Basic Chronology of Events in the Israel/Palestine Conflict

1881 Eastern Europe pogroms inspire Zionism

1897 First Zionist Congress identifies Palestine as the site for the Jewish Homeland
1915-1916 Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, Britian promises a home for Arabs in
Palestine
1916 Sykes Picor Accords, Middle East land secretly divided between Britian and
France
1917 Balfour Declaration, Britian promises “national home” in Palestine for Jews
1922-1948 British Mandate, Leage of Nations awards Palestine, Jordan and Iraq to
Britian, Syria and Lebanon to France.
1929 Temple Mount conflict, beginning of prolonged conflicts over religious sites
between Arabs and Jews
1936-1939 Arab Revolt, 3 year long general strike turned violent rebellion.
Approximately 5,000 Arabs and 400 Jews killed. Find citation
1939-1945 World War II and Holocaust, six million Jews murdered. The Haganah
begins the smuggling of Jews from Europe to Palestine to provide refuge
from the Holocaust.
1944-1947 Zionist battle against British control of the area.
1947 End of British Mandate, British leave Palestine, UN General Assembly passes a
Partition Plan dividing the British Mandate of Palestine into two states.
The Jewish leadership accepts the plan, but the Arab leadership rejects it.
1948 Zionist-Arab war, Zionists defeat Arab military.
1948 Establishment of Israel, beginning of al-Nakba, 750,000-800,000 Palestinians flee
and are driven out of the land.
1964 Fatah and Palestinian Liberation Organization are formed, headed by Yasir Arafat
1964-1968 PLO Charter created, maps an essentially Arab Palestine
1967 6 Day War, Israel defeats combined Arab forces and occupies the Sinai Peninsula
and Gaza Strip from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from
Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
1969 Arafat becomes chair of PLO
1970 Black September, Jordanians and Palestinians battle and Palestinians are expelled
from Jordan into Lebanon
1973 Yom Kippur War, Egypt attacks Israel
1974 Palestinian National Council declares policy of supporting the formation of a state
on “any part of Palestinian land”.
1977 Menachem Begin elected prime minister of Israel
1978 Camp David Accords, Egypt and Israel agree to withdrawal of Sinai in exchange
for peace
1982 Israel invades Labanon, estimated 17,825 killed and around 30,000 wounded.
1987 Palestinian intifada (uprising) begins, Violence, riots, general strikes, and civil
disobedience campaigns by Palestinians spread across the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
1988 Palestinians call for two-state solution
1989-2010 Palestinians launch various suicide bombing attacks on Israel, often killing
 civilians
1991 Madrid talks, international community attempts to start a peace process
1992 Yitzhak Rabin elected prime minister of Israel
1993 Oslo Accords signed. Agreement of mutual recognition.
1994 Cairo Agreement, Israel withdraws from Gaza
1995 Rabin Assasinated, Peres becomes prime minister.
1996 Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud elected prime minister of Israel.
1999 Ehud Barak of Labor party elected prime minister of Israel.
2000 Camp David Accords fail.
2000 Ariel Sharon of Likud party elected prime minister, visits the Temple Mount,
igniting the second intifada, named the Al-Aqsa intifada.
2002 Israel begins construction of the wall surrounding the West Bank.
2003 Mahmoud Abbas appointed prime minister of Palestine
2005 Completion of Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip
2006 Hamas wins in elections, comes to power in Gaza Strip
2007 Hamas and Fatah split.
2008-2009 Israel launches Operation Cast Lead, around 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza
killed, 14 Israeli casualties
2010 U.S. launches direct negotiations between Israel and The Palestinian Authority,
talks fail when Israel refuses to extend a moratorium on settlement
building

In the Western sphere of consciousness, few things are visually represented less
accurately then the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. How do we imagine and visualize each
side, historically? Typically, Palestinians are regarded and treated as terrorists, such that
images of the kuffiyah, the Arab scarf, are so symbolically representative of violence that
when I wear one from Palestine my friends jokingly call me a terrorist. Israelis, on the
other side, are imagined as belonging to a democratic society amongst a sea of hostile
nations, and so their image is usually one of a group of people who have for a long time
been fighting for sovereignty after a long history of oppression. History plays only a
small part in the treatment of the conflict in Western media, especially American, except
for the constant underlying remembrance of the Holocaust that has rightfully haunted
Western society since the end of World War II. Accuracy of reporting has become a
problem, to the point of some stations purposely omitting words from their broadcasts
(footnote). In school, the topic is usually avoided, and there is a history of academic
repression of professors who try to initiate an open discussion of the discussion
(footnote). Overall consciousness of the issue in an objective sense seems to be strikingly
absent from the average persons mind in America, and so this project hopes to create a
new and accessible lens for studying the project. I hope to be able to readdress the history
visually, through posters created by both groups of people. In the propaganda created by
both Israelis and Palestinians it becomes easy to deconstruct ideologies and self-
identification, consequently revealing power structures and dynamics that are typically
left out of the mainstream discussion today.

