By Tim Ito
Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
Updated: May 1999

Of all the developments affecting the fate of Jewish and Arab communities in the Middle East during the early 20th century, one of the most important was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 – a letter sent by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to a British Zionist leader approving the establishment in Palestine of a "national home for the Jewish people."

Zionists had been seeking the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East territory since the late 19th century, when their movement began taking steps toward securing international approval for a large-scale Jewish settlement. The Balfour declaration would prove to be crucial to their goals as Britain would be assigned the Palestine mandate after World War I – a development that essentially gave the Zionists the charter they had long desired.

With political turmoil in Europe and persecution of Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish immigration into Palestine increased substantially, alarming Palestinian Arabs, who feared that the Jews would soon take control of their territory. Riots followed and tensions between the two groups increased.

To appease the Arabs, Britain imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration into the area in 1939. However, with the near-extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, Western sympathies on Jewish emigration to Palestine shifted, overcoming British restrictions. By 1947, international support for a Jewish state led to a United Nations partition plan – one that called for the division of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, and for establishing Jerusalem as neutral city under U.N. administration. Arabs rejected the plan and violence between the two communities erupted almost immediately.

At midnight on May 14, 1948, the British mandate ended, and Jews proclaimed their independence with the new state of Israel. The following day, armies from neighboring Arab countries entered the former Palestine to engage the Israeli military.

The resulting 1948-49 war of independence was a watershed for Israel, which rolled over the invading Arab forces. By the end of the war, Israeli-controlled territory had increased 50 percent, and included the western part of Jerusalem. Palestinian Arabs, meanwhile, were dealt a crushing blow: most fled the region, living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries. In 1949, a series of armistice agreements was signed in Rhodes, Greece between Israel and its border states: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Violence, however, would continue to be a constant part of life in the region.

In 1956, Israel struck again at Arab lands overrunning the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula – a move that alarmed Egypt, which controlled both territories. Israel later withdrew from both Gaza and the Sinai under a U.N. occupation force plan, but by then, the seeds of Arab retaliation had been sown.

Egyptian President Gamal Nasser, in particular, publicly vowed to avenge Arab losses in the Sinai and pressed for the destruction of Israel. To that end, Nasser organized an alliance of Arab states in preparation for war. In May 1967, amid periodic violence between its ally, Syria, and Israel, Nasser ordered about 80,000 troops into the Sinai, forcing out the U.N. occupation force.

To preempt the looming Arab strike, Israel attacked first – and in lightning fashion – hitting targets in Egypt, Jordan and Syria on the same day, June 5. The brief conflict, known as the Six-Day War, produced more gains for Israel: By the time of the cease-fire, Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the formerly Jordanian-controlled West Bank of the Jordan River.

In November 1967, a U.N. Security Council resolution called for the Israeli withdrawal from the so-called "occupied territories" claimed in the Six-Day War, in exchange for Arab states acceptance of previously recognized boundaries. The efforts, however, met with little success.

After another war of attrition in 1969-70, the Syrians, Egyptians and Israelis battled again, this time in October 1973 in the Golan Heights and along the Suez Canal – a conflict that would become known as the Yom Kippur War because it fell on the Jewish day of atonement. Initially successful, Syria's and Egypt's offensives were later turned back by the Israelis, who pushed the Syrians beyond the 1967 lines and recrossed the Suez Canal to force an Egyptian surrender.

A cease-fire in place, the Israelis agreed to withdraw from the Suez Canal and eventually signed a disengagement agreement with Syria in 1974 – one that provided for a U.N. peace keeping force in the Golan Heights.

A period of relative calm between Israel and Egypt followed in the mid-1970s, as diplomatic efforts began in earnest over a more permanent peace solution. The biggest breakthrough came in November 1977 when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat broke 30 years of hostility and visited Jerusalem at the invitation of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. During the visit, Sadat recognized Israel's right to exist and established the basis for direct negotiations between the two states.

The momentum from the Sadat-Begin meeting carried over into 1978, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter invited the two leaders to meet with him at Camp David, Md. During the negotiations, Sadat and Begin agreed on a framework for peace between their countries, and set out guidelines for a West Bank-Gaza transitional regime. The resulting peace treaty, signed in March 1979, also arranged for Israel to return the Sinai to Egypt in April 1982.

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But as relations warmed between Egypt and Israel, the attacks coming against Israel from a group known as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) increased. By the mid-1970s, the PLO – which consisted of mostly former war refugees dedicated to replacing Israel with a Palestinian state – had begun initiating a series of clashes against the Jewish state from their recently established base in Lebanon.

Similar to their operations in Jordan in the mid- to late 1960s, the PLO guerrilla raids and terrorist attacks brought Israeli reprisals on the host country's territory – in the case of Lebanon, triggering the country's disintegration into prolonged civil war.

