By Ayah Hassan, Staff Writer
By now all of us have probably heard about recent occurrences in Palestine and Israel. Since most of us are “Gen-Zers,” we’ve likely only heard about recent events displayed on social media or communicated by our peers. But to fully understand what’s happening, it’s important to learn the history that got them where they are today. “The biggest misconception is that this all started on October 7th,” Sami Elzaharna, a Palestinian-American Muslim scholar, relays. This issue dates back over 75 years.
Up until the late 1800s, although a majority of the population in Palestine was Muslim, people of all religions occupied the country and were free to do so. During the early 1900s, a movement called Zionism developed that culminated in a big meeting called the first Zionist Congress. In this meeting, Zionists from around the world, many coming from Eastern Europe and Russia, came together to discuss a plan to establish a home state for the Jewish people, as they were being persecuted in Europe. Benjamin E Sax, a Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, explains that “the people who called themselves Zionists during the first Zionist Congress saw [Zionism] as a national liberation movement. It should be included that most Jews were not Zionists in the beginning; they were not interested in a political movement. The precariousness of the situation in Europe obviously brought more people to Zionism. But Zionism just seemed problematic to a lot of religious Jews.” It is important to note that although Zionism was a Jewish liberation movement “not all Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists,” explains Elzaharna.
At the end of World War I, the Balfour Declaration was created by the foreign minister of Great Britain. The Declaration stated that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
While many Jews had come to Palestine since the 19th century, because of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust in Europe, people began entering Palestine in large masses. Britain also began raising taxes on farm land in Palestine, and creating new rules, making it extremely difficult for Palestinians to afford to maintain an adequate lifestyle. This angered the Palestinians, resulting in a failed revolution against the Zionists.
According to the United Nations database, “In May of 1948, Great Britain terminated the Mandate over Palestine, and Israel declared independence on the 15th of May. Territorial expansion using force resulted in the first large-scale exodus of Palestinian refugees (i.e. 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, leaving fewer than 150,000 Palestinians within Israeli controlled territory). The 15th of May became an official day to mark the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).” The naming of this day itself reflects the divide between Israel and Palestine, as Israelis call it their independence day and Palestinians refer to it as a catastrophe. Elzaharna relates that after that point, the Palestinians “settled in either refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, or other Arab countries, mainly Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.”
After 1948, the only land under Palestinian control was the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which is 20% of the total land they previously occupied. By 1967, a six-day war had erupted between Israel and a coalition of Egypt, Syria and Jordan which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula (UN Database). Gaza’s occupation continued until 2005. Elzaharna recalls “when I used to visit Gaza when I was a child, Israel had settlements. You would see the Israeli tanks, you would know where the Israeli towns are within the Gaza Strip. But in 2005 they left. And instead of having settlements inside the Gaza Strip, they blocked it off from the outside. When people say 17 years of blockade, that’s what they’re referring to.”
Although there has been conflict for years between Palestine and Israel, “what has happened in the recent weeks is unprecedented,” states Elzaharna. According to AlJazeera News, the purported death toll as of November 29th in Israel stands at over 1,200 in Israel and more than 15,000 in Palestine, surpassing the death toll of that on the 15th of May, 1948; nearly half of them reportedly being children. “In the densely populated Gaza Strip, home to more than 2 million people, airstrikes have forced about 1.5 million people to flee their homes, according to UN figures” (CNN).
Sax points out that what’s happening in the region “is not a religious conflict. Religion plays a role in it, but religion isn’t what motivates it, religion isn’t what caused it.” Some feel like everything would be solved if we took religion out of the equation. “If religion went away, it actually wouldn’t change much of the political conditions because these are the same political conditions you see all over the world, whether there’s religion or no religion. When there’s oppression and when there are some people with more rights than others, it’s not religion that motivates. Religions gets used later to justify.”
What we may see as recent occurrences is actually decades worth of conflict. As we hear about events unfolding through different sources, Sax notes that “you can’t be a passive reader; each person has to develop a sense of critical inquiry.” Sax ended by saying that “the one thing I would want to say is that there’s so much emotion involved in this conflict because everyone imagines themselves in some capacity related to it. I think what happens is when you start to interpret someone’s suffering for them, or to de-value it or explain it in a way or to justify it, it puts them on edge and it makes them feel ‘othered’; it makes them feel unsafe.” Sax’s hope is that “when people are thinking and talking about the conflict, they have some humility. There is a lot of misinformation, there’s more than one narrative and there’s a lot that we can all learn about it.”