Arab–Israeli relations
After several Arab-Israeli wars, Egypt was the first Arab state to recognize Israel diplomatically in 1979 with the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty.
After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Jewish migration continued to increase and by 1945 there were over 500,000 Jews living in Palestine.
The War ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreement, the conquered territories remained with Israel and the West Bank was occupied by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt.
In the Arab countries, the defeat by Israel was perceived as a disaster and was called Nakba (النكبة 'the catastrophe').
[1] The defeat in the first Arab-Israeli War had strengthened Arab nationalism, and in Egypt the nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in 1952.
However, the Soviet Union and the United States opposed the occupation and threatened sanctions, so it had to be aborted and Nasser won a diplomatic victory that made him the political leader of the Arab world.
In response, Israel sought to establish close relations with the non-Arab states of the Near East, such as Turkey and Iran under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Egypt escalated the situation with false accusations that Israel was massing troops on its border with the country and closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships.
An attacking coalition of Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian troops was defeated by Israel in a triumphant military strike in a very short time.
In the process, Israel was able to conquer the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.
The PLO under Yasser Arafat and other militant groups began increasing terrorist attacks on Israeli targets, including airplane hijackings and the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
[1] Egypt was not satisfied with the territorial status quo, and from 1968 onward there was an ongoing low-intensity conflict with Israel on the Sinai border.
Sadat was therefore later assassinated by Islamists, but his successor Husni Mubarak did not reverse the normalization of relations with Israel.
In 1982, Israel intervened in the Lebanese Civil War, with Israeli forces advancing as far as Beirut to fight the PLO, which was active in Lebanon and which subsequently moved its headquarters to Tunisia.
With the beginning of the 1990s, the Arab states lost their main arms supplier with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and intra-Arab divisions opened up with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
PLO leader Yasser Arafat supported the Iraqis, which led to the expulsion of 400,000 Palestinians from Kuwait after the country's liberation.
It also facilitated the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, making Jordan the second Arab state to diplomatically recognize Israel in 1994.
However, after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist in 1995, the peace process stalled.
In 2000, efforts to normalize Israeli relations with Syria failed because of Ehud Barak's refusal to fully withdraw from the Golan Heights.
[1] A rapprochement between Israel and Sunni Arab states took place in the 2010s due to their shared fear of Shiite Iran and its nuclear program.
[9] The Israel–United Arab Emirates normalization agreement officially the Abraham Accords Peace Agreement: Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations and Full Normalization Between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel,[10] was initially agreed to in a joint statement by the United States, Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on August 13, 2020, officially referred to as the Abraham Accords.
[21] President Joe Biden said that Hamas’ attacks on Israel were intended in part to scuttle the potential normalization of the U.S. ally’s relations with Saudi Arabia.
