Why was Donald Trump’s suggestion on turning Gaza into a Middle Eastern Riviera so helpful to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu? To understand this, it is worth briefly looking back to earlier phases of the century-old conflict.
Israel became a state in 1948, after what it calls its War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba – Arabic for ‘catastrophe’.
By then, European Jews had already been migrating to Palestine for nearly half a century, aided by the expansion of political Zionism in the late 1890s, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, which handed the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, and the Balfour Declaration the following year, which expressed British support for creating a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