Zionism as an ideology and a movement arose in the second half of the nineteenth
century “as a response to the twin problems of anti-Semitism and the threat of loss of
identity through assimilation (36R&F)”. In its broadest definition, Zionism represents
support for the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national
homeland. Over time, diverse ideologies emerged within Zionism, but the main factor
that each shares in common is the claim to historic Palestine as the national homeland of
the Jewish people. The homeland is often referred to as Eretz Yisrael, a term that literally
translates into The Land of Israel that originates from the Hebrew Bible. It usually
references the “mythic connection between the Jews and the geography of Israel.
(Rowland and Frank, 12)” by implying the Biblical connection between the people and
the land

Since the first century CE, most of the world’s Jews lived outside of Eretz
Yisrael. In 1920, the League of Nations released An Interim Report on the Civil
Administration of Palestine, which describes the population of around 700,000 people
living in the area of Historic Palestine.

“Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these

are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs,
are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large
majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. …The Jewish element
of the population numbers 76,000. Almost all have entered Palestine during the last 40
years. Prior to 1850 there were in the country only a handful of Jews. In the following 30
years a few hundreds came to Palestine. Most of them were animated by religious
motives; they came to pray and to die in the Holy Land, and to be buried in its soil. After
the persecutions in Russia forty years ago, the movement of the Jews to Palestine
assumed larger proportions. Jewish agricultural colonies were founded. They developed
the culture of oranges and gave importance to the Jaffa orange trade. They cultivated the
vine, and manufactured and exported wine. They drained swamps. They planted
eucalyptus trees. They practised, with modern methods, all the processes of agriculture.
There are at the present time 64 of these settlements, large and small, with a population
of some 15,000.”- add grey to footnote
 This poster, published in Russia in 1917 prior to the elections to the general
assembly or Russian Jewry, translates into “Vote for the Zionist List (No. 6), all who
believe in the rebirth of our land through Hebrew labor”. A woman in Biblical garb,
wearing a white robe and a red scarf and sash, gathers wheat in the foreground while men
in similar ancient costume watch from behind. In the book Blue and White in Color:
Visual Images of Zionism, 1897-1947 the scene and costume are cited to be references of
the Old Testament Book of Ruth, an anecdote involving cultivation of the land as well as
ancient Hebrew property rights and familial values. In the background, an empty yellow
field extends behind the figures and the woman in the foreground stares contentedly into
the distance as she breaks from her work.
One of early Zionism’s main challenges was reconciling how to connect Jews
immigrating from dissimilar and distant societies and cultures all around the world. Eretz
Yisrael became a tool that often functioned not only has a bridge between different
cultures of the Jewish Diaspora, but also between Jewish ancient and modern identity.
Here, it is illustrated as Ruth of Moab as she interacts with the land. The physicality of
this land, mixed with the Judaic Biblical allegory represented in the poster, creates the
“rebirth of the land through Hebrew labor”. This functions to connect the new immigrants
in Israel, to each other as well as to the land, often cited by early Zionists as “a land
without a people for a people without a land”.
The assertion of the land as being empty, awaiting its rebirth, was false, as alluded
to by the Interim Report cited earlier. Accordingly, the implication that this image was a
contemporary depiction of the land of historic Palestine is false as well, in order to create
a validity and legitimacy for the Aliyah, or immigration of the Jewish Diaspora into the
land of what would become Israel. The image is almost entirely an image of an ancient
scene, implying an ignorance, or at least lack of acknowledgment, for the history of the
land since the ancient times of the Old Testament.
These mythic connections are the main
symbols present in the history of Labor Zionism,
which used biblical stories to lay the foundation for
a new society of Jewish workers and pioneers. The
movement, headed in its early stages by David Ben
Gurion, took on a socialist characteristics in order to
further its ideology that only through collective
physical labor could the land of Israel be redeemed.

