Foreign Intervention as a Significant Barrier to
Peace between Arabs and Israelis during 1900-2000
“To what extent do you consider foreign intervention the most significant barrier to peace between Arabs and Israelis across the period 1900-2000?”
Throughout the 20th Century relations between Arabs and Israelis in Palestine have undergone immense tension, change and deterioration, with both parties facing many barriers to peace. Foreign intervention is often listed as one such barrier to this peace. While the importance of foreign intervention cannot be omitted, other factors can be argued to have been both equally and more detrimental to the peace process. These include the founding of the Haganah, the 1948 War after the declaration of the State of Israel, and the rise of political extremism. The aim of this essay is to identify which barrier among so many was most significant in the hundred year period from 1900 to 2000.
Prior to the 1900’s Palestine had been inhabited by both Arabs and Jews, who generally lived peacefully. From 1920 until 1948, Palestine was governed under British Mandate, the first major example of foreign intervention in the 20th Century. The McMahon Letter of 1915 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 were key events affecting the situation. The McMahon Letter from Governor Henry McMahon to Arab Sharif Husayn of Mecca affirmed how Britain would “recognize and support the independence of the Arabs” on condition that Arab forces helped to overthrow the Ottoman forces in Palestine towards the end of World War One. In 1917, James Arthur Balfour, the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, wrote to Lord Rothschild, a prominent Jewish figure at the time, informing that Britain favoured “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. This letter, only two years on from the McMahon-Husayn correspondence, was widely publicised by triumphant Zionists over the world and was later credited as a planting “the seeds of a conflict which has lasted almost a century and is unlikely to be resolved before another century has
Throughout the 20th Century relations between Arabs and Israelis in Palestine have undergone immense tension, change and deterioration, with both parties facing many barriers to peace. Foreign intervention is often listed as one such barrier to this peace. While the importance of foreign intervention cannot be omitted, other factors can be argued to have been both equally and more detrimental to the peace process. These include the founding of the Haganah, the 1948 War after the declaration of the State of Israel, and the rise of political extremism. The aim of this essay is to identify which barrier among so many was most significant in the hundred year period from 1900 to 2000.
Prior to the 1900’s Palestine had been inhabited by both Arabs and Jews, who generally lived peacefully. From 1920 until 1948, Palestine was governed under British Mandate, the first major example of foreign intervention in the 20th Century. The McMahon Letter of 1915 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 were key events affecting the situation. The McMahon Letter from Governor Henry McMahon to Arab Sharif Husayn of Mecca affirmed how Britain would “recognize and support the independence of the Arabs” on condition that Arab forces helped to overthrow the Ottoman forces in Palestine towards the end of World War One. In 1917, James Arthur Balfour, the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, wrote to Lord Rothschild, a prominent Jewish figure at the time, informing that Britain favoured “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. This letter, only two years on from the McMahon-Husayn correspondence, was widely publicised by triumphant Zionists over the world and was later credited as a planting “the seeds of a conflict which has lasted almost a century and is unlikely to be resolved before another century has