Editing Palestine (section)

=====1948 Arab-Israeli War=====
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The 1949 Rhodes Armistice line drew out the original borders for the West Bank and the modern borders of the Gaza Strip.

With its borders now set, here are the basic conditions of the Gaza Strip. With a community living mostly on crops and fish, Gaza (as defined by the Armistice line) is a piece of land 25 miles long and 5 miles wide. It is roughly the size of Philadelphia or Washington D.C., with almost exactly the same land area as Las Vegas. The Strip is today the fifth most densely populated place on Earth, home to 2.1 million; this is more dense than any city in the U.S., including Los Angeles. As we will explain, throughout the rest of the post-Partition era, the Gaza Strip has been surrounded by walls, with the land made infertile, water undrinkable, people starved, and the airspace above (and land and sea surrounding it) militarized and controlled. Imports and exports are not allowed without Israeli approval and Israel routinely provokes armed conflict with Gazan paramilitary groups. Israel's goal, as we hope to demonstrate, is to either expel or kill the Gazans, whose territory would thus likely become a series of luxury beachfront tourist locations and oil fields on and off the coast. The Gaza Strip has thus been described as an "open-air concentration camp" since the early 2000s, by British PM David Cameron and by former Israeli Major General and director of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland. In 1947, however, the Gazan population numbered only 80,000, and by 1950 rose to 250,000 due to immigration and births.
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With Israel declared a Jewish state, the 150,000 Arabs who remained in Israeli territory after the 1948 were second-class citizens. Though they received citizenship and the right to vote, Israel was a Jewish state-- and the majority of the Arabs were non-Jews. Nominally, and as Ben-Gurion painted it in 1947-48, Israel was supposed to be a liberal democracy, an "outpost" or "rampart" against the Arab world's "barbarism", and with a socialist tinge viz. kibbutzim. However, when push came to shove, liberalism was as easily discarded as it was declared.

Between 1948 and 1966 most Arabs were monitored under a military government (junta) which restricted their rights to free speech, to assembly, to movement, and so on. They were not allowed to join the Israeli trade unions federation until 1965, and 40% of the land was taken by the Israelis for their own use, which usually did not benefit the Arab citizenry. The Arab sector was and is afforded disproportionately less than Jewish Israeli territories in terms of educational, medical, infrastructural, and other public funding. Thousands of refugees tried to cross the armistice borders seeking their relatives, homes, and lost possessions. It is estimated that Israeli forces killed 2-5,000 people who tried to cross.

Throughout the 1950s and '60s, the Palestinian Fedayeen movement gained prominence as a band of decentralized rebel forces against Israel. In retaliation for the Yehud attack, in which a Palestinian Fedayeen squad attacked and killed a family in their home, the Israelis launched the Qibya massacre under Operation Shoshana (1953). Operation Shoshana was a revenge operation against Palestinian forces in the West Bank who resorted to violence against Israeli settlers in addition to the IDF soldiers who occupied the land. During the Qibya massacre, Israelis killed 69 Palestinians villagers (two-thirds of whom were women and children) and blew up 45 houses, a school, and a mosque. Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary later: "The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to be an example for everyone." Original documents of the time showed that Sharon personally ordered his troops to achieve "maximal killing and damage to property", and post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.

In 1954, Israel launched a failed covert operation called Operation Susanna (also known as the Lavon affair) in Egypt. A group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by the Mossad to plant explosives at civilian targets owned by Egypt, Britain, and the United States. The terror attacks were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian communists with the goal of forcing Britain to retain its occupying troops around the Suez Canal. No one was killed as the plan was thwarted, but Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon was forced to resign and the Mossad cell was prosecuted in Israeli court.