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will

never be recognized.... Jerusalem was and will for
ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to
the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."
-- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N.
vote to partition Palestine.

Published between 1930 and 1940, this

poster was printed for dissemination throughout
Europe in advocacy of a Revisionist Zionist group,
the military organization Irgun Zvai Leumi
(National Military Organization in the Land of Israel). Revisionism, a movement that
began in the 1940’s and was formed primarily by Menachem Begin, offered an approach
to Zionism based on militancy, often considered a right wing but fringe alternative in
early Zionism.
The ideology of the Irgun is clearly illustrated; in the poster, Erez Jisrael’s
formation includes not only historic Palestine but Transjordan as well. Transjordan was
included in the land allotted to the British after the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916,
after which the land of Transjordan was a topic of contention among the Zionist
movement. When in 1923 the British Mandate affirmed that the area east of the Jordan
River (Transjordan) was exempt from the provisions concerning the Jewish National
Home, Begin and the Revisionist movement rejected the decision, eventually leading to
the launching of an underground war against he British occupation of the land. In 1947,
the U.N partition plan divided the land West of the Jordan roughly in two halves, one for
the formation of the Jewish state and one for the formation of a Palestinian. The Irgun
again rejected the further partition of the land, releasing a statement that asked “Have we
not a homeland? Have not is boundaries been set by God and history and the sacred blood
that has been shed up in for it form time immemorial?” (p65 R&F)
As the poster states “The Sole Solution” to the problem of establishing a
homeland was by taking up arms, symbolized in the gun that is firmly gripped by a hand
over the formation of the land. Militancy is thus mixed with mythology as a solution
towards the redemption of the land that Labor Zionism advocated for. In Shared Land,
Conflicting Ideologies, Robert Rowland and David Frank state that the militancy of
Revisionist Zionism formed as a response from the Holocaust, and so Revisionism held
that “any existing potential threat should be met with overwhelming force (R&F 65)”.
Thus, compromise was unquestionable, “land equals strength (67)”, and the conquering
of the land would bring security to the Jewish people. The Irgun became infamous for
carrying out various attacks on the British and Arab inhabitants of the land during the
Mandate period, including the bombing of the King David Hotel, which left 91 people
dead. In 1948 the new State of Israel classified the Irgun as a terrorist organization. While
it played an important role in the formation of the state of Israel, Revisionist Zionism
would not become a dominant ideology until the late 1960’s, when similar ideas became
the basis of the founding of the Herut (or "Freedom") party, which eventually led to
today's Likud party.

“We are the actors in a revolutionary drama, protagonists in an

epic struggle: to gather in the exiles, to rebuild the wastes of a
homeland, to create a society of workers. These aims are not distinct
and separate, but in all truth diverse manifestations of one vision of
perfect redemption.” David Ben Gurion (p 44 Rowland and Frank)
 From 1948 until 1947 Labor Zionism
dominated the political system of Israel and
continued to emphasize its ideology of physical
labor as a connection to the land of Israel as
part of a process towards redemption, not only
of the land itself but of the Jewish people. The
redemption is illustrated in the poster as an
idealized farmer, strong and confident as he
takes a break from his work. The poster
promises multiple things; it promises vigor,
land and thus sustainability, and a community
based on ancestry. It implies not only the
rebirth of the land but the rebirth of the man
himself as he interacts with the land. Published
in 1950, it exemplifies the pioneer of the brand
new nation. He is arguably handsome, strong,
and proud of his status as an Israeli. This was
the process and the outcome that the labor
Zionist movement envisioned in its quest to
“build the Homeland and establish in it a
Jewish state, to make a living socialism and
exalt man upon earth”. (p44 R&F) Again the
connection drawn between the new pioneers

and the physicality of the land is

emphasized in the most obvious ways
possible. In Planting the Promised
Landscape , Irus Braverman describes that
“The redemption of the uprooted Jewish
exilic subject is thus intrinsically tied to and
dependent upon the possibility of physically
reconnecting to the land of their ancestors.”

