In the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949 Arab forces (including the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq as well as Palestinian guerrillas) had expected an easy victory over the small and isolated Jewish state, but despite heavy casualties Israel won. Israel also increased the land under its control far beyond what it had been given by the partition plan. The region just west of the Jordan River known as the West Bank came under the control of Transjordan (which was renamed Jordan in 1949). Egypt gained control of the Gaza Strip, a small region bordering the southern end of Israel’s Mediterranean coast. The demoralized Arab world was unwilling to accept the Israeli victory, and shortly after the war the Arabs began to regroup for more fighting. The war had also created a large population of Palestinian Arab refugees who fled Israel for camps maintained by the UN in neighbouring Arab states.
In the mid-1950s the Egyptian government began to support Palestinian guerrilla raids into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Egypt also refused to allow Israeli ships to use the Suez Canal and in 1951 blockaded the Strait of Tiran (Israel’s access to the Red Sea), which Israel regarded as an act of war. In June 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been jointly owned by Britain and France. In late October, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, defeating Egyptian forces there. Britain and France attacked Egypt a few days later. Although the fighting was brief and Israel eventually withdrew from the Sinai and Gaza, the conflict further exacerbated regional tensions.
In 1967 Egypt, Syria, and Jordan massed their armies on Israel’s borders, and several Arab states called for war. Egypt demanded the withdrawal of UN observers from the Sinai Peninsula. Assuming the Arabs would attack, Israel struck first, in June 1967, and caught the Arabs by surprise. In the Six-Day War that followed, Israel demolished the armies and air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. It also gained control of the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights region of south-western Syria, and all of Jerusalem. A second wave of Palestinian refugees fled the fighting, worsening the problem created by the first exodus in 1948.
The Arab states continued to call for the destruction of Israel, while Israel for its part, refused to consider withdrawing from the territories it had occupied except in the context of a comprehensive peace plan. The Arabs increasingly threw their support behind the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a political body that had been formed in 1964 to create a Palestinian state. Using terrorism, the PLO attacked Israel from their bases in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; attacks by Palestinian Arabs came from within the Gaza Strip and West Bank as well. Israel’s position hardened, and little progress toward achieving peace was made in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat reconstructed the Egyptian army in the early 1970s. Syria also prepared for war and received weapons from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Israel, in turn, fortified its forward positions and was supplied with weapons by the United States. The Arabs attacked in October 1973 on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, and caught Israel by surprise. Egypt and Syria pushed across the armistice lines established after the Six-Day War, which had kept Egyptian troops west of the Suez Canal and Syrian troops northeast of the Golan Heights. The Arab advances greatly restored Arab confidence. Israel, however, quickly recovered from the surprise and again pushed into Arab territory, surrounding or destroying the bulk of the Egyptian and Syrian forces. Nevertheless, Israel suffered greatly in the three-week war, especially from the injuries, deaths, and massive physical destruction of the war’s first two days. Moreover, Israel’s confidence was shaken, and the euphoria that followed the country’s victory in the Six-Day War was lost. In Israel and among most Western countries, the conflict came to be known as the Yom Kippur War; Arabs call it the October War or Ramadan War.
Following the war, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger negotiated a series of disengagement agreements with the warring parties. Kissinger’s work (labelled shuttle diplomacy because he flew back and forth between the capitals of the warring countries, which refused to meet with one another) did little to change the pre-war status quo, and the countries were technically still at war. Even so, the agreements did reverse the military build-up and achieved a relatively peaceful, if tense, stalemate.
In the late 1970s Egypt’s military expenses caused it increasing economic hardship and social unrest, prompting Sadat to initiate negotiations with Israel in 1977. Sadat hoped to end the military build-up and regain the Sinai Peninsula. Israelis greeted Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem enthusiastically. United States president Jimmy Carter facilitated the negotiations between Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agreements came to be known as the Camp David Accords after the Maryland retreat where Carter hosted some of the negotiations. Under the peace treaty signed in March 1979, Egypt regained the Sinai Peninsula, which was partially demilitarized; foreign observers were placed in the peninsula to maintain the treaty’s provisions; and Israel and Egypt entered into normal diplomatic relations. For its part, Israel achieved peace with what had been its largest enemy at the cost of evacuating Israeli settlers from the Sinai and losing some investment in the area’s infrastructure, such as roads and housing. The Camp David Accords, however, did nothing for Syria and only advanced the Palestinian cause in the vaguest of terms. For these reasons, the Arab League expelled Egypt and the rest of the Arab world widely condemned the accords. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated by a group of Islamic fundamentalists within the Egyptian army. Egypt continued to maintain relations with Israel after Sadat’s death.
Following Camp David, Syria maintained its warlike posture and demanded the unconditional surrender of the Golan Heights, and the PLO continued its terrorist assaults on Israel. In 1982 Israel tried to wipe out the PLO by attacking its bases in Lebanon, which had been plunged into its own civil war in 1975. The assault on the PLO, which Israel called Operation Peace for Galilee, quickly escalated into ground battles in Lebanon and full-scale engagements between the Israeli and Syrian air forces. After a siege on Beirut the PLO leadership evacuated from Lebanon and relocated to Tunisia. Arabs were frustrated that Israel had occupied an Arab capital with little intervention from the rest of the world, and the Palestinians of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip felt more isolated and abandoned than ever. Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon by 1985, though it continued to maintain a self-declared security zone inside Lebanon along the Israeli border until 2000.
Excerpt from Encarta.
Post script: Israel is a story and demonstration of what God can do with little people (remember David and Goliath). Israel is one small people doing great things.
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