Form of government: Parliamentary democratic republic. Israel
is divided into six districts.
The Palestinian Arabs, who had been a majority of the population for more than a thousand years, were opposed to Jewish immigration, which they suspected of being a prelude to an attempt to establish a Jewish state. As the persecution of Jews in Europe worsened during the 1930s, pressure for Jewish immigration to Palestine increased, and Arab resistance broke into open revolt in 1936. The failure of this revolt left the Arabs leaderless and divided. After the Second World War the fate of the European Jews aroused international sentiment in favour of a Jewish state. When the British banned further Jewish immigration, Zionist militias launched a terrorist campaign against the British. In 1947 the British handed the issue to the United Nations, which recommended that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The Jewish organisations accepted the Palestine Partition Plan, but the Palestinians, supported by the Arab states, rejected it, and war broke out immediately. The State of Israel was declared in May 1948. The victorious Israelis kept the lands seized during the war, leaving 800,000 Palestinians as refugees. Since independence Israel has absorbed millions of Jewish immigrants. It fought wars with its Arab neighbours in 1956, 1967 and 1973. In 1967 Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt. Sinai was returned in 1979 as part of a peace treaty with Egypt, but the other territories, home to 2 million Palestinians, remain under Israeli occupation. From the late 1960s the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation, waged an intermittent campaign of terrorist violence against Israel. This served mainly to harden Israeli attitudes, leading to a prolonged war in Lebanon in the 1980s and many deaths on both sides. Finally in 1993 Yitzhak Rabin's Labour government concluded an agreement known as the Oslo Accords, whereby the Palestinians agreed to recognise Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority was created (see also Palestine), and Israel handed over administration of most of the territories to it. In 1995, however, Rabin was assassinated, and a Likud government opposed to the Accords was elected in his place. The process was stalled, but was revived when Labour's Ehud Barak won the 1999 election. Barak, supported by the US, made extensive concessions to the Palestinians, but in 2000 Arafat rejected the offer at the Camp David meeting. Barak's government fell, the Oslo process collaped, and the Palestinians resumed terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, leading to Israeli military retaliation. Israeli politics has been dominated by the Palestinian issue since the 1970s. The Labour Party, which governed Israel from independence until 1977, favours renewed negotiations and further concessions. The conservative Consolidation or Likud party of the current Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, opposes concessions. Sharon won a crushing victory on this policy at the 2003 elections. Israel's system of proportional representation fosters a multitude of parties. Likud is usually supported by conservative and religious parties including Shas (International Organization of Torah-observant Sephardic Jews), National Union, Homeland, Revival, Our Home Israel, National Religious Party, Israel and Immigration and United Torah Judaism. Labour is allied with the centrist Dimension party, and is usually supported by the social-democratic Energy, as well as left-wing parties including Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, One Nation, National Democratic Alliance and the United Arab List. The liberal-secularist Change-Centre Party maintains an independent position. |
