UN Security Council Resolution 242 on the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Context

The roots of modern hostility between Arab Muslims and Israeli Jews, the Six-Day War, and Resolution 242 extend back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1896 Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist, published Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State. This influential book marked the beginning of Zionism, a movement calling for Jews to return to their biblical homeland and establish a Jewish state in Palestine, territory that Muslim Arabs claimed as their own. During World War I, Palestine came under occupation by the British, and in 1917 the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, pledged in the Balfour Declaration that the British were committed to the establishment of a safe homeland for Jews in Palestine. In 1922 the newly formed League of Nations (predecessor to the United Nations) officially designated Palestine a British mandate, or territory under British administration. Britain's responsibilities under the mandate were to secure a Jewish national homeland and to protect the religious and civil rights of all inhabitants of Palestine.

In August 1929 the status quo changed dramatically when rioting broke out over disputes about access to the Wailing Wall, a holy site in Jerusalem. Charges, countercharges, and rumors led to outbreaks of violence, particularly in the city of Hebron. A British investigative team laid the blame for the unrest primarily on the Arab community, which felt that its agricultural land was being taken over by Jewish immigrants. In 1936 Britain recommended that Palestine be divided into Jewish and Arab areas, but militancy among Arabs and Jews had increased, both sides rejected the proposal, and Palestinian Arabs launched three years of terrorist activities against Jews. Acting on the recommendations of a report called the White Paper of 1939, which suggested that the source of the tension was Jewish immigration, Britain limited Jewish immigration into Palestine for a period of five years, thus ensuring an Arab majority in Palestine. A practical effect of this restriction was that many Jews were trapped in Europe during World War II and the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust.

After the horrors of World War II, which left many of Europe's Jews homeless and displaced, calls increased for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, particularly after the British mandate in Palestine ended in 1948. Anticipating Britain's withdrawal, in November 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine into a Jewish zone and an Arab zone. Jews accepted the plan, but the Arabs rejected it.

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its existence as an independent state, but the following day, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan (then called Transjordan) attacked Israel, beginning the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which lasted until March 1949. Indeed, Israel was in a vulnerable position from its inception. The nation occupied just a tenth of 1 percent of the Middle Eastern landmass and had less than 2 percent of the Middle Eastern population, making it a very small nation (about the size of the U.S. state of New Jersey) surrounded by much larger and more populous nations. The armistice lines established after the 1948 war were precarious. Syria overlooked northern Israel and the Sea of Galilee, Israel's major water source, from the Golan Heights; Jordan dominated the coastal plain from the West Bank of the Jordan River; and the southern suburbs of the major Israeli city of Tel Aviv were just thirty miles from Egypt along the Gaza Strip. Israelis thus lived in fear of a surprise attack.

From one point of view, the Six-Day War of 1967 was simply a third phase of the 1948 war, for the Arab states continued to call for the destruction of Israel in the two decades between the wars. A second phase of the conflict took place in 1956, after Egypt closed the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The result was armed conflict between Egypt and a coalition of Israel, France, and Great Britain. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, having lost stature when he backed down during the Suez crisis of 1956, spearheaded a pan-Arabist movement. This was an effort to unite Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa into a single political entity—and the effort entailed continued calls for the destruction of Israel. Influenced by the pan-Arabist movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, was formed in 1964.

The situation in the Middle East grew increasingly tense yet again in 1967. Border skirmishes between Israel and Syria were frequent. The PLO, which represented the interests of the Arab Palestinians in the region, made frequent terrorist attacks against Israel, often backed by Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Egypt moved troops into the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, and other Arab nations mobilized their militaries. The Soviet Union fueled tension by claiming falsely that Israel planned to attack Syria in May. On May 22, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran, a violation of maritime law and an act of war. Nasser also demanded that UN troops, placed on the frontier between Israel and Egypt after the 1956 crisis, be withdrawn. Later that month, Egypt and Jordan signed a mutual defense pact. Troops from several Arab Muslim nations poured into the Sinai Peninsula.

With the Arab coalition poised to attack, the Israeli cabinet decided to make a preemptive attack on June 5, 1967. Israeli forces moved swiftly and with overwhelming success. They crippled the Egyptian air force and routed Egyptian ground troops from Sinai and the Gaza Strip, drove Jordanian forces out of the West Bank, and crushed Syrian forces in the Golan Heights. The UN Security Council called a cease-fire, which went into effect on June 10, leaving Israel with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in its hands. Additionally, Israel was in control of the entire city of Jerusalem, which had been divided after the 1948 war.

Between the cease-fire and the passage of Resolution 242 in November 1967, considerable diplomatic wrangling occurred. At a summit in Khartoum, Sudan, held from August 29 to September 1, the Arab nations rejected peace proposals and continued to call for the destruction of Israel. The U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, in a speech on June 19, outlined a set of five principles that he believed could lead to peace in the region: respect for the right of the nations in the region to exist, justice for war refugees, respect for maritime rights, reduction of arms buildups in the Middle East, and respect for territorial integrity. Israel accepted these five principles, but the Arab nations, still with the backing of the Soviet Union, rejected them. Efforts were made on each side to court nonaligned nations—that is, nations not allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Despite the cease-fire, the situation remained incendiary, with frequent violations of the terms of the cease-fire on both sides.