Editor’s Note

We open our Spring 2023 issue with a significant analysis—and critique—of the European Union’s post-2006 policy toward the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, two territories that have been under Israeli military occupation since June 1967. Madrid-based scholar, Itxaso Dom ınguez de Olaz abel, argues in ‘EU Policies in Historic Palestine’ that EU policies are focused almost exclusively on pressuring the Palestinian Authority, set up in parts of the West Bank in 1995, to comply with Israeli security demands. In so doing, EU policies ignore both the history of the Palestinian ‘problem’ and its continuing and negative ramifications for Palestinians living under Israeli (primarily) and other legal regimes. In effect, EU policy treats the Palestinian Authority as a sovereign entity, ignoring the reality of its subordination to Israeli military control. The Palestinian ‘problem’ dates backs to the November 1947 vote of the then new United Nations to divide the UK’s Palestine Mandate—mandate being a fancy 1920s term for a colony—into an Arab and a Jewish state. The UN vote led to a civil war in Palestine; the intervention of Arab armies, primarily from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, to protect the Arab state—which never came into existence; the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian civilians, most of whom became refugees in Gaza and Lebanon; the establishment of the new state of Israel on 78 percent of the former Palestine Mandate; and two Palestinian-inhabited territories: the Gaza Strip under Egyptian administration and the West Bank under Jordanian administration until the June 1967 War, when Israel seized control of both areas. The Oslo Peace Process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1993 to 2000 was supposed to lead to an independent Palestinian state comprised of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. However, the summer 2000 failure of final status peace talks, ‘mediated’ by the United States—which blamed the PLO for the collapse of negotiations—led to four years of intifada [uprising] in Gaza and the West Bank, albeit with Israel always in control of the conflict and the Palestinians bearing the brunt of casualties and destruction. An Egyptian-mediated agreement ended the conflict in February 2005, although since then Gaza has had its own government separate from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and it also literally is sealed off from the rest of the world, as its land and Mediterranean Sea borders are tightly controlled by Egypt and Israel. It is within this political context that EU policy visa-vis Palestine and Palestinians is not focused on the much needed economic, educational and social development programs that would contribute to peace but rather on security assistance so that the Palestinian Authority can comply with Israeli-defined