ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

Assess the Significance of the Presidency of Anwar Sadat in terms of the Peace Process in the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Assess the Significance of the Presidency of Anwar Sadat in terms of the Peace Process in the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Origins of Dispute

Decades-old dispute between the state of Israel and its Arab neighbors over issues emerging from competing claims over the territory of the Middle East region of Palestine. The Arab-Israeli conflict has claimed thousands of lives, and efforts to achieve a durable compromise have been frustrated time and again by outbreaks of violence, suicide bombings, and breaches of agreements and treaties. The clash between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel has global implications; given the wide-reaching religious, economical, and geopolitical dimensions of the conflict, many other countries have a direct interest in seeing the dispute settled. (Mansfield 1991, 11-19)

The Creation of Israel

In its present form, the Arab-Israeli conflict began in 1948, when Israel declared its statehood (Hourani 1991, 4-9). However, the roots of the dispute go far back into the troubled history of the region. After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust—in which millions of people, including six million Jews, were tortured and slaughtered by the Germans—thousands of European Jews migrated to Palestine, responding to earlier Zionist calls to rebuild the ancient state of Israel. (Cohn-Sherbok and Sudqi El-Alami 2001, 24-35) Since 1920, Great Britain had been controlling the region under a mandate granted by the League of Nations. As early as 1917, Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, in which it declared its support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the historical region of Palestine.

By 1946, a year after the German surrender in Europe, there were approximately 680,000 Jews in Palestine. Meanwhile, new Arab countries, including Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, were being created in the region. The young United Nations, seeing an urgent need to regulate the competing claims over Palestine, decided in 1947 to partition the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The fiercely disputed city of Jerusalem was to become an international city. The Arab community, however, refused to accept that solution. In keeping with the UN decision, Israel immediately declared itself a sovereign state. The stage was set for a bloody conflict, which continues to this day.

The Six-Day War (1967)

The next major conflict between Arabs and Israelis was the Six-Day War, also known as the June War, which was fought by Israel against a coalition of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian forces. The war lasted only 132 hours and 30 minutes—less than six days. On the Egyptian front, the actual duration of the conflict was only four days, and on the Jordanian side, it lasted three days. Defeating Syria took Israel the full six days.

The Six-Day War was a dramatic event for the Arab world, resulting in a humiliating Arab defeat. (Gerner and Schwedler 2004, 22-33) Arab weakness in this war, compared with the strength and efficiency of Israel, still influences the relations in the ...