Israel and the Palestinians: 2. Israel

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Hello and welcome to Understand Israel and the Palestinians.

I'm Katya Adler.

Amongst the noise and the trauma of this conflict, we take a breath and a step back to provide context and a who's who guide to help you get to grips with the complexities of what's going on today.

Throughout our series, we take a detailed look at the Israeli and Palestinian experience, the rise of militant groups and the role of global players in the region.

Last episode we looked at Palestinians, where and how they live, and in this one we'll examine what shaped modern Israel.

I lived in Israel, also working and staying for extended periods in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in the wider Middle East for many years.

And I find that knowing the region with its passions, contradictions and nuances really helps.

Also helping us today, from Jerusalem, we're joined by the BBC's Tim Franks, who covered the region for years, and will speak to Greg Carlstrom, the Middle East correspondent of The Economist.

Some basic facts to kick us off.

There are around 9 million people living in Israel.

Most are Jewish, but there are also 2 million non-Jewish Israelis of Arab or Palestinian origin.

It's a country and a region that sparks interest and depth of feeling far beyond the geographical borders.

As we heard in episode 1, the founding of Israel in 1948 was seen as a catastrophe by the Palestinians who lived there before the State of Israel was founded.

So, Tim, how would you describe the Israeli idea of Israel, or even the Jewish idea of Israel?

The idea of Israel, for a lot of Jews, although not all Jews around the world, is sort of twofold.

One is mystical and mythical, and the other one is extremely real.

I mean, the foundational belief about Israel for Jews in Israel is that this is the Holy Land, the land where Jews first lived as a people, that Jews spent nearly 2,000 years in exile yearning to return.

You know, that fed into the equally pressing need for a refuge from anti-Semitism.

And the early state builders of Israel wanted it to be, especially after the Holocaust, not just a refuge, but they also wanted it to be a beacon.

And it is still the boast that this is a Jewish state, but it is a democratic state in a region that does not do democracy.

If we look at the geography, Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, it's all tiny, really.

Israel itself is about 250 miles long and about 70 miles wide at most.

As for its neighbours, you have Syria and Lebanon to the north, Jordan to the east, Egypt and the Red Sea to the south.

Relations with Jordan and Egypt have, well, they've been more normalized over time, but since Israel was created, it's fought all its neighbours at different points.

So kids grow up there with a constant sense of threat.

But Tim, the Six-Day War of 1967, that left a particular legacy.

67, you know, really did feel like an existential war to Israelis.

They felt that they were about to be attacked by egypt by syria by jordan so they launched a a preemptive strike and astonishingly the hostilities were over uh pretty much within six days not only that the israelis had conquered a vast amount of new territory the golan heights from syria They conquered territory which we now call West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and they conquered Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt.

There was further massive displacement of Palestinians.

I mean, there had been a huge displacement of Palestinians after 1948.

There are hundreds of thousands more Palestinians were displaced in 1967.

Syrians were displaced from the Golan Heights.

And it also wasn't just a massive geographical change, but it was a massive change in psyche as well.

I think that this was Israel showing the region that it was was a superpower.

But it also created a rift in Israeli society and it changed how the outside world viewed Israel because it became an occupier in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Without a doubt, and you know, part of that was driven by the way in which the population who were already living there, the Palestinians, were treated.

And it was harsh military rule.

It was two standards of administration, two standards of justice, and the template was set.

That difference in treatment is something which goes to the core of so many of the problems that Israel faces internally and faces in terms of its standing in the world.

Yes, and controversially, in the years that followed, and increasingly with the support of Israel's government, people who became known as Jewish settlers moved into the Palestinian territories.

They left Gaza in 2005, but today there's about half a million settlers living across large areas of the West Bank, and that's not even including East Jerusalem.

The settlements are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

But Tim, religious ideology really seems to be a driving force of the settler movement.

For settlers, for a lot of them who are ideologically motivated, the West Bank, this is the land that really matters to them.

I mean, you know, Tel Aviv and Haifa, which are in what most of the world regards as Israel proper, you know, they're not mentioned in the Bible.

But places like Betel and Shiloh and Hebron, places that we would call settlements, comma, illegal under international law, comma, well, for a lot of the people who live there, there is a belief that this is their land by birthright.

And a lot of them are also living in some of the most contentious, some of the tensest places in the West Bank.

And they are also much more powerful politically and they're much more willing as well to use violence to make their presence known and to fight for the space.

The occupation and the settlements have provoked such anger amongst Palestinians.

There were two long-running intifada, that's uprisings, by Palestinians against Israel.

One started in the late 80s and the other in the early 2000s and thousands died.

At times we've seen the violence less intense, but the conflict has never stopped.

And we can't really talk about Israel, can we, without talking about Israel's military, known as the IDF, the Israel Defence Forces.

Pretty much everyone in Israel is eligible for military service, men and women.

And the IDF holds a special place in Israeli society.

When you're in Israel, you often see young soldiers hitching a ride by the side of the road, and passers-by stop to give them a lift because they see them in some way as their children.

Yeah, I mean, the IDF, the Israel Defence Forces, the Army,

it's similar probably, but with bells on, to how Britons often talk about the National Health Service.

I mean, it's just it is

the respected, beloved institution.