In this poster, published by the

General Federation of Hebrew Workers
(Histadrut) in 1954, the land again plays a
prominent role in the poster but shows the
less extreme ideology of Labor Zionism as
compared to Revisionist. However, when
considered in regards to the borders
established in 1948, the extremity of the
image of the land becomes questionable. It is hard to discern whether or not the entire
formation of historic Palestine is shown, or whether it is only the borders of Israel since
the man standing in the upper right section is covering the area that would show the West
Bank. Regardless, the ideology does not include Transjordan in its illustration of the state
of Israel.
The men are illustrations of workers and soldiers, one holding an axe, one holding
a shovel and one in military outfit holding a rifle. All three stand facing a different
direction, asserting power over the land beneath them. The text reads “With one hand on
a weapon and one hand at work… (Nehemia 4:11)” and exemplifies an equivalency
between the importance of cultivating the land and defending the land. In this way, the
Israeli military begins to become normalized. Israel is one of the few nations of the world
to require military service for both men and women, and so this equivalency can be seen
as a way to equalize the importance both agriculture and military services.
Similarly, this 1962 poster published by the Israeli Defense Forces attempts to
portray the army in a neutral and normalizing way. Translating to say “Armored Corps
Day”, the illustration shows two children delivering
flowers to two soldiers in command of a tank. It
separates the soldiers from the context of war and
violence, placing them in an everyday scene. They are
partaking in a job of security that seems to be easy
enough for them to take to greet the children. Most of
all, it draws a connection between the children and the
soldiers, who may end up in similar military positions.

"I am increasingly consumed by despair. The

Zionist idea is the answer to the Jewish question in the
Land of Israel; only in the land of Israel, but not that
the [Palestinian] Arabs should remain a majority. The
complete evacuation of the country from its other
inhabitants and handing it over to the Jewish people is
the answer." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 132)
Jewish National Fund director Yosef Weitz, 1941

The militarization of Israeli society was a

reaction against the problem they faced of dealing with
the Arab inhabitants of the land. Other reactions to the
indigenous Palestinians varied between different strains
of Zionism, from denial of the existence of the people
(footnote) to the assumed inferiority of the people
(footnote).
David Ben Gurion, a prominent figure of Labor
Zionism who would become the first Prime Minister of
Israel, addressed the Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry in 1946 on the issue of Palestine and of its Arab
inhabitants. Ben Gurion compared Palestine to a large
building of fifty rooms or more from which the Jews had been expelled. Upon their
return, they found “some five rooms occupied by other people, the other rooms destroyed
and uninhabitable from neglect.”
These five rooms, however, were made up of approximately 750,000 Palestinians
native to the land, native inhabitants that began to be systematically expelled from their
homes throughout the history of Zionism, culminating in the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948,
during which the majority of Arab inhabitants fled or were forced off the land by the
superior Zionist armed forces (footnote).
In this Israeli poster, the Hebrew text reads “The Forest Protects You - Protect the
Forest!” Inside the pine tree that a joyful soldier hugs, there are images of Army tanks
and soldiers amidst a forest of trees that shield them. Above the army scene, depicted is a
man in a hammock and a group of people gathered around a campfire. Advocating for the
trees of Israel to be dealt with caringly, even lovingly, for not only do they function as
instruments of concealment over Palestinian villages, rendering them inhabitable, but
they acted as concealment for the Israeli army as they conquered the land. Furthermore,
they benefit everyday families and communities in the new state of Israel.
What the poster illustrates is the Zionist strategy of creating a new landscape for
the new inhabitants of the area followint exodus of the Palestinians. The Jewish National
Fund’s process of afforestation functioned to create a specific landscape in Israel.
Accordingly, “In the Israeli context, the pine tree has become almost synonymous with
the Jewish National Fund (JNF). JNF is probably the major Zionist organization of all
time. It is also the most powerful single organized entity to have shaped the modern
Israeli/Palestinian landscape. Over the course of the twentieth century, JNF has planted
over 240 million trees, mostly pines, throughout Israel/Palestine.” (Planting the Promised
Landscape,) Journalist Max Blumenthal describes the trees planted by the JNF as
“instruments of concealment, strategically planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on
the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages the Zionist militias evacuated and
destroyed in 1948” (http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/12/the-carmel-wildfire-is-burning-
all-illusions-in-israel/)

“A nation which has long been in the depths of sleep awakes only if it is rudely
shaken by events, and only arises little by little… This was the situation in Palestine,
which for many centuries had been in the deepest sleep, until It was shaken by the great
war, shocked by the Zionist movement, and violated by the illegal policy (of the British),
and it awoke, little by little” Khalil al-Sakakini, 1923, as quoted by Khalidi p. 158

