Palestine was a common name used until 1948 to describe the geographic

region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. In its history,
the Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires have
controlled Palestine at one time or another.

After World War I, Palestine was administered by the United Kingdom under
a Mandate received in 1922 from the League of Nations. The modern history
of Palestine begins with the termination of the British Mandate, the
Partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel, and the ensuing Israeli-
Palestinian conflict.

THE PARTITION OF PALESTINE

In 1947, the United Nations (U.N.) proposed a Partition Plan for Palestine
titled “United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) Future
Government of Palestine.” The resolution noted Britain’s planned
termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and recommended the
partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the
Jerusalem-Bethlehem area protected and administered by the United
Nations.

The resolution included a highly detailed description of the recommended

boundaries for each proposed state. The resolution also contained plans for
an economic union between the proposed states and for the protection of
religious and minority rights. The resolution called for the withdrawal of
British forces and termination of the Mandate by August 1948 and
establishment of the new independent states by October 1948.

FIRST ARAB-ISRAELI WAR (1948)

Jewish leadership accepted the Partition Plan but Arab leaders rejected it.
The Arab League threatened to take military measures to prevent the
partition of Palestine and to ensure the national rights of the Palestinian
Arab population. One day before the British Mandate expired, Israel
declared its independence within the borders of the Jewish State set out in
the Partition Plan. The Arab countries declared war on the newly formed
State of Israel beginning the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

After the war, which Palestinians call the Catastrophe, the 1949 Armistice
Agreements established the separation lines between the combatants: Israel
controlled some areas designated for the Arab state under the Partition
Plan, Transjordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt
controlled the Gaza Strip.

THE SIX DAY WAR

The Six Day War was fought between June 5–10, 1967, with Israel emerging
victorious and effectively seizing control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai
Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and
the Golan Heights from Syria. The U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution
242, the “land for peace” formula, which called for Israeli withdrawal “from
territories occupied” in 1967 and “the termination of all claims or states of
belligerency.” Resolution 242 recognized the right of “every state in the area
to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats
or acts of force.”

THE 1973 WAR

In October 1973, war broke out again between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai
and the Syria in the Golan Heights. A ceasefire was achieved (U.N. resolution
339) and U.N. peacekeepers deployed on both the fronts, only withdrawing
from the Egyptian front after Israel and Egypt concluded a peace treaty in
1979. U.N. peacekeepers remain deployed in the Golan Heights.

RISE OF THE PALESTINE LIBERATION

ORGANIZATION (PLO)
In 1974, the Arab League recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and
relinquished its role as representative of the West Bank. The PLO gained
observer status at the U.N. General Assembly the same year.

In 1988, the Palestinian National Council of the PLO approved a Palestinian

Declaration of Independence in Algiers, Tunisia. The declaration proclaims a
“State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem,”
although it does not specify exact borders, and asserts U.N. Resolution 181
supports the rights of Palestinians and Palestine. The declaration was
accompanied by a PLO call for multilateral negotiations on the basis of U.N.
Resolution 242.

THE INTIFADA (1987 TO 1993)

Conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including Jerusalem, after more
than 20 years of military occupation, repression and confiscation of land,
contributed to a Palestinian uprising called the intifada in December 1987.
Between 1987 and 1993, over 1,000 Palestinians were killed and thousands
injured, detained, imprisoned in Israel or deported from the Palestinian
territories.

THE PEACE PROCESS

In 1993, the Oslo Accords, the first direct, face-to-face agreement between
Israel and the PLO, were signed and intended to provide a framework for
the future relations between the two parties. The Accords created the
Palestinian National Authority (PNA) with responsibility for the
administration of the territory under its control. The Accords also called for
the withdrawal of Israeli forces from parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Implementation of the Oslo Accords suffered a serious setback with the

assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Prime Minister and signer of the Oslo
Accords, in November 1995. Since 1995, several peace summits and
proposals, including the Camp David Summit (2000), Taba Summit (2001),
the Road Map for Peace (2002), and the Arab Peace Initiative (2002 and
2007), have attempted to broker a solution, with no success.

