was to deprive Palestinians of water, nutrition, fuel, medicine, and medical equipment. Prior to the blockade, about 500 trucks with supplies reached Gaza daily (Maharmeh, 2025, p. 7). Following the blockade, about 70 trucks entered per day. Gaza’s food security was already precarious as tens of thousands of refugees depended on food and water aid. Agriculture represented 10% of Gaza’s economy, but 80% of farmable land in Gaza was destroyed in the war. By 2025, 455 Palestinians had died of starvation, and at least 20% of the Gaza strip met the criteria for a “catastrophic famine” and another 50% was in a food “emergency” (Haq, et al., 2025).

Food shortages in Gaza were exacerbated by criminality. Israel maintained security of Gaza’s borders once the cease fire was declared and was responsible for delaying or obstructing the transportation of resources. Israel also tolerated civilian interference with transportation and the destruction of food headed for Gaza. (Maharmeh, 2025, pp. 7–12). The shortage of supplies led to closures of bakeries and disruption of fisheries and livestock production. Israel also destroyed United Nations Relief and Work Agency facilities that distributed food in Gaza.

On May 27, 2025, the Israeli and U.S. sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) replaced about 400 distribution stations across Gaza with four stations all located in Israeli controlled areas. The reduction in distribution sites was theoretically to secure distribution. The stations were heavily guarded and hundreds of Palestinians were killed and injured as they attempted to collect food and supplies. Palestinians walked for miles to reach the sites, then waited for hours in the desert sun while enduring random rifle fire, tear gas, and sound bombs (Maharmeh, 2025, p. 12). In addition, rogue Hamas gangs routinely hijacked convoys of aid and stole food and supplies headed for Gaza’s battered and broken residents. They did so with Israeli support because these rogue Hamas soldiers had turned against Hamas (Maharmeh, 2025, pp. 7–12).

In December 2021, President Trump announced intentions to develop a luxury resort in Gaza. His son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kurshner, had already developed plans that include a sea-side hotel, high-speed rail system, and amenities that would make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East” (Broughton, 2021). Four years after the announcement— after Gaza was reduced to rubble and its survivors were hungry, homeless, and deprived of humanitarian aid—the luxury plan remained a gleam in Trump’s and Netanyahu’s eyes. Gaza was to become part of the  India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a modern day silk road that links ports along India’s west coast to the Gaza and the mediterranean via the United Arab Emirates and Aqaba with spurs to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The plan is based on bi-lateral agreement between the U.S. and Israel that will evolve into a multi-lateral trust with the U.S. taking the lead on development and security. The plan requires execution of a “Palestinian policy,” which calls for the removal of Palestinians via “voluntary relocation,” which will compensate Palestinians with rent and food subsidies. Critics note that the Palestinians will have no voice in the project and charge that the vision is tantamount to ethnic cleansing (Ziadah, 2025).

The Trump peace plan for Gaza called for a gradual withdraw of Israeli Defense Forces, the release of hostages held on both sides, the mutual suspension of all bombings and attacks, amnesty to Hamas members who surrender their weapons and commit to peaceful co-existence with Israel, Gaza to be governed by a temporary transitional government that is overseen by a Board of Peace chaired by Trump, Gaza must be demilitarized in all aspects of militarization, and Hamas must promise it will not be a threat to its neighbors (Trump, 2025). The plan promises aid to rebuild Gaza if conditions for peace are met.

On the matter of Palestinian statehood, the plan states, “While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people” (Trump, 2025,19). There is no promise of a Palestinian state, only a hint that if Palestinians do whatever the peace board wants them to do, they might get a state. There is no assertion that international leaders will work with Israel to create a Palestinian state or welcome refugees back to the West Bank. There is no word on whether Israel will have the right to build more settlements in occupied territory.

The peace plan bears an eerie resemblance to the colonial approach to resolving all forms of international conflicts. It maintains that stability and development are first and foremost material and fiscal matters rather than moral or social matters. It holds that business ventures and industrial expansion will generate wealth that organically trickles down to the masses and brings justice to all. The peace plan smacks of colonialism inasmuch as it denies Palestinians a substantial say in what happens to them and their land.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission published a report based on a two-year investigation of events and conditions in Gaza. It asserted that Israel committed four genocidal acts including: “killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births” (Human Rights Council, 2025, pp. 51–66). The commission found that Israel acted with intent to commit genocide.

The report was no surprise to Palestinians nor to journalists, international humanitarians, and scholars who have studied Israel’s policies and actions toward Palestinians. President Trump’s Middle East envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kusher rejected findings that Israel committed genocide reasoning, “there was a war being fought” (Kelly 2025). Trump also rejected claims of genocide, stating that “Israel has been under siege, and they had no choice but to defend themselves” (Scwartz, 2025). The logic of these assertions defies historians’ laws of causation that take the long view and insist that the context of actions tell the world much about the intentions of actions.

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Chapter X: Epilogue

Perspectives

From the perspective of Zionists and their supporters, the history of the Middle East since the 19^th  century is one of triumph of a persecuted people. Against all odds, international Jews formed coalitions of financial supporters, networks of political advocates in high places, and arms merchants willing to sell their wares above and below the table for the Zionist cause. Their efforts and the labor of Jewish settlers from distance lands carved from the desert the state of Israel, a haven for Jews. From the Palestinian perspective, the history is a layered tragedy that began with a unilateral agreement of Western empires to determine which people would have a sovereign and autonomous nation in Palestine and which would not. Subsequently, Palestinians were displaced by Jewish occupation and made refugees by the hundreds of thousands. They became second-class citizens under Israeli apartheid as Israel imposed its policies on Palestinians and marginalized them in the legislative processes. From the American perspective, Israel was in some ways an investment— a vital ally in the Middle East that was costly, yet useful in American strategies to safeguard oil interests.

In the history of the Middle East since 1897, historians are faced with a chronology of events that suggest colonialism and hegemonic ambitions of nations remained intact throughout the 20^th century and beyond. The democratic ideals espoused by peace-makers after World War I and World War II did not alter national aspirations to amass great wealth, nor the national will to use force to acquire great wealth. The mandate system that gave the Brish and French authority to govern portions of the Middle East after World War I were structured to assist local populations with transitioning from Ottman rule to autonomous democracies. The extent to which that intention was sincere and equally applied to Palestinians and Zionists faded with each unchecked expansion of Israel into Palestinian territory and with each failure of the international community to protect Palestinians against Israeli apartheid against Arabs.

