Peace cannot be built on crumbling foundations

The Zionist movement of the 1920s and 1930s resulted in hundreds of thousands of Jews immigrating en masse to Palestine, inevitably provoking unrest in the Arab community.

In 1947 a UN special committee proposed a split of territory between Jews and Palestinians and on May 14, 1948, known as “al-Nakba” or Catastrophe by Palestinians, the first Jewish state was proclaimed since Judea more than a millennium ago.

In a sign of what was to ensue, only a day after this declaration of statehood, Arab armies from Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Syria invaded, but without success.

Since then neighbouring states have raced to form an Arab response to the creation of Israel. Palestinians essentially became onlookers, as the battle became one between Jews and Arab Muslims. The territories in question only made up of about 25 per cent of the British Mandate Palestine, with the majority of the lands forming what is now modern-day Jordan. However, it was the sudden flock of Jewish migrants with Western support and the forcible displacement of Palestinians that enraged Arabs.

In 1964, with Arab government support, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was born, although it was never a truely independent body until the arrival of Arafat, leader of the notorious Fatah organisation, in 1969. Successive attempts to gain territory by neighbouring states only led to further frustration and in 1967 the infamous Six-Day War resulted in Israel doubling the land under their control.

This age of optimism for Israel left Arab states more fractured - as each state differed in its approach to Israel and in dealing with many more thousands of Palestinian refugees. As Arabs states wielded economic clout by enforcing trade embargos, Israel became more dependent on US military and diplomatic support, which in turn made peace more difficult.

A milestone came in 1974 with Yasser Arafat’s first dramatic appearance at the European Union and his famous remark, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun”.

But perhaps, international attention was only really swayed by a dramatic Intifada - or uprising - in 1987 resulting in civil disobedience and graphic images of violence for the next five years.

The Palestinian National Council (a government-in-exile) in 1988 renounced terrorism and voted to accept a “two-state” solution, based on the 1947 UN partition resolution and pre-1967 territorial gains of Israel. But like much in the region’s recent history, total agreement on this charter never had cross-national support.

The election of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 resulted in frenzied Israeli-Arab peacemaking, culminated in the Declaration of Principles and a historic first handshake between Rabin and Arafat.

The birth of the Palestinian National Authority soon followed in 1994, with Arafat elected president in 1996. However, disagreements both internally and with Israel over the establishment of a Palestinian state, the status of Jewish settlements, Jerusalem and the thousands of refugees, soon halted gains.

Amid a background of tensions, suicide bombings and reprisal attacks, peace talks were always likely to be laborious and tentative.