It has, of course, been the one institution that has kept Israel alive over its 75 tumultuous years.

What kind of impact do you think it has on the psychology of Israel and on Israeli youngsters when you think that at the age of 17 or 18, most of them are called on to serve in the army, hold a gun and hold power in the occupied territories?

I think for some young Israelis, especially these days, the only contact that they have with Palestinians is when they are posted during their national service to doing guard duty or checkpoint duty in the West Bank.

And it means that their only experience of direct face-to-face experience of Palestinians is one which is extremely tense on both sides.

And in some ways today's military in Israel really reflects a broader shift we're seeing in Israeli politics and society.

Religious and conservative voices are much more prominent.

I can discuss all that now with Greg Carlstrom, Middle East correspondent of The Economist.

Greg, so much much has changed politically in Israel.

Right.

It's a country with a lot of very deep internal divisions.

People have what can seem like almost mutually incompatible ideas of religion and state, for example, national identity, Jewish identity.

The vision of the state back in 1948 when Israel was founded, the vision of people like David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, was to create a sort of, on the one hand, economically left-wing socialist, and on the other hand, a very secular society.

That was the way people who founded Israel identified it.

Okay, but now the country's leadership has become more religious, more right-wing.

There's been a big increase in the prominence of people following stricter forms of Judaism, like the modern Orthodox.

They think the West Bank is theirs, God-given.

The modern Orthodox are a growing force.

They are religiously observant.

They also tend to be more nationalist and more hawkish in their political views.

And so it's often identified with the settler movement in the occupied territories.

And they have, particularly, over the past decade or so of Prime Minister Netanyahu's rule, they have become a very important political force.

Immigration has also had a huge political impact, right?

I mean, for a long time, Israel was ruled by the Labour Party associated with European Jews.

Over the years, Jews have increasingly been arriving from the Arab world, and they tend to support the right-wing, more hard-line Likud party.

They've helped it win power.

There's also been that influx of people into Israel from Russia.

That's right.

The Labour Party, which ruled Israel for the first three decades, was and still is identified by many Israelis as being an Ashkenazi party, a party that catered to Jews of European origin.

In 1977, when the Likud Party, the main right-wing party, won an election for the first time, that was seen as not just a political shift in Israel, but a shift in the balance of power between the European Jews and the Mizrahi Jews, the Jews from Arab countries from North Africa.

Then, as you mentioned, the influx of Russians in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, that also, I think, pushed Israel a bit further to the right.

Not because that community is particularly religious, many of them are not, but because they just tend to be more conservative in their worldview.

So what about the peace movement?

For decades, we used to hear in Israel about the hawks and the doves politically.

You don't hear much about the doves these days.

No, the peace movement really ceased to be an operative force in Israeli politics more than two decades ago.

I think what really was the beginning of the end for the peace camp, of course, was the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005, that five-year stretch of Palestinian suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis.

And it also meant that a generation of young Israelis growing up during the Second Intifada became much more hawkish than their parents internalized this idea that we have no partner on the Palestinian side and we can't negotiate with them and we need a military solution to this rather than a political solution to this.

And you see, even today, young Israelis, it's one of the few countries where young people tend to be more conservative in their political views in many ways than their parents.

And what kind of impact would you say Israel's longest-serving prime minister has had?

Of course, we're talking about Benjamin Netanyahu or Bibi.

Netanyahu has always had a worldview that there cannot be a settlement with the Palestinians, there cannot be a two-state solution, and he has devoted his entire political career to trying to make his worldview a reality.

And I think what we've seen over the past few days and what many Israelis have been talking about is, you know, Netanyahu's view of the conflict was that the Palestinians could be managed indefinitely, that the occupation was sustainable, that the status quo was sustainable.

Yes, there would be some small moments of violence violence here and there, but broadly, the Palestinians would just accept to be stateless indefinitely.

And as many Israelis have pointed out over the past few days, that view of the conflict now seems to have been utterly wrong.

I think the other way in which he has done a lot to reshape Israeli politics is

elections have become almost a referendum on whether or not you want this one man to be prime minister.

And I think that is a major fundamental change in Israeli politics.

Although if there's one thing you can pretty much guarantee in Israel, that's when the country is or feels attacked, people unite.

At least in the short term.

My thanks to Greg Carlstrom of The Economist and our own Tim Franks in Jerusalem.

In our next episode, we'll look at the rise of Hamas.

Hello, I'm Tom Bateman, a BBC correspondent based here in Jerusalem.

Now, as you've been hearing, this current conflict does have deep roots, and there's one period in particular that was foundational.

It was a kind of bauge.

There is one beautiful quote where one British official said, I loathe them all.

They are a beastly race, and it means Jews and Palestinians.

There was a general perception in the Syrian population that the French were arrogant, brutal conquerors.

This was the basis of everything that went wrong after that.

So much happened in the three decades after the First World War, when Britain and France were handed so-called mandates to govern this region, that I've made a series about it.

There was a very strong negative reaction among the great majority of the population.

It touched every fibre of my being.

I still feel it today.

I've been speaking to people who lived through that critical period that shaped the modern Middle East and some of the historians who explain it best.

The mandates is available now on BBC Sounds.

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