Historians observe that Israel represents many things. To the Zionist, it is the sovereign Jewish state —a home for the world’s Jews where anti-Semitic persecution will not stand— resting on land where once tread the patriarchs and kings of ancient Israel. For Christian Zionists, Israel represents the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and confirmation that Jesus Christ will soon return to earth to establish his kingdom. To Britain and the U.S., Israel is an ally in the Middle East. To the Soviet Union, Israel was an outpost of the West that signaled Moscow’s need to proceed with caution in attempts to cultivate alliances with Arab nations. To the Palestinians, Israel represents an illegitimate state, a source of suffering and oppression, and a reminder that the destiny of people and nations is often determined by powerful entities — foreign nations, corporations, and international agencies — and not those who live on the land that others covet.

Some Observations

There are several lessons in the history of the Middle East that address existential matters and the universal struggle of human beings to peacefully co-exist. The first observation is that the war in the Middle East, wherein Palestine is ground zero, has been under way since the first Palestinian objections to Jewish (largely Ashkenazi) settlement reached Ottoman ears in the mid-1800s. The war, like many wars, could have been avoided. Had the British followed through on promises to create an Arab state, or had the superpowers refused to economically and militarily aid Israel, history might have taken a different course. All conflict and geo-political opportunities attract outsiders with special interests who have a stake in the outcomes. In this case, strategic outposts and access to oil were of special interest to outsiders, as were the fortunes that could be accumulated by selling military weapons and accoutrement to all sides.

It is challenging for social scientists to decipher the extent to which racism and “othering” impacted events, but it fair to say that bigotry and centuries-old prejudices towards ethnicities and religions played a significant role in conflicts in the Middle East and that bigotry and prejudice impacted the way outsiders judged those involved in the conflicts. The demeaning language that Palestinians and Jews used to describe each other (pestilence and vermin), for example, speaks to the refusal to see each other as human beings.

Another note of import regards the tenacity of prejudices and shortage of humility in the peace process. The Middle East peace process has been ongoing for several decades, and few have been willing to negotiate, sacrifice, and compromise for sake of peace and justice. The lessons seems clear: where national interests and private wealth and power are concerned, the ideals of benevolence and mutual devotion to self-being and human dignity are either scrapped in whole or reduced to the fluff of meaningless rhetorical posturing. There were, of course, exceptions. The risks that Anwar Sadaat and Yitzhak Rebin took to achieve peace were olive branches in a tornado, and both were assassinated for their efforts. The prophetic words of Mikhail Gorbachev who saw the folly of imperialism, militarism, and autocracy were, and are, much under-appreciated. Arguably, Gorbachev offered the world opportunity to reform the dominant paradigms of global economics and governance, but he too was marginalized, and in time, autocracy and militarism came to define the new Russian Republic.

Periodically, historians encounter dissent that flies in the face of the ideologies that dominate official narratives. Dissent is a constant in human societies, but it is difficult to know the extent to which people have departed from orthodox doctrines of nationalism, militarism, and tribal identity. The fact that many Jews opposed Zionism and petitioned Israeli officials to cease and desist from expanding settlements into occupied territory, and to seek a two-state solution to the conflict is often marginalized in historical narratives and reports. In order to present the full picture of events, historians must overcome the tendency to accept the notion that those who speak with the greatest arsenals of war to back them should have the biggest megaphone. It is often the ones with no arsenal at all who offer the greatest wisdom concerning peace and peaceful co-existence.

The uneven distribution of U.S. aid to Israel and Palestine represent a fourth observation. The distribution is uneven in both amounts and types of activities the funding supports. U.S. aid to Israel from 1949-1969 totaled roughly $$126.67 million, with military aid commencing in 1959. After 1969, aid to Israel increased substantially. In 1959, U.S. military aid to Israel represented less than one percent of total U.S. aid, then represented 30% in 1967, and 87% by 2025 (U.S. Foreign Aid, 2025). The distribution suggests de facto approval of Israel’s conduct in Palestine.

Aid to Palestine is dwarfed by aid to Israel as seen in Figure 10.1, which also illustrates a correlation between aid and casualties in terrorist strikes and wars. Palestinians deaths far outnumber Israeli deaths. Figure 10.2 reveals that 45.8% of Israeli deaths between 2008-2022 were those of armed combatants, while 16% of Palestinian deaths were those of armed combatants; thus, greater numbers of Palestinian civilians died than did Israeli civilians. This disparity is due in part to Israel’s military advantage and its deliberate targeting of civilians. The differences between Israeli armed forces and Palestinian armed forces are stark: Israel has 178,000 active troops while Palestine has 56,000; Israel has 534 military aircraft and a 49-ship naval fleet while Palestinians have neither and air force nor navy; Israel possesses 60 nuclear warheads and Palestine has none (Global Military, 2025). In 2025, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act stipulated that no form of aid to the Palestinian Authority may be used to buy or transfer of weapons to Palestinians (U.S. Aid to Israel, 2024). U.S. favoritism to Israel is clear.

In 2011, the Palestinian State attempt to gain recognition of the UN. Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, warned that such recognition would be “politically damaging in our domestic context.”  It was a dog whistle alerting U.S. officials to Jewish backlash at the polls should the U.S. support the Palestinians (Sheizaf, 2011). In 2024, when the Palestinian State sought full membership in the UN, the UN Security Council cast twelve votes in favor, which is three more than the required nine to adopt, only to meet with one veto that sank the whole prospect. The U.S. vetoed the proposal and it only takes one veto of the five permanent members on the Security Council (Britian, China, Russia, U.S. and France) to kill a proposal. Palestine has been a UN observer since 2012, but the U.S. has consistently opposed its full membership because it blames the Palestinian state for tolerating and abetting Hamas and terrorism (UN Affairs, 2024).