While Israeli identity was shaped by the context of creating a new state on a land
holy to the Jews, Palestinian identity was shaped by the negation of that process; the
decimation of the state on land also holy to Islam. While the Palestinians historically
never achieved sovereign power over, they still considered the land be a home.
Paradoxically, both identities are thus premised by a history of oppression and
displacement.
Prior to the beginning of Zionism, Palestine existed under Ottoman and was
regarded to as “Filistin”, an abstract term referring to the general rural population of an
area that encompassed all of what is now Palestine, including Nablus, Haifa and the
Galilee (Khalidi 151). Thus the people’s identity was shaped roughly by Ottoman
borders, and also by the beginning implantations of Zionism. According to Rashid
Khalidi in his book Palestinian Identity, “the growing problem of dealing with Zionism
provided Palestinians with the occasion to feel part of a larger whole (156).”. After a
failure of the Ottoman empire to pose a solution to Zionism, after the 1916 Sykes-Picot
agreement the Palestinians found their land to be occupied by Great Britain, who soon
after publically voiced their support for the national movement of Zionism in Palestine
(Khalidi 159). The time of the British Mandate in palestine was colored by a series of
failed pleas to the British government, resulting in a concrete national struggle that ended
in “a crescendo of violence, as fighting inside Palestine between the Arabs and Jews
intensified between November 1947 and May 1948 (Khalidi 177)” The movement
culminated in the defeat of the nakba, when by 1949 more than four hundred cities, towns
and villages were depopulated, incorporated into Israel and settled with Israelis, while
most of their Arab populations were dispersed throughout the region as refugees (Khalidi
179).
From 1948 until the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964,
Palestinian identity underwent a period of stagnation from the combined effects of the
Mandate period’s failed attempts at diplomacy, the devastating effects of the nakba, the
violent military defeats by Israeli forces that
eventually formed the core is the Israeli army,
and the new problems faced by the large
refugee population.

The Palestinian Liberation

Organization formed as an umbrella
organization under which other groups formed,
such as Fatah, which would become the largest
faction of the PLO. The PLO originally formed
as an armed guerilla organization that
advocated for the right of return and the self-
determination of the Palestinian people.
In the PLO’s early logo, the text in the
green circle reads “patriotic unity - national
mobilization – liberation” and in the red
rectangle “Verily, We Are Returning”. Similar
to many Zionist posters, the land is used as a
symbol, and that symbol is engrained with a
mythic quality by the use of Quranic language
in red. The land is again imbued with religious
importance, and the process of returning to the land is unity and struggle. The strategy is
strikingly similar to that of early Zionism; the land is used as a mythic unifying factor
that presents a reason for united struggle and liberation.
 In this way, a group of people
who had never been given statehood
was united in a common struggle, and
so their identity was shaped by this
struggle. Underlying their identity were
themes of Arabism that connected them
with the region they existed in (R&F
165), but the distinct characteristics of
the Palestinian people were that in the
face of struggle against an entity much
more powerful, they resolved
themselves into a people who were
heroic, martyrs, steadfast, and sacred
(R&F 162). The anger and struggle the
new Palestinian nationalism identified
Zionism as the enemy, and so as R&F
point out in Shared Land, Conflicting
Identities, “there was no alternative but
to destroy Zionism through physical
force; there was no room for
compromise or rapprochement (129)”
This unyieldingness is what Robert and
Frank refer to as the “tragedy of
Palestinian discourse”.
The heroic warrior is
exemplified in this 1970 Fatah poster.
His identity is clearly asserted in the
text in that it completely resolves
around his homeland and his pathway
back there. The pathway is illustrated by the man masked in a kuffiyah confidently
confronting his enemy. Armed struggle recurs as a theme in early Palestinian nationalist
posters, and in this one it may be considered as a result of the 1967 6 Day War, which
resulted in the Zionist occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip
and the Sinai Peninsula.
 “The Oslo accords were too much of a whole with several prior decades of
Palestinian dispossession, house demolitions, land expropriation and attacks on civil
society. As against that, there has been, as I said, a moral and political solidarity
building up between Palestinians all over the world.” Edward Said Memory, Inequality,
and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Right