The incorporation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict within the Arab-Israeli wars

Résumé du document

From the onset, Arab states surrounding Israel - Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon - were concerned with the emergence of a non-Arab state adjacent to their borders, and it is this preoccupation, more than a genuine sense of solidarity with Palestinians, that explains Arab involvement in what would come to be known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Because Arab states seem to stand behind Palestinians, and feel entitled and obligated to respond to Israel's behavior towards its Palestinian minority, striking parallelisms exist between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the larger Arab-Israeli dispute.

A few wide trends can be distinguished in the history of this broader conflict. Firstly, the timeline of the Arab-Israeli conflict is marked by a change in nature brought on by the 1967 Six-Days war. In turn, because Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts are so deeply intertwined, this change of the Arab-Israeli conflict affected the relations between Israel and Palestinians. I argue that the complicated rapport between Palestinians and other Arab nation-states blurs the line between the two conflicts. I also argue that each conflict has had profound long-term effects on the other, partly due to the dream of Arab unity and the intricate links between Arab states on the one hand, and the Palestinian leadership and diaspora on the other hand.

Extraits

[...] It led to the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians, who typically fled to the surrounding Arab countries, where they were at times met with hostility, and confined into dreadful camps, waiting for the opportunity to return to their Palestinian homes. This refugee problem, with the influx of thousands of non-nationals into politically precarious nation-states, caused further entrapment and involvement of Arab states into the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The refusal by many Arab states to recognize the official state of Israel is proof of this increasing espousal by Arabs of the Palestinian cause, which slowly but surely morphed into an Arab cause. [...]

[...] This consecration of an Arab-Israeli conflict of its own was confirmed by the subsequent overlap with other, more specific threads of conflict between specific Arab states and Israel. The most prominent of these sub-conflicts are the one opposing Syria to Israel, and Lebanon to Israel. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 in the midst of the violent Lebanese civil war, leading its troops up to the capital. In the aftermath of this invasion, the Lebanese Hezbollah emerged as a potential threat for Israel, which then engaged in a twenty year-long confrontation with this new Shi'a faction, which most recently led to the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. [...]

[...] This is evidence of how the conflict has evolved from having a mostly Palestinian component to integrating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict within a regional Arab-Israeli clash which at times supersedes the original conflict. Laqueur and Rubin (eds.): 116 and Rubin (eds.): Ibid 7Laqueur 5 Page Additionally, the complicated relationship between Palestine and the rest of the Arab world blurs the lines between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian-Israeli war. The 1950s and 1960s saw numerous attempts at uniting Arabs in what could be defined as a secular rendition of the Islamic Umma. [...]

[...] With the multiplication of smaller points of contention between given Arab states and their Israeli enemy, as well as humiliation felt all across the Arab states after the defeat of 1967, the Palestinian dimension of the conflict seemed almost absorbed by its broader Palestinian dimension. This explains the importance of settling Arab disputes with Israel in the success of a Palestinian-Israeli peace process. 8 Page Bibliography Abba Eban, Refugee Problem” (speech to the in Laqueur and Rubin (editors), The IsraelArab Reader, 5th edition, pp.129-40. Gelvin, J. L. (2007). The Israel-Palestine Conflict - One Hundred Years of War. New York: Cambridge University Press. [...]

[...] Khalidi, R. (2010). Palestinian Identity - The Coonstruction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press. "Security Council Resolution on the Middle East in Laqueur and Rubin (editors), Israel-Arab Reader, pp.217-8. Hisham Sharabi, "Prelude to War: the Crisis of May-June 1967", in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (editor), The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, pp.49-65. [...]