Many Americans have contempt for the UN because they believe it does not need the UN to advance its agenda and because they believe other nations rely too much on U.S. aid and military prowess to solve their problems. In July 2025, the Trump administration announced that in December it was going to withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). State Department spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, said UNESCO’s programs were incompatible with U.S. interests and that the UN focuses too much on divisive social and cultural causes and sustainability, which are “at odds with our America First foreign policy” (Scanlon, 2025).

The fifth observation acknowledges that the UN has changed over time and has become more critical of  Israel and the U.S. Between January 1990 and June 2013, the Center for Economic Studies and Information documented 1,676 UN General Council  resolutions, 932 of which specifically named countries (Becker, et al.,2014). The top three named countries were Israel with 480 mentions, Palestine (as a quasi-state not a member of the UN) with 438 mentions, and the U.S. with 145 mentions. Israel received 422 criticisms, Palestine received 29 criticisms, and the U.S. received 39. The data registers the General Council’s approval and disapproval of nations, but the credibility of their votes has been challenged. Analysts charge that the UN is biased against Israel, largely owing to votes of the Arab bloc, which has always been opposed to Israel’s presence in Palestine, and to developing nations that chastise Israel to dodge valid criticisms of their own autocratic countries (Becker, et al., 2014).

Former Israeli statesman Avi Becker wrote that the reprehension of UN members towards Israel was a symptom of “an ideological and structural crisis unrelated to the Arab-Israeli conflict” (Becker, 1988, p. 4). He believed that the UN was unduly influenced by non-democratic nations who opposed democratic nations. His claims relative to anti-democratic sentiments are curious in light of Israel’s refusal to extend democratic rights to Palestinians.

UN members find fault with Israel’s assertions that it has attacked Palestinian villages and neighborhoods— even preemptively — for the sake of self-defense. Some critics say these assertions are invalid because Israel’s use of force in self-defense violates UN laws regulating proportionate assaults and the targeting of civilians. Others say that Israel’s attacks do not constitute a legitimate retaliation for terrorist strikes because they are not that of a legitimate state, but an organization (Erlangga, 2022).

Since Israel was welcomed into the UN, it has survived accusations that it is an illegitimate state and many attempts to remove it. One such attempt was made by an Iranian representative in 1982. In response, U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz said that the U.S. would withdraw its presence from the General Assembly and pull its funding of the UN and other UN agencies that expelled Israel (Becker, 1988, p. 1). His remark amplified the power of the U.S. to make or break the UN and individual nations who opposed it.

Israel holds that the UN bears responsibility for terrorist assaults against it. Subsequent to the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, over 100 Israeli plaintiffs sued the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA), which was established in 1948 to provide aid, housing, and employment to displaced Palestinians and refugees following Israel’s victory in the Arab-Israeli War. They accused the UNRWA of funding Hamas and helping it build a “terrorist infrastructure,” and sought $1 billion in damages. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres dismissed the case and noted that plaintiffs failed to provide substantial evidence to prove assertions (U.S. Judge Dismisses, 2025).

In September 2025, the Human Rights Council of the UN issued Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza subsequent to October 7, 2023, and that it deliberately inflicted on Palestinians “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” It also noted that Israeli actions did not occur in isolation, but were “preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and repression under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and its replacement” (Human Rights Council, 2025, p. 71).

Israel condemned the UN report, declaring that it was based on Hamas lies. It also called for the abolition of the Commission of Inquiry (Israel Rejects UN, 2025). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 2025. He began with a litany of threats to regional peace and the state of Israel, then listed all Israel did with U.S. assistance in the preceding year to “hammer the Houthis” in Yemen, “crushed the bulk of the Hamas machine,” “devastated” Iran’s atomic program, “crippled Hezbollah,” and “destroyed Assad’s armaments in Syria.” He lashed out against nations who condemned Israel and imposed embargos against it, and proclaimed to those nations, “It’s an indictment of you! It’s an indictment of weak-kneed leaders who appease evil rather than support a nation whose braver soldiers guard you from the barbarians at the gate” (The Times of Israel, 2025).

Netanyahu then defended Israel by asserting that if America were attacked as Hamas attacked Israel, “The United States would wipe out that terror regime and ensure that such savagery would never threaten America again,” then said, “This is precisely what Israel is doing in Gaza. We’re wiping out the terror regime of Hamas and ensuring that its savagery will never threaten Israel again. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what any self-respecting government would do.” (The Times of Israel, 2025).

Hamas’ attack of Israel on October 7, 2023 was an atrocity. Israel justified atrocity in return because Hamas “started the war.” The allegation, however, slides over the root cause of hostilities that precipitated Hamas’ attack. Further, international law does not consider who started a war when determining whether genocide has been committed (McDoon. 2026).

Regardless of what the historians’ political views are, they are in a position to recognize patterns in human behavior and fallacies in the logic and assumptions of assertions. They and other social scientists and philosophers may then raise questions about the meaning and impact of those patterns, fallacies, and assumptions. In this case, Netanyahu invoked the U.S. as justification for Israel’s conduct, which conjures the notion that both are equally  moral in their response to terrorism. His remarks presume that meeting terror with terror is, without question, the right course of action. Because Netanyahu ignores the root causes of Palestinian rage, he raises questions about whether he is capable of the kind of objectivity and compassion that is essential to being a true peace-maker.

Netanyahu’s remarks become problematic when juxtaposed with disparaging assertions about Palestine and Palestinians that Israeli officials have made before. Golda Meir’s claim that before Israel was created there were no Palestinians (Giles, 1969),  Ben Gurion’s order that villages be purged of Arabs and that Arab names of cities and streets changed to Hebrew names in order to erase the history and record of Aab civilization in Palestine (Rosenne, 1978), and Sharon’s cry that Jews who criticized massacres of Palestinians were “self-hating Jews” (Naylor, 1983) suggest that Netanyahu’s low opinion of Palestinians was aligned with his predecessors’ opinions.

