Origins

Although Palestinians trace their origins to a land called Palestine, the vast majority have come to Canada at a time when that country did not exist as a distinct administrative entity. Moreover, for most of the second half of the twentieth century, Palestinians have been forced to live as refugees whether in territories that were once part of historic Palestine or in neighbouring states.

Historic Palestine was located along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. By the second decade of the twentieth century it formed a narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean in the west and the Jordan River and Dead Sea in the east, surrounded by Lebanon and Syria in the north, Jordan in the east, and Egypt in the southwest. In 1948 Palestine was divided into the Jewish state of Israel and two other territories: the so-called West Bank west of the Jordan River (including old, or East, Jerusalem), which became part of Jordan; and the Gaza Strip along the Mediterranean Sea near the seaport of Gaza which became part of Egypt.

At the time of its partition, Palestine had 1.7 million inhabitants, of whom 61 percent were Muslim, 30 percent Jewish, and 8 percent Christian. The Arab-speaking Muslims and Christians, wherever they eventually lived, came to be known as Palestinians, while the Jews were henceforth associated with the state of Israel. By 1992, less than half the estimated six million Palestinians worldwide lived within the borders of historic Palestine, nearly 1.7 million in the West Bank and Gaza and 720,000 in Israel. Of the 60 percent who live outside Palestine, the largest numbers are in Jordan (1,680,000) and in Lebanon and Syria (660,000).

Palestine has for millennia been the crossroads of major trade routes between East and West. As such it was coveted by various peoples and empires, including Egypt, Hellenic Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and various Muslim states. It was also the centre of an Israelite state, which reached its apex during the reign of King Solomon (1015–977 B.C.E.).

What made ancient Palestine unique, however, was the fact that it was the birthplace of two major world religions – Judaism and Christianity. The country figures prominently in both the Old and New Testaments and, after the seventh century, it was to become important for Islam as well. Consequently, Palestine, and in particular its capital Jerusalem, is a Holy Land for three great religions whose adherents have in the past as well as present fought over its control. Since the early sixteenth century, Palestine has been part of the Ottoman Empire, whose rule was to last for four centuries until the end of World War I.

In 1920 the League of Nations created the mandate of Palestine under the administrative authority of Great Britain, whose commitment to the establishment of a Jewish homeland had been expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 (fulfilling the resolution of the first Zionist Congress held in August 1897 in Basel, Switzerland). During the period of the British mandate, which lasted nearly three decades, the country’s demographic balance changed dramatically. At the outset of the period (1922) Jews represented only 11 percent of the population, but by the time of the partition in 1948 they had increased to 30 percent. Jews began to arrive in large numbers after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, but most especially as refugees of the Holocaust, in particular from east-central Europe, after the close of World War II.

During the inter-war years, the Jewish settlers had been encouraged by the Zionist movement to return to what was considered their God-given “promised land.” Helped by international Jewish organizations, the newcomers were able to purchase large tracts of land from former Ottoman-era absentee landowners and Palestinian Arabs. This displaced thousands of Palestinian Arab farmers who were forced to move to nearby towns and cities. Fearing the further loss of their patrimony, the Arabs responded in 1936 with widespread strikes and revolts in protest against British immigration policy. Britain tried to quell the discontent by proposing limits on Jewish immigration and the partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.

The British proposals satisfied neither the Arabs nor the Jews. Particularly problematic were Jewish underground military groups who attacked the British administration. A Zionist conference was held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in 1942; there, a new Zionist program demanded open immigration into Palestine and publicly declared the Zionist intention of establishing a state in the whole of Palestine. In 1944 the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution endorsing the Biltmore program. At this point the international community became involved. The United Nations General Assembly on 29 November 1947 passed resolution 181 calling for the partition of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state with Jerusalem and Bethlehem under an international administration. Britain prepared to depart from Palestine on 15 May 1948. The Palestinian Arabs and Arab states, however, rejected the U.N. resolution, and war between Jewish forces and Palestinians broke out. The Jews achieved a military conquest of major Palestinian cities in the latter part of April 1948, and their leaders proclaimed the independent state of Israel on 14 May 1948. The surrounding Arab states responded with an attack that led to the first Arab-Israeli war.

In the course of this conflict, an estimated 750,000 Palestinian Arabs either fled or were expelled from their homes in Israeli-held territory and sought refuge (temporarily, they assumed) in camps located in those parts of Palestine that had come under Jordanian (West Bank) and Egyptian (Gaza Strip) control, as well as in Syria, Lebannon, and other parts of Jordan and Egypt. This was the beginning of the problem of Palestinian refugees. When an armistice was signed in early 1949, Israel controlled three-quarters of Palestine (much more than in the 1947 plan of the United Nations).

The “temporary” status of the refugees soon appeared to become permanent. In 1949 Israel refused to implement United Nations resolution 194 affirming the Palestinian refugees’ right to repatriation and/or compensation. Two years after the Palestinian tragedy, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency assumed relief operations for the refugees in their areas of concentration.

During the first Arab Summit in 1964, Ahmed al-Shuqayri, the Palestinian Arab League diplomat, was authorized to convene a new Palestinian National Council. This appointed council met in Jerusalem and founded the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as its executive arm. The PLO’s elitist structure was in direct contrast to the Palestinian underground structure called the Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM), which was led by Fateh (founded in 1963). In 1969 the Resistance Movement took over the leadership of the PLO and turned it into an umbrella organization under the chairmanship of Fateh’s leader, Yasser Arafat. Its declared goal was the liberation of Palestine by popular armed struggle.

PLO attacks against Israel, followed by reprisals by the Israeli military, contributed to the outbreak of a new Arab-Israeli conflict in 1967. The brief Six-Day War ended in a victory for Israel, which annexed the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip as well as other neighbouring territories from Egypt (the Sinai Peninsula) and Syria (the Golan Heights). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank fled to Jordanian territory east of the Jordan River, so that the total number of Palestinian refugees throughout the region increased to over 1.4 million. The United Nations again intervened with a resolution that called on Israel to withdraw from the territories it conquered in exchange for peace. This began what later became known as the Middle East peace process, in which the international community, led by the United States, tried to create a situation that would allow for the secure coexistence of all states in the region, including Israel. In this way, the Palestinian problem could be solved only in the context of the larger regional issues.

The situation for Palestinians initially worsened. Along with the PLO, thousands of Palestinians who only recently had sought refuge in Jordan were driven from that country in 1970. Once again they were resettled as refugees, this time in Syria and southern Lebanon. From there the PLO launched attacks against Israel, whose military responded with frequent air raids and two invasions of Lebanon (1978 and 1982) during which thousands of Palestinians lost their lives and their makeshift refugee homes. Other more radical Palestinian groups (including Black September) launched terrorist acts against civilians in various parts of the world during the 1970s and early 1980s, with the result that much of international opinion came to consider all Palestinians to be terrorists.

When it seemed that the liberation struggle abroad was unable to improve the plight of Palestinians, a new form of resistance against Israeli rule began in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This was the intifada (in Arabic: “shaking off”), which began in late 1987 and expressed itself in widespread strikes, boycotts, and attacks by rock-throwing youths against Israeli soldiers. Encouraged by the success of the intifada, which succeeded in attracting sympathy in many international circles, the Palestine National Council proclaimed in 1988 an independent but as yet landless state of Palestine headed by PLO leader Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 1993, under international encouragement led by the United States, Israel and the PLO signed a peace agreement that called for autonomy for Palestinians and the promise of further negotiations for a permanent settlement. Since that time the Palestinians have achieved limited home rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, although further negotiations have become more difficult following a change in Israeli government in 1996.