THE DRIVE FOR RECOGNITION OF PALESTINIAN

STATEHOOD
In a speech on September 16, 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the
Palestinian National Authority, declared his intention to proceed with the
request for recognition of statehood from both the United Nations General
Assembly and Security Council. On September 23, 2011, President Abbas
delivered the official application for recognition of a Palestinian State to the
United Nations Secretary General. Numerous issues remain to be settled by
Israelis and Palestinians, however, before an independent state of Palestine
emerges. Negotiations are ongoing.

EMBASSY SHIFT

On Monday, the US officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as a

new US Embassy opened there.

It’s a controversial move that breaks with decades of official US policy — and
it comes at a particularly tumultuous time for Israel and the region.

President Donald Trump announced his decision to move the embassy from
Tel Aviv to Jerusalem back in December, calling it “a long-overdue step to
advance the peace process and to work towards a lasting agreement.”

On May 14, which coincided with the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding,
Trump’s daughter Ivanka, her husband Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin, and a number of members of Congress attended the opening
ceremony in the former consulate building in the Jerusalem neighborhood of
Arnona. The new embassy will be housed there temporarily, as the
administration scouts out a permanent location. Christian and Jewish religious
leaders were reportedly in attendance as well — the guest list included close
to 800 people. Trump himself spoke by video link from Washington.

But as the embassy event got underway on Monday, Israeli soldiers were
firing on Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border.

As of Tuesday morning, they had killed at least 60 people and wounded

thousands of others. Many of the protesters were unarmed, though some
hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. The Israeli military also said that they shot
three protesters who were attempting to detonate a bomb. No Israelis so far
have been injured.

Palestinians are in their seventh week of protests at the border with Gaza,
calling for the right of return to territory that is now part of Israel. They’re also
protesting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which is suffering from a stifling
Israeli and Egyptian blockade.

The embassy opening also comes right before what Palestinians call Nakba
Day, or the Day of Catastrophe, where Palestinians commemorate lands they
either fled or were evicted from after the creation of the state of
Israel. Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, also begins this week.

Meanwhile, Israel and Iran’s shadow war in Syria is moving closer to becoming
an actual, full-blown conflict. On May 9, Iran reportedly launched 20 missiles
into the Golan Heights, and Israel responded with strikes on Iranian-linked
targets in Syria. Last week, Trump announced that the US was withdrawing
from the Iran nuclear deal, a move that could push Iran closer to acquiring a
nuclear weapon.

Put together, the embassy move is happening at a chaotic, unpredictable, and

dangerous time for both the region and Israel itself. And though the White
House says that moving the US embassy to Jerusalem will increase stability
and the chance of peace, there’s a real reason to worry that it will do the
opposite.

Here’s why the embassy move is so controversial

When the president announced the decision to move the embassy back in
December, it placed him squarely in the middle of the decades-long conflict
over Jerusalem.

As Sarah Wildman and Jennifer Williams wrote for Vox in December, both the
Palestinians and the Israelis claim Jerusalem as their capital, and the city
contains sites sacred to both Jews and Muslims. Though Israel’s parliament
and the prime minister’s home are in Jerusalem, they sit in West Jerusalem,
on the side of the city Israel has controlled since 1949. Israel captured East
Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed that half of the city.

The international community considers East Jerusalem occupied territory. But

that half of the city also contains sites holy to all three major monotheistic
religions, including the Western Wall, the holiest place in the world where
Jews can openly pray, and Haram al-Sharif, Arabic for “the Noble Sanctuary,”
a sacred site for Muslims that Israelis refer to as the Temple Mount.

The Palestinians want to officially divide the city and make East Jerusalem the
capital of a future Palestinian state. The Israelis disagree — and the right-wing
government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long made
clear that it wouldn’t consider making concessions over Jerusalem, in part
because Jews were barred from the Western Wall when the Old City was
under Jordanian control in the years before the 1967 war.
All of this helps explain why the Israeli government was pleased when Trump
made good on a promise he’d made time and time again during his campaign
and recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

To be clear, Trump isn’t the first US president to talk about moving the
American embassy to Jerusalem. As Politico points out, Bill Clinton said he
supported the idea in principle. George W. Bush declared he would move the
US ambassador there in 2000. And Barack Obama, for his part, referred to
the city as the capital of Israel and said it must remain “undivided.” Congress
has also repeatedly passed legislation calling for the embassy move.