Observation six finds that historians are often faced with official statements that are a tangle of contradiction, duplicity, and denial. Early in its existence, Zionism assured the world that its intentions were benevolent, and that it sought a democratic Jewish state that would not permit minorities to be abused in any way. These statements do not always align with Israel’s behavior. Central to the misalignment is the question of Israel’s intentions to absorb all of Palestine and leave nothing for a Palestinian state. The lack of empathy that Netanyahu expressed for Palestinians in 2025 in the wake of Israel’s war against Gaza is consistent with other Zionists who believed that Arabs had no right to live in Palestine. Like other Zionists, Netanyahu said there would never be a Palestinian state in Palestine and that those who recognized a Palestinian state were “disgraceful.” Like others, he believed that Palestinians and the Arab nations that supported them, were entirely to blame for the lack of peace in Palestine and the Middle East (Goldsmith, 2025). When confronted with contradictions, denials, and distortion, historians are pressed not only to identify these things and to explain potential motivations for them, but, in many cases, to explain why these kinds of assertions were uncontested at the time of utterance.

A seventh observation calls attention to the combatants’ reliance on dehumanization to justify war and incite violence. Zionists have frequently referred to Palestinians as vermin and subhumans. An Israeli Rabi advised Israelis to spare no mercy for Palestinians and to kill all of them, even children, because they will grow up to kill Jews (Maalej, 2025). Dan Gillerman, Israeli ambassador to the UN, referred to Palestinians a “horrible inhuman animals, and Netanyahu’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant boasted, “We besieged Gaza. We cut power, water, food, and fuel. All cut. We are fighting animals in the form of humans” (Maalej, 2025, p, 216). Palestinians have also referred to Jews in similar ways. Hamas’ stereotyping of Jews as greedy money lenders, thieves, and power-mongers is often found on social media, and Hamas has referred to Jews as “blood suckers,” “demons,” “brothers of apes,” “human pigs,” and a “cancer expanding” across Palestine (Baral, 2023).

The reliance on assertions that one’s adversaries are less than human reminds historians that provoking people’s emotional reactions to one’s enemies is a powerful psychological instrument of war. Its irrationality arouses a sense of superiority. Historians are obliged to expose irrationality as it so often taints motivations and soils the nobility of actions. Historians are always at risk when they do this because the assertion that something is irrational is sometimes itself corrupted by subjectivity. Irrationality has often led societies to war and often nullified the legitimacy of claims made to justify war.

A final observation concerns the infusion of theological convictions into the rationales for initiatives, policies, actions, and objectives. Where the Middle East is concerned, theological convictions have been offered to justify the creation of Israel, oppose to the UN partition of Palestine, resist Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and  expansion of Israeli settlements, approve for Israeli apartheid against Palestinians, provide economic aid to Palestinians and Israelis, provide military aid to Israel, establish terrorist organizations, and use terrorism to punish, destroy, or coerce others. In short, God has been claimed by all sides.

There is no way historians can prove that God’s hand directs events. There is no way to prove that God wills the survival of one people and the destruction of another. Historians have a duty, however, to report the motives of individuals. This obligation emanates from historians’ professional standards that require historians to be objective, faithfully report diverse perspectives, and to respect the public’s trust by representing the past accurately (AHA Statement, 1987). Historians are part of a professional axis of social scientists who help people understand the past and the present by analyzing human behavior on the individual, institutional, and social levels. It is common for professionals in social science to encounter theological assertions and convictions and thus to factor them into their discussions about the prevailing ethos of a given time and place.

Human beings seek existential reasons for their choices and to explain the circumstances in which they find themselves. They demand that there is meaning in all things, and when it is not apparent, they often invent it. It is for the theologian to offer insights to whatever religious meaning people attach to their actions and to assess whether those meanings are in concert with the will of God. Yet, historians and theologians compliment and supplement each other’s work. The theologian provides information about religious traditions and exegetical debate in the religious community that could shed light on motivations, spiritual traditions, and commitments to political and economic ideologies. The historian provides information about the context in which eschatological drama and religious crusades unfold, with attention to the political, economic, and sociological milieu.

The modern history of the Middle East has much continuity with all previous civilizations. It is a recycled story of tribalism, colonialism, and human lust for wealth, power, and control of vital resources. Whether that comforts or indicts us depends on what we believe about what should universally comfort us and what should universally indict us.

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Naylor, R. T. From Bloodbath to Whitewash: Sabra-Shatila and the Kahan Commission Report. Arab Studies Quarterly, 5(4): 337–61. (Fall 1983).

Rosenne, Shabati. Israel and the United Nations: Changed Perspectives. The American Jewish Yearbook, 1978: 3–59.

Scanlon, Kate. US to Withdraw from UNESCO over Palestine and UN Development Goals. Maryknoll Magazine, July 23, 2025. US to Withdraw from UNESCO over Palestine and UN Development Goals – Maryknoll Magazine

Sheizaf, Noam. US Envoy: Congress will Punish UN if it Recognizes Palestine (UPDATED). 972 Magazine, June 23, 2011. US Envoy: Congress will punish UN if it recognizes Palestine (UPDATED) – +972 Magazine

The Ties of Israel. “Full Text of Netanyahu’s Speech: We Won’t Let the World Shove a Terror State Down Our Throat.” September 26, 2025. Full text of Netanyahu’s speech: We won’t let the world shove a terror state down our throat | The Times of Israel.

AHA Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct. The History Teacher, 21(1): 105–109. (November 1987).

UN Affairs. US Vetoes Palestine’s Request for Full UN Membership. UN News, United Nations, April 18, 2024. US vetoes Palestine’s request for full UN membership | UN News.

U.S. Aid to Israel and Palestinians. If American Knew. October 22, 2024. https://ifamericansknew.org/stat/usaid.html.

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U.S. Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Accusing UNRWA of Funding Hamas. Palestinian Chronicle, October 3, 2025. US Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Accusing UNRWA of Funding Hamas – Report – Palestine Chronicle.

Chronology Middle East, 1816–2026

1816: The Turks (Ottoman Empire) celebrated its 300^th anniversary of its conquest of Jerusalem

1839: British open a consular office in Jerusalem

1869: Mark Twain published Innocents Abroad

1869: The Suez Canal opened. Built by the French with capital from stocks sold to various countries, it connected the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea with a waterway of 120 miles. It cut travel time from Europe to the Persian Gulf by seven to ten days. In 1875, Egypt was forced by debt to sell its stocks to the British. In 1888, Britain became the protectorate of the canal. As a consequence of the Suez Crisis (1956) Britain lost control of the canal.

