Israel s Opposition to the Shia States

Israel and the Arab World

Introduction

The history of modern Israel and the Arab world is a history of tension and violence that has gone on for decades. It is a history characterized by numerous wars, accusations of genocide, threats of annihilation, and bitter hostilities punctuated intermittently by peace agreements like the Camp David Accords, signed during the Carter Administration to ease tensions between Israel and Egypt. This paper will describe the history of Israel, the nature of the hostilities between Israel and the Arab World, and relations between the UAE and Israel.

History of Israel

Following World War 1, England took control of Palestine, known then as the British Mandate. Prior to the war, the Ottoman Empire had controlled the realm. The Zionist Movement, seeking a home for the Jewish people, had sought protection from the Ottoman Empire, which promised nothing of the sort. The English Lord Balfour, in the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917, filled the gap that the Ottomans left open by assuring Lord Rothschild (a leader within the Zionist Federation) that should the British win the war, there would be “a national home for the Jews” (Balfour Declaration, 1917). In the same declaration, however, Balfour had also stipulated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” (Balfour Declaration, 1917). This was an important qualification, as Balfour like many others had intimated the potential for tension and conflict to arise between the citizens of a Jewish state in a land long held by Arabs and the various peoples of that Arab world (both Islamic and Christian).

Jewish immigrants and Zionists began to settle in British Mandated Palestine in increasing numbers. During the 1930s, Hitler and the German Zionists arranged the Transfer Agreement to resettle Jews from Germany in British Mandated Palestine (Yisraeli, 1971). However, some with the Zionist Movement were particularly hostile to the British, particularly during and after World War 2. A Jewish militia known as the Haganah along with the Jewish Resistance Movement opposed the British through acts of terror, sabotage and violence (Hoffman, 2011). In 1946, the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the British had their military headquarters (Hoffman, 2020). Thereafter, British government wanted to cede the Palestine issue to the United Nations upon the establishment of the latter organization.

Thus, it would not be until after World War 2 that Israeli statehood would come to be recognized in the West. To settle the matter of establishing a home for the Jews, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was proposed, which recommended a partition of Mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. The plan was adopted in 1947 by the UN General Assembly as Resolution 181. Resolution 181 established clear borders for Israel and Palestine. However, Israel would not respect the establishment of those borders, insisting upon a policy of expansionism over the ensuing decades. That policy further exacerbated relations between the state of Israel, Palestine (which Israel has refused to accept as a legitimate state) and the rest of the Arab World.

The first Arab-Israeli War commenced immediately Israel declared statehood, recognized both by the Soviet Union and the US in 1948. To increase Jewish population, Israel passed the Law of Return in 1950, which all Jews and people of Jewish ancestry the right to settle in Israel and become a citizen there. Over the course of the next decade, the population of Israel would more than double. Israel would also begin nuclear development secretly at Dimona, which would create tension between US President Kennedy, who sought to establish better relations with the Arab world, and Israel (Gazit, 2000). Kennedy’s assassination essentially put an end to that tension.

Since that time, Israel has cultivated ties with the West, particularly with the US, which provides funding to the Israel state every year. In fact, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid since WW2, having obtained nearly $150 billion from the US over that time period (Congressional Research Service, 2019). Annually, it acquires a grant of $3 billion from the US.

Hostility between Israel and the Arab World

The Arab world was not at all pleased with UN Resolution 181: it divided Palestine into two states that satisfied neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians. The border partition also blocked Israel from accessing important cultural sites that it associated with its national identity (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013). The Arab states viewed Israel as an intruder and occupier. The Arab-Israeli conflict led to Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in 1950. Israel, in response, invaded the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt initially promised to reopen the shipping lanes, but Nasser closed them again in the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967.

From the very beginning, Israel had been seizing land from Palestinians. Arabs were a majority of the population of Palestine by a factor of 2 to 1 in 1948 and held 90% of land. Palestinians saw their numbers and property decline at an exponential rate from 1948 onward. Following the declaration of Israeli statehood, the Palestinian population dropped dramatically to 150,000 in all of Israel, which soon obtained control of 78% of the territory, an increase of 23% from the days of the 1947 partition plan (Khalidi 2007, 1). Those that remained saw their rights restricted and experienced dispassion of their property.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is best described by Khalidi (2007) in these simple terms: “The degree of harm done to Palestinian society in 1948 is hard to convey. Over a few weeks in the spring of 1948, Jaffa and Haifa, the cities with the largest Arab populations in Palestine, which were the most dynamic centers of Arab economic and cultural life throughout the Mandate period, were conquered by Zionist militias)” (p. 2). Those same militias then went on to serve as the core of the Israeli army and continued to disperse the Arab people and take possession of the land. Lydda, Ramleh, Acre, Safad, and other towns and cities that had been Arab were subsumed into Israel. Even in Jerusalem, approximately 30,000 Arabs had been expelled, leaving a tremendous crater in Arab society, where “the most highly educated, the wealthiest, and the most culturally active, had lost their property and become refugees” (Khalidi, 2007, p. 2). The purge of Arabs of their land continued in the hundreds of villages throughout the territory, with four hundred of the five hundred Arab villages taken over by the Irgun or the Israeli army and other militias (Khalidi, 2007).

