38 ARABS AND ISRAELIS
contained (though with difficulty) by the British, who after World War I exercised
neocolonial powers over much of the Middle East between the eastern Mediterranean
and the Persian Gulf. Officials in London sent numerous delegations to Palestine to
inquire into the reasons for the violence and what could be done about it. One of the
most diligent inquiries, the Palestine Royal Commission, or Peel Commission, in 1937,
became so alarmed by the “irrepressible conflict” that it advocated the “partition” of
Palestine between Arabs and Jews. The British government rejected that option, but
the logic of it became so compelling that the newly established United Nations (UN)
embraced the idea a decade later, when Britain decided it could no longer afford to
govern Palestine. The splitting of Palestine became the very basis for the founding of
Israel despite the continuing objections of some Arabs and Jews to this day.
When Ben-Gurion and his fellow Jewish leaders proclaimed Israel, they knew war
would result. The first of the wars between Arabs and Israelis began the day after their
declaration. Over several months, a carefully prepared, well-led Israeli army fighting to
preserve the new state fended off the uncoordinated armies of five Arab states. After
the war, the United Nations opened the first of many attempts to mediate an end to
the Arab-Israeli dispute. That effort led to armistice agreements between Israel and its
neighbors, but it failed to resolve the underlying conflict or the many problems cre-
ated by it. One of these problems was the dislocation of about 700,000 Palestinian
Arabs who had fled or been pushed by the Israelis from their homes in what had
become Israel. The United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 adopted a
resolution insisting that the refugees be allowed to return to their homes or compen-
sated for their lost property. Within a few years, Israel allowed nearly 100,000 of the
refugees back but has since refused to accept any more. The surrounding Arab coun-
tries to which the Palestinians fled were poor and could not offer the refugees much
by way of assistance. Palestinians, thinking that they would soon return to their homes
chose to remain in camps, which over the years became permanent. Six decades later,
the United Nations counts 4.4 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants. More
than 1.3 million of them live in dilapidated UN-run refugee camps around the region.
The next big challenge to peace in the region came in 1956, at least partly in
response to a phenomenon that mirrored Zionism: Arab nationalism, as embodied by
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic leader of Egypt. Angered by what he perceived
as slights by the United States and Britain, and seeking to assert Egyptian authority
over the Suez Canal, the country’s prime economic asset, Nasser in June 1956 nation-
alized the waterway, which had been controlled by British and French interests. Britain
and France plotted to take back the canal and brought Israel in on the conspiracy. On
October 29, four days after leaders from the three countries secretly agreed on a plan,
Israel invaded Egypt. It was supposed to be the first step leading to British and French
seizure of the canal, the ousting of Nasser, and an Israeli takeover of much of the Sinai
Peninsula. The careful planning went awry, however, when the two superpowers—the
United States and the Soviet Union—intervened to halt the attack on Egypt. An angry
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, believing he had been misled by the three conspir-
ators, used U.S. influence to force them to back down. Israel’s subsequent foot-
dragging in acceding to international demands that it withdraw from the Sinai led to
one of the lowest points in U.S.-Israeli relations.
In the long history of Arab-Israeli wars, the one fought in 1967 was perhaps the
most decisive. After three years of heightening tension resulting from cross-border