1890s: Hamadian Massacres. Ottomans murder 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians to ethnically cleanse the empire.

1891: Oriental Jews and Christians petition the Ottomans who controlled Palestine at the time to end Jewish immigration to Palestine as the Ashkenazi Jews had an adverse impact on the existing economy by prohibiting Jews from hiring Jews and Arabs (Kimmerling & Migdal, 1993, p. 74)

1897: The first World Zionist Organization meeting in Basel, Switzerland. Over 200 delegates from 17 nations attended. They addressed immigration to Palestine and establishment of a Jewish state.

1899: The Jewish Colonial Trust is established. This bank was created to help create a Jewish state in Palestine. Headquartered in London, branches opened in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron, Safed, Gaza, and Beirut. It extended loans for the development of Jewish farms and businesses in Palestine and was sold in the 1980s to a private investor.

1901: Jewish National Fund established to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine

1906: David Ben Gurion moves to Palestine

1908: British discover oil in Persia and create Anglo-Persian Oil Company

1912: First Balkan War secures Greek, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bulgarian independence from Ottomans

1913: Second Balkan War: Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia fight over territories

1914: About 85,000 Zionists are in Palestine.

1914: Word War I begins. Germany, Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy (until 1916) fight the Allied powers of Britain, France, Russia, and U.S. (joined in 1917). The war leads to the collapse of Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia which replaced monarchy with communism, the end of the Ottoman Empire, and the humiliation of Germany.

1915-16: David Ben Gurion seeks support of U.S. Jews to fight with Ottomans, then in 1917, sensing the Allies were going to win, shifts support to the British.

1915-16: The McMahon-Hussein Letters discuss British desire of Arab aid in their war against Ottomans and offer support for Arab nation in Palestine in return.

1916: The Sykes-Picot Agreement divided Ottoman holdings in Palestine between the British and French.

1917: The U.S. entered Word l and the Bolshevik Revolution toppled the Romanov Dynasty that had ruled Russia for about 300 years.

1918: Jewish settlements represented 8% of Palestine’s population. By 1931 they represented 17% and by 1940, they represented 33%.

1919: The Treaty of Versailles concludes World War I. None of the Axis powers were represented. Jews and Arabs who were present were treated like subjects of a colony and the promise that the war would bring democracy to the world was betrayed by British, French, and American ambitions in Asia and the Middle East. The Treaty imposed severe punishments on Germany including the occupation of the Saarland by France, the surrender of the Alsace-Lorrain region to France, restrictions on the size of Germany’s army, air force and navy, and the payment of 132 billion gold Reichsmarks to the victors. The crippling penalties caused horrible deprivations in Germany and aroused bitter anti-Semitism and a desire to take revenge for their treatment.

1919: The first Palestinian Arab Palestinian Conference of Muslim and Christian associations was held. The objective was to develop strategies to prevent Zionist settlement in Palestine. It confirmed growing interest in Arab nationalism and roundly opposed the Balfour declaration.

1919-1939: Roughly 372,000 immigrate to Palestine (Andreen, 2025).

1920: In March, Delegates from Palestine and Syria attended a conference in Damascus. The delegates rejected the Balfour Declaration and elected Faisal I (son of Hussein ibn Ali, King of the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula along the East coast of the Red Sea) to be the king of a united Palestine that included present-day Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon.

1920: In April, the Allies met in San Remo, Italy and carved up the Ottoman Empire between Britian and France. The French wasted no time in driving Faisal out of Syria and dashing the hopes and plans of Arabs to establish an Arab kingdom in the region. The French run Faisal I out of Damascus and Syria (Kimmerling & Migdal, 1993, p. 15)

1920: Arabs create Arab Executive Committee in Haifa for purpose of opposing Zionist agenda for Palestine.

1920: Arabs attack several Jewish settlements. Zionists created the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Force. Its adjuncts include the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that orchestrated terrorist attacks against Arab Palestinians and British personnel. It operated from 1931 to 1948.

1921: A Muslim-Christian delegation from Palestine went to London and petitioned the government to create a national, democratic  government in Palestine that allowed Christians, Muslims, and Jews to vote, and to repeal any and all intentions and claims that Britain would establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The British rejected their appeals and attempted to destroy the solidarity of Muslims and Christians (Roberts, 2024).

1921: Arab attacks against Jewish settlements around Jaffa kill 200 Jews and 120 Arabs. Zionists saw this as a pogrom similar to those of Russia (MacDowell, 1991, p. 22)

1921: The Arab Executive Committee of Palestine Arab Congress met with High Commander, Herbert Samuel, to express fears of Jewish statehood. The British did not believe Jews would flood into Palestine, nor establish a state west of the Jordan River. The British told Arabs that they had to accept British decisions about Palestine.

1922: U.S. Congress passed the Lodge-Fish Resolution that expressed support for the creation of  Jewish homeland in Palestine.

1922: Churchill White Paper. British affirm support for Jewish homeland in Palestine, but emphasize that Arabs will not be displaced or persecuted. Recommended limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Some saw this as evidence that biblical prophecies about Jesus’ return were being fulfilled.

1922: The British ended its mandate in Iraq by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, which installed Faisal I bin Hussein as its first king. The monarchy was later toppled in a coup in 1958.

1923: British Mandate for Transjordan created, but Britain granted Transjordan announced its intentions to grant the Transjordan full autonomy in 1928. The Kingdom of Transjordan was made fully independent by Treaty with Britain in 1946.

1923: The French begin their mandate in Syria and Lebanon.

1923: Arabs boycott elections intended to create legislative council in Palestine under British Mandate. The y denounce the Balfour Declaration and British Mandate.

1925: Ben Gurion announced that Palestine would be for both Arab and Jews and ruled with a government without discrimination (Chomsky, 1974, p. x-xi).

1925: United Israel Appeal was formed in U.S. to raise money for Zionists.

1927: Riots in Petah Tikwa in response to the prevention of Arab laborers to harvest oranges purchased by an Arab businessman.

1928: Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic organization, was created to enjoin Arab nations to resist Western hegemony.