The Palestinians who remained were viewed not as equal citizens but rather as unwanted pests ruled by martial law. The Arabs saw Israel as an enormous threat to their peace, way of life and culture, and economic prosperity. From 1948 onward, the situation remained one of perennial tension throughout the territory and neighboring states. The Palestinians described this loss as “the catastrophe”—al-Nakba—and it served as the foundation for their motivation to fight back against a state they viewed as illegitimate. Ramzy Baroud (2009) describes his own father’s experience as a villager, forced from his land and into the ranks of the Arab freedom fighters opposing Israeli occupation from 1948 onward. The personal narrative is situated within the context of Ben Gurion’s 1948 statement on Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine: “Not one refugee will return. The old will die. The young will forget” (Baroud, 2009, p. xi). Baroud would not forget—and many outside the zone of conflict would never hear the stories of the Arab freedom fighters.

As tensions continued to flare between Israel and its neighbors, the Six Day War appeared inevitable to many, with some positing that Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Egypt was in part driven by a fear regarding “a possible Egyptian surprise attack on the Dimona nuclear reactor” (Kurtulus, 2007, p. 229). Israel’s military might far surpassed anything Egypt and the other disorganized Arab states could muster, however. The Six Day War proved how ill-prepared the Arab world was to an Israeli attack: Israel’s power in the Middle East continued to surge as a result (Popp, 2006).

The Yom Kippur War of 1973 followed. It saw Syria and Egypt both attacking Israel. Thousands died and the US and the Soviet Union both intervened; at the end of the war there was a greater sense of a need for peace in the Middle East to be brokered. That is what led to the Camp David Accords under Carter in 1978. Aiding in that effort was the Egypt’s Sadat pursuing a policy of Infitah—“open door”—with Israel to ease relations (Weinbaum, 1985). The Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

In the background of these hostilities and attempts at peace agreements are the numerous proxy wars in the Middle East, such as the war in Yemen. The main actors in the Yemen conflict are Houthis in the north (Shia, aligned with Syria, Iran and Iraq) and supported by Iran (Salisbury, 2015). Sunnis in the south are allied with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the US. Another proxy war in Syria is also related and is between Assad and the various freedom fighters supported by the US, Israel and other allies (Hughes, 2014). Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have all backed Syria in the Syrian conflict against ISIS and so-called freedom fighters, supported by the KSA, Israel and US. Israel, however, has recently allied with Gulf Arab nations, deepening the coalition against the Iran-Russia axis. This occurred largely during the Trump Administration.

History between UAE and Israel

The UAE obtained its independence in 1971. At the time, the UAE viewed Israel as an enemy, as did most of the Arab world (Ulrichsen, 2016). However, the UAE and the US develop a close alliance in 1990 as a result of the Gulf War; that alliance gradually gave way to Israel opening a diplomatic office in the UAE in 2015—its first in the Gulf states (Neubauer, 2017).

Iran, Syria and Russia have represented an axis of power since the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. Russia came to the defense of Syria’s Assad and has helped to secure the state. Israel’s alliance with the UAE since 2020 has largely been the result of forces consolidating over the fate of Syria and Iran. Iran has long viewed Israel as an enemy and routinely threatens to annihilate the state. Israel in turn has long viewed Iran as an enemy, with Netanyahu appealing to the West for support, urging the US Congress that Iran should not be permitted to cross a red line in terms of developing nuclear power, which Israel sees as a threat. Under Trump, the US placed heavy sanctions on Iran and withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal fostered by the Obama Administration.

In the Arab World, the religious tensions between Sunni and Shia sects has caused states to be opposed to one another, and Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran all contain largely Shia populations. The Sunni Arab world, led by the UAE, the KSA and Egypt, tend to align against the former. By forming an alliance with the UAE and other Sunni states, Israel has situated itself against the Russia-Iran-Syria axis.

At the same time, politics and tension over the Israel-Palestine conflict have not made for smooth negotiations between Israel and the UAE. For instance, the Israeli settlements on the West Bank are still regarded widely as illegal. The Trump Administration posited that there was nothing illegal about them, and this was a problem for the UAE. However, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a fast friend of Netanyahu and entrusted by Trump for being responsible for negotiating a Middle East peace, helped to facilitate talks between the UAE and Israel in spite of the West Bank disagreements (Baker et al., 2020). The negotiations that resulted assured that Israel would halt annexation of the West Bank in return for a closer relationship between the UAE and Israel on intelligence and diplomatic matters.