The Palestine Question: Historical Background

The Palestine question is the longest-running unresolved political issue in the modern Middle East. Its origins lie in the late Ottoman period, its decisive turn in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and its present form in the territorial and political dispute over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — home today to roughly seven million Israelis and over seven million Palestinians. For Pakistan, the question has been a fixed point of foreign policy since 1947 and remains a subject on which CSS examiners regularly test candidates.

The Ottoman background and Zionist beginnings

Palestine had been under Ottoman rule from 1517 to 1917, organised administratively as part of the Sanjak of Jerusalem and the vilayets of Beirut and Damascus. In the late 19th century, two developments began to converge on the territory:

• The emergence of Zionism as a Jewish nationalist movement, formalised by Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
• The first waves of Jewish immigration (Aliyot) to Palestine, beginning in the 1880s, accelerating after 1900 and again after 1917.

At the start of the First World War, the Jewish population of Ottoman Palestine numbered approximately 85,000 against an Arab population of around 650,000.

The First World War and the conflicting promises

During the war, the British government made three sets of contradictory commitments regarding Arab lands:

1. The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence (1915–16) — British promises to Sharif Hussein of Mecca of Arab independence in lands liberated from the Ottomans.
2. The Sykes-Picot Agreement (May 1916) — secret Anglo-French agreement dividing Ottoman Arab territories into British and French spheres of influence.
3. The Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917) — British commitment to "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

The contradictions among these three commitments — and the manner in which the British Mandate over Palestine (granted by the League of Nations in 1922 and operative from 1923) interpreted them — are the root of the modern dispute.

The Mandate period (1923–1948)

Under British administration, the Jewish population of Palestine grew from about 11% of the total in 1922 to roughly 31% by 1947, reaching nearly 600,000 against an Arab population of about 1.3 million. The growth was driven by:

The Mandate period saw recurrent Arab-Jewish violence — most notably the 1929 Hebron riots, the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, and the 1947–48 Civil War that began after the UN Partition vote.

The UN Partition Plan (1947) and the creation of Israel (1948)

The British, unable to manage the deteriorating situation, referred the question to the newly-established United Nations. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone for Jerusalem.

• Jewish state: 56% of the territory, with a population that would be roughly 55% Jewish and 45% Arab
• Arab state: 43% of the territory, with a population that would be roughly 99% Arab
• Jerusalem: an international zone (corpus separatum) under UN administration

Jewish representatives accepted the plan. Arab representatives — including the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League — rejected it. Pakistan, having become independent only three months earlier, voted against the partition plan at the General Assembly.

On 14 May 1948, the British Mandate ended; on the same day, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The next day, armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon entered the territory; the first Arab-Israeli war (1948–49) followed. By the time of the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Israel controlled roughly 78% of historic Palestine — more than the UN Partition had assigned to it. Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem; Egypt administered Gaza. An estimated 700,000–750,000 Palestinians were displaced — the event known to Palestinians as al-Nakba (the Catastrophe).

The 1967 Six-Day War and its consequences

The June 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan transformed the political geography. In six days, Israel captured:

• The West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan
• The Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt
• The Golan Heights from Syria

The 1967 war produced UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied and recognition of the right of every state in the region to live in peace within secure borders. Resolution 242 became the foundational text of all subsequent Middle East peace negotiations.

After 1967, the West Bank and Gaza came under direct Israeli military occupation — a status that continues, with modifications, to the present. Sinai was returned to Egypt under the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty (Camp David Accords, 1978); the Golan Heights was annexed by Israel in 1981 in a move not recognised internationally; East Jerusalem was annexed in 1980 in a similarly unrecognised move.

The PLO and the path to Oslo

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was established in 1964 and reorganised under Yasser Arafat after 1969 as the principal political vehicle of Palestinian nationalism. The PLO's trajectory passed through:

Phase	Period	Defining events
Armed struggle	1969–82	Operations from Jordan, then Lebanon; expelled from Beirut 1982
First Intifada	1987–93	Mass Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories
Oslo Process	1993–2000	Mutual PLO-Israel recognition; Palestinian Authority established 1994
Second Intifada	2000–05	Collapse of Oslo; widespread violence
Post-Oslo fragmentation	2007–present	Hamas-Fatah split; Hamas in Gaza, PA in West Bank

The Oslo Accords (1993, 1995) established the Palestinian Authority and provided a framework — never completed — for a final-status agreement on borders, Jerusalem, refugees and security.

The present situation

Today the political geography includes:

• The State of Israel, in the 1949 armistice borders plus East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights
• The Palestinian Authority administration in parts of the West Bank
• Hamas governance in Gaza, under Israeli blockade since 2007
• Over 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
• 6.4 million UN-registered Palestinian refugees across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied territories

The most recent major escalation began on 7 October 2023, when Hamas conducted a cross-border attack from Gaza into Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. The subsequent Israeli military operation in Gaza, ongoing through 2024, produced over 40,000 Palestinian deaths and the destruction of much of Gaza's civilian infrastructure.

The next lesson examines Pakistan's policy on the Palestine question — historically and at present.