1929: The Jewish Agency for Palestine was created. As a branch of the World Zionist Organization, it was the largest non-profit entity of its time and was instrumental in the resettlement of millions of Jews to Palestine. It began as an office in the World Zionist Organization in 1908. It periodically clashed with the British over initiatives to slow Jewish immigration and restrict Jewish land purchases.

1929: From August 23–29, violence erupted between Jews and Arabs as the Jews wanted to work on the Wailing Wall (ruins of the old temple) and the project abutted property on which stood the al-Aqsa Mosque. Muslims called for a jihad against Christians and Jews, and riots in Hebron, Safed, and other villages left about 250 people dead.

1929: British High Commissioner, John Chancellor called for revision of the Briths Mandate charter in order to prevent Zionists from creating a class of landless Arabs in Palestine. Pro-Zionists in the British government prevailed and allowed privileges given to Zionists to determine Arab land policies continued.

1930: Passfield White Paper: British issue a formal statement on Palestine which objected to Zionist settlement practices of hiring only Jews to work on Jewish land. Zionists objected to the document and claimed it violated the Balfour Declaration. As a result of Zionist Lobbying, the recommendations of the Passfield White Paper were rescinded (Beckerman-Boys, 2015).

1933: Adolph Hitler takes power in Germany. Dachau, the first concentration camp, is opened. It houses criminals and Hitler’s political adversaries.

1935: Nazi Germany enacts the Nuremberg Laws.

1935: Arabs discover Jews smuggling guns into Jaffa.

1936-1939: Arab Revolt against Jewish immigration and plans to take Palestine. British defend Jews and the Arab defeat hardens Arab conclude that the British have no interest in their rights and that their best course of resistance is militancy.

1937: Peel commission Report advocated the partition of Palestine. Arabs object as it seeks nullification of the Balfour Declaration and refused a Jewish state on any terms.

1938: British Woodhead Report nullified the Peel Commission’s recommendation for partition.

1939: British White Paper, May 29^th, set a quota on Jewish refugees to 75,000 over a five-year period.

1939: In June, the German ocean liner, the St. Louis, refused dockage in Miami with hundreds of Jewish refugees aboard. The ship was forced to return to Germany and the Nazis killed half of the Jewish refugees on board.

1939: September 1^st, German invaded Poland and triggers World War II.

1941: United States entered the war in December as result of Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor.

1942: At the Wannsee Conference in January, Nazi officials Outlined the “final solution” to the Jews and designed the means of mass extermination in death camps.

1942: The Biltmore Conference in New York gathered 600 jews from 18 nations who agreed on project to create a Jewish state in Palestine with its own military forces,

1942: The Turks denied the Romanian ship, Struma, with over 600s refugee Jews, passage to Palestine.

1942: In the fall, the Allies were convinced that rumors about the Nazi’s systematic exterminating Jews in death camps was true.

1945: World War II ended with Allied victory over Germany and Japan.

1945: World War II ended with victory of the Allies over the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. The world was introduced to atomic bombs when the U.S. dropped two of them, one on Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki. The world also became aware of the horrific carnage of the Holocaust, as newsreels, articles, Nazi documents, and testimonies of survivors detailed the scale of atrocities committed by the Nazis and the abomination of the labor and death camps.

1945-46: The Nuremberg Trials were held in Germany. Judges represented the Allies: the U.S., Britian, France, and the Soviet Union. They heard testimony against 199 defendants accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Most, 161 were convicted, but only 37 were sentenced to death.

1946: Irgun forces bombed the King David Hotel where British administrators were housed. Ninety-one people died in the explosion and 46 were injured. The motive of the attack was to destroy documents that incriminated the Jewish Agency for Palestine in its attacks against the British for its role in raids to obtain weapons and suppress the Jewish insurgency against the British Mandate. The British obtained documents confirming that the Jewish Agency had approved of Irgun sabotage and attacks.

1947: Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq formed the Ba’ath Party, which embraced tenants of socialism and was anti-imperialism.

1947: US Congress passed the National Security Act which established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

1948: Israel began the Dalet Plan to remove Palestinians from territory the UN designated for the Jews.

1948-49: Arab-Israeli War (also called the War of Jewish Independence).

1949: May 11^th, the UN recognized the nation of Israel.

1950: UN created the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). The program aimed to employ refugees by putting them to work on public projects such as road construction, and forest rehabilitation. It employed only 12,000 and was costly to administer. Many believed it would be more cost effective to simply provide charity (Pevsner, 1953).

1951: The U.S. proposed a plan for an Arab-Israeli alliance to protect the Middle East from communist encroachment. Arabs refused the offer as it refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel.

1951: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is created with the goals of lobbying American politicians and distributing money to campaigns in order to promote special policies and regard for Israel’s needs.

1951: King Abdullah, Jordan’s first monarch, was assassinated by a Palestinian. Abdullah cooperated with Israel over the partition of Palestine which angered and dispossessed thousands of Palestinians

1951: Egyptian scholar and staunch Muslim, Sayyid Qutb, published The America I Have Seen. The text documented his travels and the U.S. and offers sharp critic of American culture which he found materialistic, sexualized, and godless.

1952: By this time, world oil consumption is about 4.25 billion barrels of oil annually and the U.S. used about two thirds of it. Oil extraction was already a 50-year old industry in the Middle East, but it has not yet transformed the region into more affluent, less impoverished region.

1952: Four years after the Arab-Israeli War, 1948, about 800,000 Palestinian refugees were scattered across the Middle East and Israel still refused them repatriation.

1952: Three years after Shukri al-Quwatli, was democratically elected president of Syria, Army officer forced him out of office in a bloodless coup.

1953: Israel began construction on National Water Carrier that tapped headwaters of rivers feeding into the Jordan River and decreased amount of water for others who shared these tributaries and aquafers.

1953: Massacre at Qibya during which Israelis kill over 69 Arabs in retaliation for an Arab strike days earlier, drawing UN condemnation.

1953: A UN report concluded that the UNRWA programs could not possibly meet the needs of Palestinian refugees who needed new homes, new jobs, and access to services and resources.

1954: The Lavon Affair is exposed and reveals the extent to which Israel would go to manipulate U.S. opinions about Arabs.