But none of the previous presidents followed through — one reason being that
the move would appear to put the US squarely on the side of Israel.

Ilan Goldenberg, a Middle East expert with the Center for New American
Security, told me that Trump’s decision significantly undercuts the US’s
credibility as a neutral party in the conflict.

As the country that has led the Israeli-Palestinian peace process negotiations
for the past 25 years, the US is “supposed to be acting like the fireman,” he
said. “Instead, we’re acting like the arsonist — we’re making things worse.”

The embassy move could also make the chances of a peace deal, already
remote given that the two sides haven’t held serious peace talks in years,
nearly impossible.

“Jerusalem is the linchpin to an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement,” Khaled

Elgindy, a fellow with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, told
me.

Trump’s recognition of the city as Israel’s capital is a “huge victory” for the
Israelis, he added, but it also “essentially takes a Palestinian state off the
table.”

People expected “the Arab street” to explode when Trump announced the move. It didn’t.

Much of the world was shocked when Trump announced the upcoming
embassy move, and world leaders feared there would be an outbreak of
violence. Palestinians held a general strike, and four protesters died during
clashes with Israeli soldiers. Thousands protested in Turkey, Lebanon,
Morocco, and elsewhere. But the protests were short-lived and mostly
peaceful. The massive violent reaction people feared never came.
Indeed, neighboring Arab countries’ reactions in recent months have been
fairly muted. Many are dealing with their own domestic issues, such as
economic issues, political unrest in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and two
ongoing conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

“The people in the region have been through a great deal of hardship over the
past few years owing to war, conflict, and authoritarianism,” H.A. Hellyer, an
expert on the politics of the Arab world, told me. “I don’t think they have the
bandwidth to respond to this latest political outrage.”

There’s also the fact that several Arab countries have quietly begun to grow
closer to Israel. For two years, Egypt secretly allowed Israel to carry out drone
strikes against militant groups on the restive Sinai peninsula. Mohammed bin
Salman, the Saudi crown prince informally known as MBS,
reportedly disparaged the Palestinian leadership while visiting the US in March,
saying, “It’s about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come
to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.” In an Atlantic
interview, he also said that Israel had the right to “their own land.”

And just last week, after Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal
and Iran reportedly fired missiles into Israel, Bahrain’s foreign
minister tweeted that Israel has the right to defend itself in the face of Iranian
aggression — a sign that Arab fears about the growing threat posed by Iran
may trump former regional disagreements.

Despite these signs, though, it would be wrong to assume that the

Palestinian-Israeli conflict has fallen off the radar for Arab leaders. Saudi King
Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud put the issue of Palestine at the top of the Arab
League conference’s agenda last month, declared that it would be called
the “Jerusalem summit,” and issued a strong statement condemning
Washington’s planned embassy move. And MBS himself said that there would
be no normalization with Israel until the “Palestinian issue was resolved.”

These conflicting signals mean it’s impossible to know whether the actual
embassy move will spark widespread violence in neighboring countries — or
pass by relatively quietly.

Trump’s decision probably won’t have the outcome he says he wants

According to the State Department, the new embassy is opening in the

building that houses current consular operations in southern Jerusalem. There
are plans to relocate it to a separate annex, and a permanent location, by the
end of 2019.

The Trump administration says that it’s not taking a stance on final status
issues like the boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. And during a
White House call on Friday, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said
the move was done to create “a better dynamic for peace,” and that “from a
broader perspective, this helps stability.”

But Friedman also said that no members of the US delegation coming to

celebrate the embassy move had plans to meet with any Palestinian officials.

And experts say this move essentially shuts down any potential talks with
Palestinians.

“If you don’t have Palestinian involvement, you don’t have a peace process.
It’s as simple as that,” Elgindy told me. “I don’t see how a Palestinian leader
can engage with this administration on the peace process after Monday.”

It seems much more likely, Elgindy continued, that another country will have
to step in and take on the primary role of overseeing peace negotiations. But
it’s unclear which country that would be or how long it would take.

With the US effectively discredited by this move, “we have a vacuum that’s not
likely to be filled anytime soon. Anything that would emerge would have to be
an entirely new framework for peace,” he told me. “We’re just in limbo.”