The Arab-Israeli conflict, the wars and peace processes, the role of outside powers, and the obstacles to peace in the Middle East since 1945

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to explain why peace in the Middle East, above all between Israel and its Arab neighbours and the Palestinians, has proved so elusive since 1945. You need to handle the creation of Israel in 1948 and the Palestinian refugee question, the series of Arab-Israeli wars, the involvement of outside powers including the superpowers, the peace processes and their partial successes, and the deep obstacles that have prevented a lasting settlement. The elective is examined through source analysis and essays in the external paper.

The roots of the conflict lie in competing national claims to the same land. Both Jewish Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism claimed the territory of Palestine, governed under British mandate after the First World War. The Holocaust intensified the case for a Jewish homeland, and in 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The state of Israel was declared in 1948, and the surrounding Arab states immediately went to war. Israel survived and expanded its territory, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled, creating a refugee problem, known to Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe), that has remained central ever since.

A series of wars followed. The Suez Crisis of 1956 saw Israel, Britain and France attack Egypt after Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, a humiliation for the old colonial powers. The Six-Day War of June 1967 was decisive: Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria and occupied the Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, creating the occupied territories that lie at the heart of the conflict today. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973, an Arab surprise attack, ended in Israeli recovery but shook Israeli confidence and triggered an oil embargo with global consequences.

Outside powers shaped the conflict throughout. During the Cold War the United States backed Israel while the Soviet Union armed several Arab states, making the region a Cold War battleground. The oil wealth of the region gave it global strategic importance. Outside intervention both fuelled conflict, through arms and rivalry, and sponsored peace, as the United States did in brokering key agreements.

Peace efforts achieved real but partial progress. The Camp David Accords of 1978 led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979, the first between Israel and an Arab state, for which Sadat paid with his life. The Oslo Accords of 1993, with the famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat, established mutual recognition and Palestinian self-government, raising hopes of a two-state solution. But the process stalled amid assassination, settlement expansion, the Palestinian intifadas, and the failure of later negotiations such as Camp David in 2000.

The obstacles to peace run deep: competing claims to the same land and to Jerusalem, the unresolved refugee question, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, the fragmentation of Palestinian politics, the role of religious extremism on all sides, and recurring cycles of violence that destroy trust. These help explain why, by the early 21st century, a comprehensive peace remained elusive despite decades of effort.

Historiographically, the rise of Israel's "New Historians" from the 1980s, using newly opened archives, challenged earlier accounts of 1948 and the Palestinian exodus, provoking continuing debate. Historians also debate the relative weight of local, regional and superpower factors in driving the conflict, and whether peace has failed because of specific decisions or deeper structural causes.