1954: Colonel Adib Shishkali’s government is overthrown following persecution of the Druze, a monotheistic religious minority that blends Islamic and Abrahamic traditions. The coup revived the parliamentary system. Syrian leadership throughout the decade faced conflicts between those who wanted stronger ties to Iraqi Hashemites who ruled Iraq and Jordan. Syria was also best by conflicts between ethno-religious groups.

1954: The Egyptian monarchy led by King Farouk was toppled by General Gemal Nasser, an Arab nationalist who sought the leadership of all Arab nations in the Arab quest for autonomy and prosperity.

1954: American Israel Public Affairs Committee exerted pressure on those running for office in the election year

1955: Baghdad Pact is signed by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and Britain to strengthen mutual commitment to sustain foreign policy favorable to Western interests.

1955: Egypt bought $83 million dollar worth of Soviet tanks, naval vessels, artillery, jet, and other weapons from the Soviet Union via Czechoslovakia (Laron, 2011). This may have emboldened Nasser’s decision to close the Suez Canal.

1956: Suez Crisis leads to armed confrontation between Israel, Britain, and France opposing Egypt, from October 29^th to November 7^th.

1957: In her comments about who controlled the Gulf of Aqaba, Foreign Minister Golda Meir declared that Israel is outside international laws as its court of justice “was not competent to rule on matters affecting Israel and states that ‘do not recognize Israel’” (Israeli Expansionism, 1967, p. 11)

1958: Oil Production begins in Nigeria and it becomes one of the top oil exporters I the world, and also one of the poorest oil nations in the world.

1958: The Iraqi army led a coup against King Faisal II, thus ending the Iraqi monarchy. Abd al-Karim Qasim became the prime minister. He took Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact and established close relations with the Soviet Union. During his reign, Iran supported Kurdish rebels as it sought to annex Iraq. In 1963, Qasim was deposed in a CIA led coup and replaced by Ahmed Hassan al Bakr.

1960: Mossad (Israeli intelligence) captured Adolph Eichman, former Nazi officer who coordinated train transportation of Jews to death campus during WWII. He is taken from Argentina, tried in Jerusalem by an Israeli court, convicted of violating Israel’s Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law (1950), and executed by hanging.

1960 : OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) created by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. OPEC’s objective is to coordinate policies that will impact Western control over oil and see that oil producing nations share a just portion of profits from their oil. OPEC members have also included Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, Libya, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Qatar.

1961: Syrian coup restored the Syrian republic and dissolved the United Arab Republic (its alliance with Egypt).

1962: North Yemen Civil War (until 1970) erupted between monarchists and those seeking a democratic republic. Saudi Arabia wanted a monarchy and received support from Israel, Jordan, and Britain; Egypt wanted a republic and so severed ties with the Saudis.

1963: A coup in Syria that led to the Ba’athist Party’s regime domestic repression, and strident militarism against Israel.

1964:  The Palestinian Liberation Organization was created.

1966: Leaders of the far-left socialist Ba’ath Party removed the government run by moderate Ba’ath socialists and installed General Salah Jadid, who led Syria until he was overthrown by conservatives in 1970.

1967: Six Day War. It ended with Israeli victory over Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Israel took control of Gaza (from Egypt), the Golan Heights (From Syria) and the West Bank (from Jordan).

1969: The PLO was formed by merging Fatah, the PLFP, and other Palestinian and Islamic resistance groups.

1970: Libya succeeds in challenging the 50-50 distribution of profits between OPEC nations and oil companies.

1971: The British left their stations in Iran, leaving the Persian Gulf vulnerable to adversarial elements. The U.S. assumed the defense of the Persian Gulf indirectly through the Shah of Iran.

1972: The Munich Olympics suffered tragedy when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes.

1972: European nations now depend more on oil for energy than they depend ono coal.

1972-1977: Arab oil producing nations experience a most profitable boom in sales.

1973: The October War of 18 days ends with an Israeli victory. U.S. support for Israel causes Saudi Arabia to led an oil embargo against the U.S. and Western nations.

1974: Palestinian attacks at Kiryat, Ma’alot, and Shamona leave many Israelis dead. Israelis respond with attacks against several Arab villages. The bloody exchange typified the cycle of violence that had become normalized by this time in Israel and the occupied territories.

1974: After his culpability in the Watergate break-in and cover-up was exposed, Richar d Nixon resigned from the presidency.

1975: The Lebanon Civil War begins. It lasted until 1990 and demonstrated the growing might of Palestinian and Arab terrorism and its willingness to attack Americans and others outside Palestine.

1975: The United Nations declared that Zionism was racism.

1976: Chairman Mao Zedong died and Deng Xiaoping, China’s new premier, leads China towards economic reform.

1977: U.S. Senate hearings on  three million Palestinian refugees documented Israeli abuse of Palestinian rights, illegal incarceration, and use of torture.

1978: President Carter hosted the Camp David talks that produced a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.

1978: Israelis created the Israel Peace Movement which protested Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

1979: The Shah of Iran was overthrown by Islamic fundamentalists who installed the Ayatollah Khomeini as the leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The reels kidnap 66 Americans and hold 52 of them for 444 day before being released after the U.S. agreed to Iran’s terms.

1979: Soviets invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to the make the People’s Democratic Republic a Soviet satellite, but were defeated by the mujahedeen guerrillas and forced to withdraw in 1989. The U.S. provided weapons and training to the mujahadeen, many of whom became Islamic jihadists against the U.S.

1979: Jerry Falwell established the Moral Majority and becomes one of the first evangelists to mobilize evangelical votes for candidates and to raise money to promote the Christian Right’s interests.

1980: Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election to Ronald Reagan. His defeat was due in part to America anger over the energy crisis and jump in gas prices due to the oil embargo 0f 1974 and 1974, and in part due to the Iranian hostage crisis that he was unable to resolve for over a year.

1980-1988: Iran-Iraq War

1981: Anwar Sadaat shot and killed by Islamic radicals in Egypt.

1981: December 15, a suicide car bomb exploded near the Iraqi embassy in Beirut by Shiite terrorists and killed 61

1982: Israel invaded Lebanon, which transformed the Civil War into a war of Israeli aggression that it justified by telling the world it needed to rid Lebanon of terrorists who attacked Israel.

