The Egyptian Pharaohs occupied part of Canaan in 3200 BC, building fortresses to protect their trade routes, but the country kept its independence. Around 2000 BC, another Semitic people, Abraham’s Hebrews, passed through Palestine on their way south. Seven centuries later, twelve Hebrew tribes returned from Egypt, following Moses. There was fierce fighting over possession of the land. The Bible records that «The sons of Judah were unable to exterminate the Jebusites that dwell in Jerusalem» (Joshua 15, 63).
Four centuries later, Isaac’s son David managed to defeat the Jebusites and unite the Jewish nation. After the death of his son Solomon the Hebrews split into two states, Israel and Judah. These later fell into the hands of the Assyrians, in 721 BC, and Chaldeans, in 587 BC. It was in 587 that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and took the Jews into captivity in Babylon.
In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Palestine, but the territory returned to the Egyptian Empire of the Ptolemies soon after his death. The country was subdued by the Seleucids from Syria before a rebellion, headed by Judas Maccabeus, restored the Jewish state in 67 BC.
In 63 BC, the Roman Empire seized Jerusalem, placing the city under its domination. Maccabeans, Zealots and other Jewish tribes resisted the invaders but were fiercely subdued. Solomon’s temple was demolished around 70 AD, and the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem around 135 AD.
The Romans gave Palestine its present name, and Roman domination was followed by that of the Byzantine Empire (the Roman Empire in the East), which lasted until 611 when the province was invaded by the Persians. The Arabs, a Semitic people from the inner peninsula, conquered Palestine in 634, and, according to legend, it was in Jerusalem that the prophet Muhammad rose to the heavens. As a result, the city became a holy place for all three monotheistic religions.
The Islamic faith and the Arabic language united all the Semitic peoples except for the Jews. With short intervals of partial domination by the Christian Crusaders and the Mongols in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, Palestine had Arab rulers for almost 1,000 years and Islamic governments for 15 centuries.
In 1516, Jerusalem was conquered by the Ottoman Empire which maintained power until the end of World War I. During this conflict, the British promised Shereef Hussein the independence of the Arab lands in exchange for his cooperation in the struggle against the Turks. At the same time, in 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour promised the Zionist Movement the establishment of a «Jewish National Homeland» in Palestine.
Britain had no power at all over the area, either de facto or de jure, but it soon obtained this right by defeating the Turks, with the help of Arab allies, with a League of Nations mandate in 1922. Massive immigration raised the Jewish population of Palestine from 50,000 at the beginning of the century to 300,000 prior to World War II (see Israel).
The Palestinians staged a general strike in April 1936 in protest against this immigration, which they saw as a threat to their rights. The British put forward a plan for the partition of Palestine into three states: Jewish in the north, Arab in the south, and a third section under British administration in the Jerusalem-Jaffa (Tel Aviv) corridor. The Arabs rejected the plan and rebellion broke out, lasting until 1939, when London gave up the idea and set limits to immigration.
Once World War II was over, Britain handed the problem over to the newly-established United Nations.
When the UN General Assembly approved a new partition plan (1947) 749,000 Arabs and 9,250 Jews lived in the territory where the Arab State would be set up, while 497,000 Arabs and 498,000 Jews lived in the part which was to become the Jewish state.
To drive the Palestinians from their land, a detachment of the Irgun organization commanded by Menachem Begin raided the village of Deir Yasin on April 9 1948, killing 254 civilians. 10,000 terrified Palestinians left the country.
On May 14 1948, Israel unilaterally proclaimed itself an independent country. Neighboring Arab armies immediately attacked, but were unable to prevent the consolidation of the Jewish State. On the contrary, the latter emerged from the 1949 war with a land area larger than that proposed by the United Nations.
More than half of Palestine’s inhabitants had abandoned their homes: most of them lived as refugees on the West Bank, a territory which had been annexed by the Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan, and in the Gaza Strip, which was under Egyptian administration.
In the eyes of the United Nations and therefore of international law, the Palestinians were not a people but simply refugees, a «problem» to be solved.
Political decisions about the Palestinian cause were left entirely in the hands of the Arab governments, who even had the right to appoint the Palestinian representative to the Arab League. At the 1964 Arab summit, Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, asked the League to take on the task of forging a united Palestinian organization.
In Jerusalem, on May 27, the Palestine National Council met for the first time. There were 422 participants, including personalities, business leaders, representatives of the refugee camps, the trade-union organizations, and the young people’s and women’s groups; they founded the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Palestinian groups already operating secretly, such as Al Fatah, were wary of this Arab-promoted organization as they distrusted its emphasis on using diplomatic channels for its struggle. They were convinced that their land could only be recovered by military force.
On January 1 1965, the first armed operation took place in Israel. The attacks intensified during the following months, until the outbreak of the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel occupied all of Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The defeat of the regular Arab armies strengthened the conviction that guerrilla warfare was the only path.
