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General => The Tailgate => Topic started by: remrogers on September 13, 2019, 08:41:57 AM

Title: Today in history 9-13
Post by: remrogers on September 13, 2019, 08:41:57 AM
1993
September 13
Israel-Palestine peace accord signed


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.

In May 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed, and five Arab nations attacked in support of the Palestinian Arabs. The outnumbered Israelis fought off the Arab armies and seized substantial territory originally allocated to the Arabs in the 1947 United Nations partition of Palestine. In 1949, U.N.-brokered cease-fires left the State of Israel in permanent control of this conquered territory. 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, 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 of 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. Israel let it be known that Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai might be returned in exchange for Arab recognition of the right of Israel to exist and guarantees against future attack. The Sinai was 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.