We have to painfully acknowledge the fact that the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which has been going on for three quarters of a century, flared up again: on October 7, on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the militants of the radical movement Hamas attacked Israeli settlements beginning a new war, with civilian casualties: senior people, women and children.
The history of the issue is complex. The core of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the cause of all wars in the Middle East was the Palestinian problem. Aliyah (repatriation of Jews to Palestine, guaranteed in the Law of Return, which was passed by the Knesset in 1950) began after World War II (Palestine was under the British rule then). Since Arab-Jewish conflicts began to break out with the number of settlers increasing, in 1947 the UN officially recognized the existence of two states in Palestine, the Arab and the Jewish. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, being major religious centers, were to be considered international cities. The Arab majority refused to partition Palestine.
In 1948 Israel declared its statehood, and on the next day it was attacked by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. They failed in their quest to destroy Israel, but the war they launched caused a mass exodus of Palestinians, many of them having succumbed to the calls of Arab leaders who promised quick victory and the end of the “Zionist entity”.
As Gennady Tarasov, Ambassador of Russia to Israel from 2002 to 2007, recalled, the USSR initially advocated the creation of a dual democratic state.
In 1947 Joseph Stalin agreed to the formation of Israel, believing that that would undermine the British influence in the region. He did it because the first Jewish settlers, many of whom fought in World War II, adhered to socialist and pro-Soviet views. However, over time, Israeli leaders adopted a pro-American position.
The Arabs, on the other hand, began to gravitate towards the ideas of liberation and socialism. For many decades, the Soviet Union supported their national liberation struggle, primarily, that of the Arab people of Palestine, who, as a result of the Arab-Israeli wars and the expansion of Israel, lost their homeland.
The Arab-Israeli wars of 1947–1949, 1956, 1967, 1973 and the other crises that followed did not bring a solution to the conflict. Quite the contrary. According to some estimates, there are up to 5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside Palestine in the neighboring Arab countries. Israel kept expanding its lands and settling Palestine. The territories of the Palestinians kept shrinking, and their population was growing faster than the Israeli one. At least 2.5 million people now live on the West Bank and about the same number reside in the tiny enclave of the Gaza Strip, which is considered one of the most densely populated parts of the world (in 1947, the strip with its capital Gaza, one of the oldest cities on our planet, became part of the territory allocated for the creation of an Arab state).
Solutions to the Palestinian problem have often been rejected not only by Israeli but also by Palestinian leaders. Thus, in 2000, in accordance with the agreements signed at Camp David, the Palestinians were offered another opportunity to create their own state. $30 billion was offered as compensation for refugees. This required the Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to exist, an offer Yasser Arafat rejected at the time.
The great powers have not yet managed to reach a settlement to the long-standing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, although at certain moments the degree of tension seemed to be decreasing.
Unfortunately, the confrontation gave birth to movements, parties and politicians, both in Israel and Palestine, that professed and proclaimed aggressive and even extremist slogans. Hence the waves of violence that periodically shake these long-suffering lands.
We are now witnessing the highest level of passion and violence in the Middle East. The moment has come when all states, leaving aside internal differences, must join efforts to achieve peace in Palestine. And this must be done not by force of arms, but through reason, persuasion, and by turning to universal human values.
We really want to hope that the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation will end and the sovereign state of Palestine will be created in accordance with the decision of the UN Security Council taken 75 years after the formation of the state of Israel. If this is not achieved now, bloody conflicts on lands holy to three religions will be repeated. Moreover, on an ever larger scale, the situation risks plunging the whole world into the abyss of war.
We are convinced that Russia will do everything possible to ensure that the conflicting parties will reach a consensus on resolving this issue and minimize losses among the civilian population.
