Did a little digging on the Internet as a result of several of these threads popping up and found some interesting sites that I think will at least contribute to the debate.
Here is the full text of the Balfour Declaration from 1917. flowbark is right in that it does not call for the establishment of the state of Israel, but personally I’m hard pressed to find another reasonable interpretation of the phrase “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. It does expressly state that the political and religious rights of the non-Jewish population in Palestine, and of Jews elsewhere in the world, should not be compromised, but as I intend to show a little later on in this post, the Zionists had other ideas.
The source of the conflict in Palestine long predates 1948, but it is not religiously based. This is a site I found quite interesting, especially for the chronology it provides.
According to the first part of the chronology, Jewish settlements were being established in Palestine as far back as the 1880s - in fact Petah Tikva, the first such settlement, was established in 1878. Palestine at that point was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and in 1881 the Ottoman government announced that Jews had permission to settle throughout the empire, Palestine excluded. The following year some 25,000 Jewish immigrants settled in Palestine, which the Ottomans viewed as a political problem since they’d said no Jewish settlements in Palestine.
The 1890s were a period of legal and political wrangling, with the Jewish Colonization Association (founded by Herzl and supported by the Basle Program of the First Zionist Congress of 1899) continuing the program of immigration and land acquisition despite repeated actions by the Ottoman sultan to prevent this. It should be noted that as early as 1899 the JCA’s representative in Jerusalem, Albert Antebi, asserted that the Basle Program had adversely affected relations between Jewish immigrants and the local Palestinians. I can find no cite for the actual date, but this essay here has Antebi commenting on the situation in much the same light around 1913.
After World War I, it was decided at the Paris Peace Conference that the conquered Arab territories would not be returned to Ottoman rule. Neither did Britain and France want to let them go, however, since the First Palestinian National Congress in 1919 sent two memoranda to the conference demanding independence. That same year the Peace Conference sent a commission of inquiry to Palestine to find out what the locals wanted. Britain and France refused to participate, and it ended up being two Americans who went and ultimately recommended the project of a Zionist homeland in Palestine be given up. Their conclusions, the King-Crane Commission Report, can be found here.
In 1920, the provinces of Syria, Transjordan, Palestine, and Lebanon declared joint independence, but the San Remo Peace Conference assigned the Palestinian Mandate to Britain, who immediately prevented the Second Palestinian National Congress from meeting.
Here, then, we have the general background - decisions regarding the future of Palestine taken by imperialist powers with little or no input from the Palestinians themselves, while these same powers have expressed explicit support for a program that is generally acknowledged to have been causing political and social problems for 40 years already.
The 1920s and 1930s witness the establishment of several militant Zionist organizations, like that of Vladimir Jabotinsky who called for the forcible colonization of Palestine and Transjordan, and the dramatic increase in Jewish immigration (as illustrated by flowbark above). In 1935 a large shipment of arms smuggled by Zionists is discovered in Jaffa. In 1937, another militant Zionist organization, Irgun, begins to advocate armed attacks on Palestinians. The following year, 119 Palestinians are killed in Irgun attacks, while 8 Jews are killed in Palestinian attacks. Britain, meanwhile, dissolves all Palestinian political organizations and establishes military courts to deal with the Palestinian rebellion that is emerging. Meanwhile a British officer by the name of Orde Wingate organized squads of British soldiers and Zionists to attack Palestinian villages.
The 1940s see the emergence of the Stern Gang and the increased activity of Haganah, another armed and militant organization. The Stern Gang originally called for an alliance with the Axis powers against the British in protest of an immigration policy that favored Palestinians, while the Irgun entertained itself by stealing weapons and ammunition from British military installations. The Stern Gang had originally broken off as a splinter group from Irgun, but by 1944 they had joined with Irgun for terror campaigns against the British.
In 1946, Haganah simultaneously attacks eight major highway and railroad bridges, for which the British arrest over 2,000 Jews. Later that same year, the Jewish Agency Executive calls for a cessation of terrorism by Jews, but it continues in 1947 with a series of letter bombs sent by the Stern Gang to British officials and an attack on a Palestinian family in Tel Aviv that leaves twelve members, including six children, dead. In December of that year Haganah attacked the villages of al-Khisas (page) and Qazaza (page), both of which remain uninhabited today.
Now we come to 1948 - the seminal year of modern Israeli history. They start out the year purchasing 20 warplanes from Britain and $12 million worth of arms from Czechoslovakia, while David Ben-Gurion orders the conquest of Jerusalem and asserts that the State of Israel will come into being with or without an international force behind it, and that the territory will not be dependent on UN partition but “military preponderance”. March and April witness coordinated Haganah military offensives on a number of fronts, occupying villages and expelling the inhabitants. 120 Palestinians in the Jerusalem suburb of Dir Yassein are massacred by the Stern Gang and Irgun. The Czech arms shipments start arriving in Haifa (which was forcibly occupied by Haganah the day after the British withdrew in April) in March, followed by two in May. By that time, almost 200,000 Palestinians were reported to have fled zones occupied by Haganah - not all of them expelled, to be sure, but fleeing when they found out what was going on, certainly.
In reaction to all this, the surrounding countries decide that they ought to send troops to Palestine at the end of the British Mandate on 15 May.
So it wasn’t some sort of secret anti-Semitic plot by the whole of the Middle East to wipe the peaceful Palestinian Jews off the map, as some seem to assert here. The whole history of Zionism in Palestine from the establishment of Petah Tikva to the declaration of the State of Israel has been one of blatant disregard for the local population and national laws, turning into violent aggression and repression once they felt they had the upper hand. This, IMO, is the real source of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and IMO most peace proposals merely serve to legitimize the way Israel chose to carve itself out of Palestine - something I’m hardly surprised any Palestinian finds it difficult to swallow.
None of this, however, is to say that I’m arguing Jews don’t have a right to live anywhere they wish to. I just have a problem with the Zionists, who have shown by their actions that they believe they have to act as an occupying army and assert their right to live where they wish at the expense of the local population.