1982: In Tyre, Lebanon Hezbollah set off a suicide car bomb near an administrative build and killed 76 Israelis and 15 Lebanese.

1983: The PLO bombed the US Embassy in Beirut

1983: The PLO bombed the barracks of US Marines stationed in Beirut.

1987: The First Intifada began and lasted until 1993.

1987: Israelis founded The Twenty-First Year, whose members refused military assignments in occupied territory and refused to buy from Jewish businesses in occupied territory.

1989: Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia declared themselves sovereign nations leave the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union

1990: Iraq invaded Kuwait with hope of annexing it and becoming the Arab world’s leader.

1991: UN adopted Resolution 687 and imposed sanctions against Iraq which results in severe suffering and death in Iraq.

1991: Madrid Peace Conference, October 30-November 1.  U.S. and Soviets encourage a “land for peace” deal whereby Israel gives land to Palestiians in exchange for peace. Israel asked for $10 billion loan to re-settle Jews from Soviet Union. Rabin was open to ending settlement expansion but Likud and Shamir were not. Madrid produced no peace.

1993: Oslo Accords agreements between Palestinians and Israel to explore two-state solution. Accords produced no peace. They did not address refugees, enforcement, borders, and future governance.

1994: Russia invades Chechnya to suppress Islamic fundamentalism but is defeated, resulting in de facto Chechnyan independence

1995: Oslo II Accords proposed three districts in West Bank for self-governance. The U.S. would give $500 million to assist Palestinians, but not give money directly to Palestinian Authority lest it be sued for terrorism.

1995: Al Qaeda bombed National Guard Center in Saudi Arabia.

1996: Al Qaeda bombed Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia where U.S. soldiers lived and bombed U.S. embassy in Kenya. And bombed the U.S. embassy in Tanzania.

1998: U.S. received multiple warnings that Osma bin Laden was going to attack the U.S.

2000: President Bill Clinto hosted Camp David meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Barak and PLO’s Yasser Arafat to resolve citizenry and governance of Jerusalem without results.

2000-2005: Palestinians execute the Second Intifada. Palestinian resistance to Israeli discrimination occupation included  wave of suicide bombings. Interest in Islamic jihad increased during this time.

2001: September 11 attacks. Al Qaeda takes responsibility and Osma bin Laden explains reason for attack in open letter to Americans. The attack promoted passage of the Patriot Act, which decreased civil rights of privacy. Changes in immigration were also implemented and universities around the nation punished those who explored the Islamic perspective and expressed sympathy for Arabs and Palestinians.

2001-2021: U.S. and allies war in Afghanistan to overthrow Taliban government and capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

2003-2011: U.S. war with Iraq to overthrow Sadaam Hussein and establish democracy.

2004. 2004. PLO leader Yasser Arafat died in November, leaving behind a divided Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule.

2010-2012: Arab Spring describes the series of uprisings of Arab citizens against oppressive and autocratic leaders. Regime changes and/or government reforms occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, and Morrocco.

2021: U.S. President Donald Trump announced that his son-in-law, Jared Kurshner, had developed plans to create a luxury resort in Gaza. The fate of Palestinians were not a central concern and Trump thought many would leave Gaza if given monetary incentives.

2023: October 7, Hamas launched a missile attack against Israel and set off a war .

2024: March UN Resolution called for immediate cease-fire.

2024: The UN officially recognized Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

2025: September, Britain, Australia, Canada, Portugal France, Luxembourg, Monaco, Malta, and others recognized the Palestinian state.

2025: The International Association of Genocide Scholars recognized Israeli genocide in Gaza.

2026: February, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV will not join President Trump’s Board of Peace for Gaza. The Vatican noted that the United Nations is recognized as the highest ranking international organization for maintaining peace and resolving international crises, and that the pontiff had no intentions to usurp its leadership.

A Short History the Middle East & Its Relationship with the United States

Reflection, Discussion, Debate, and Research Questions

For the Classroom, Religious Retreats, and Further Inquiries

1. What conditions and experiences motivated Diaspora Jews to create the nation of Israel in the 1800s?
2. Was Zionism a secular or religious movement or both? Explain with evidence.
3. Describe the evolution of the United Nation’s plan to partition Palestine, identify the choices they had following the fall of the ottoman Empire, and describe the conflicts of interest among the British, Arabs, Americans, and Jews relative to the fate of Palestine.
4. Describe the internal debate in the United Nations over the fate of Palestine, the controversy over Resolution 181, and identify what the conflict and controversy reveal about international relations and conflict resolution in the UN.
5. Debate whether the creation of Israel was ethical or unethical and identify the salient criteria for conclusions.
6. Determine whether Jewish settlement in Palestine and the creation Israel have been possible without private funding? Would the nation of Israel have been possible without US economic and military aid?
7. Describe the relationship between Oriental/Arabic and Sephardi Jews and Arabs and Muslims before the Ashkenazi influx and settlement in Palestine, and how the expansion of Ashkenazi settlements impacted the Oriental/Arab Jews, Sephardic Jews, and Arab Muslims.
8. Describe how U.S. policy towards the creation of Israel and support for Israel evolved over time and identify the conflicts that existed over this support in the US.
9. What role did the Holocaust impact the creation of Israel?
10. How did the conflict in the Middle East after 1948 impact U.S. relations with oil-producing Arab nations? Did Israel have a role in those relations? Explain.
11. Describe the Palestinian and Arab nations’ response to the creation of Israel and to Israeli expansion following 1948, and determine whether the United Nations played a significant role in protecting the rights of Palestinians in Palestine and Palestinian refugees who fled Palestine.
12. Was Israel justified in expanding and building settlements in territory it occupied following wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973? Explain.
13. Were Palestinians justified in creating terrorist organizations and using terrorist attacks inside and outside Palestine to achieve their goals? Explain.
14. Did Israel and/or Islamic terrorist organizations commit genocide at any time during the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians? Explain.
15. Describe the role of religion in the evolution of Middle Eastern relations and the Israeli state, and determine whether beliefs about God’s will should be factored into political policies and secular administration of nations.
16. Who do you think were true peace-makers in the saga of modern Middle Eastern history? Why?
17. What does the history of the modern Middle East suggest about the individual’s obligation to secure peace and justice in our world? Explain.