In 1978, Israeli forces crossed over into Lebanon, later withdrawing after the installation of a U.N. peace keeping force. Fighting in Lebanon between the PLO and Israel, however, continued into the 1980s. And in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon again, eventually forcing PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, to flee the country. Israel would withdraw from most of Lebanon by 1985, leaving a small residual force in the south as a "security zone."

Despite some promise, Arafat's flight from Lebanon produced little peace in the region. One reason was the rise of other, more radical Muslim fundamentalist groups in the region – ones dedicated to punishing friends of Israel while demolishing the Jewish state. One victim of such fundamentalist aggression was Egyptian President Sadat, who was gunned down in 1981 by assassins angry at his peace overtures to Israel.

As the fundamentalist groups grew stronger, their initially random acts of violence steadily became more coordinated. Beginning in 1987, the several groups – mostly factions of the PLO, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and the Islamic Jihad – organized a series of demonstrations, riots, and terrorist attacks directed against Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The varied demonstrations and attacks, known as "intifada," came to characterize much of the late 1980s, bringing harsh Israeli retaliation against Arabs in the occupied territories.

However, by 1988, Arafat and his PLO faction began making public statements moving away from a policy dedicated to the Jewish states's destruction. That year Arafat, in fact, would express support for a solution allowing for a Palestinian state to coexist with Israel. The statements from a former enemy hardly mollified Israel's hard-line conservatives – and did little to win support of the more radical Muslim groups – but did perhaps signal that some change was in the air.

After a coalition victory in the Gulf War over Iraq, the United States and the Soviet Union convened a historic October 1991 meeting in Madrid of Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese officials, during which leaders of the respective countries attempted to lay the foundations for a wider regional peace.

The negotiations led to a September 1993 signing in Washington of a declaration of principles between Israel and the PLO – known as the Oslo Accords – which outlined objectives related to the transfer of authority from Israel to an interim Palestinian authority. Israel and the PLO would subsequently sign a Gaza-Jericho pact in May 1994 and a transfer of powers agreement in August, which outlined the process by which Palestinians would receive authority. (The same year, Israel also signed both a non-belligerency agreement and a peace treaty with its longtime rival Jordan.)

In September 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Arafat initialed a historic Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement that broadened Palestinian self-government by means of a legislative council and provided for redeployment of major Israeli population centers in the West Bank. Negotiations on the permanent status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and security issues, were left until the next year.

By late 1995, it was clear that, on paper, the progress achieved had indeed been historic, but implementation would prove difficult. In November 1995, a right-wing Jewish radical, angry at concessions to the Palestinians, shot and killed Prime Minister Rabin, delivering a huge blow to the peace process. Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres subsequently called for early elections in February 1996 – resulting in a narrow victory for the conservative Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu's win complicated the peace process further. Having banked much of his support during the campaign on hard-line supporters – mainly Israeli settlers who considered retreat from the West Bank and other occupied areas as an anathema – Netanyahu faced the prospect of going forward with the previous proposals while remaining true to his base.

As a result, negotiations in 1996 bogged down, with both Israeli and Palestinian sides bringing recriminations against the other. Further bombing attacks on Jews by fundamentalist groups and crackdowns by Israelis against Arabs left many to wonder if the process could proceed forward at all.

Several attempts were made to revive the peace process in 1997 and 1998, with little success. A breakthrough, however, came in October 1998, with both Arafat and Netanyahu agreeing to meet in Wye River, Maryland. Extended negotiations produced an interim accord committing the two sides to exchange land and power for concrete steps to secure Israel from political violence.

Specifically, the accord called for Israel to turn over an additional 13 percent of the West Bank to Palestinian control and release some 750 prisoners from its jails. The Palestinians, meanwhile, agreed to a formal revocation of 26 anti-Israeli paragraphs from their charter and, under provisions calling for verification by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, arrest 30 suspects wanted for murder by Israel.

The two sides still face difficult negotiations on "permanent status" questions establishing borders and determining control of Jerusalem – issues that were to be resolved by May 4, 1999, according to the agreements reached in 1993 and 1995. Those issues were put on hold due to internal political turmoil in Israel.

Arafat had said that he would declare an independent Palestinian state on that date regardless of where negotiations stood. But in late April 1999, he backed off, persuading the Palestinian leadership to delay a declaration of statehood until after Israel's general election in May.

The stunning victory of Labor Party leader Ehud Barak over Netanyahu in the May 17th election opened the door for a potential breakthrough in peace negotiations. A protege of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Barak has presented himself as heir to the assassinated leader's legacy. He has vowed to pursue a final peace settlement with the Palestinians and reach agreements with Israel's Arab neighbors.