After decades of bloody animosity, representatives of Israel and Palestine meet on the South Lawn of the White House and sign a framework for peace. The “Declaration of Principles” was the first agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians towards ending their conflict and sharing the holy land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea that they both claim as their homeland.
Fighting between Jews and Arabs in Palestine dates back to the 1920s when both groups laid claim to the British-controlled territory. The Jews were Zionists, recent emigrants from Europe and Russia who came to the ancient homeland of the Jews to establish a Jewish national state. The native Arabs (they did not yet call themselves Palestinians) sought to stem Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state.
On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed, and five Arab nations attacked in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israelis fought off the Arab armies and seized substantial territory originally allocated to the Arabs in the 1947 United Nations partition of Palestine. After two successive U.N.-brokered cease-fires, the State of Israel reached formal armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria in February 1949. These agreements left Israel in permanent control of the territory it had conquered during the conflict.
The departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from Israel during the war left the country with a substantial Jewish majority. Israel restricted the rights of the Arabs who remained. Most Palestinian Arabs who left Israeli territory retreated to the West Bank, then controlled by Transjordan (present-day Jordan), and others to the Gaza Strip, controlled by Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of exiled Palestinians moved permanently into refugee camps.
By the early 1960s, the Palestinian Arab diaspora had formed a cohesive national identity. In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed as a political umbrella organization for several Palestinian groups and meant to represent all the Palestinian people. The PLO called for the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Israel permanently annexed East Jerusalem and set up military administrations in the occupied territories. Although Israel offered to return some of the territory seized in return for “the security requirements of Israel,” the Arab League opted against formal negotiations in the Khartoum Resolution on September 1, 1967.
The Sinai was later returned to Egypt in 1979 as part of an Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, but the rest of the occupied territories remained under Israeli control. A faction of Israelis called for permanent annexation of these regions, and in the late 1970s nationalist Jewish settlers moved into the territories as a means of accomplishing this aim.
After the 1967 war, the PLO was recognized as the symbol of the Palestinian national movement, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat organized guerrilla attacks on Israel from the PLO’s bases in Jordan and, after 1971, from Lebanon. The PLO also coordinated terrorist attacks against Israelis at home and abroad. The Palestinian guerrilla and terrorist activity provoked heavy reprisals from Israel’s armed forces and intelligence services. By the late 1970s, Arafat had won international acceptance of the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
Egyptian and Syrian forces launched an attack against Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973 in an attempt to regain land lost during the third Arab-Israeli war. A cease-fire went into effect on October 25, 1973.
On September 17, 1978, after nearly two weeks of secret negotiations at Camp David, Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords — the first peace agreement between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors. The accords sought to establish a framework for peace in the Middle East, and both countries agreed to share the Nobel Peace Prize for 1978 as part of the agreement. These events ultimately led to Sadat’s assassination on October 6, 1981 by Islamic extremists.