2025/10/13 by Williams, Amah
#Arab #Arab Israeli crisis #Britain #Diplomacy #Israel
paper · doi:10.60787/aksujhgs.vol4no1.3
The protracted and bitter struggles between the Arabs and the Jews for control of the holy land has caused untold pains and sufferings for many generations and has seen the Arabs engage the Jews in many wars since the 1948 war of independence. There is a plethora of scholarly works on the conflict, but it is often claimed by scholars that the crisis originated with Jewish emigration into Palestine and the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948. This paper therefore interrogated the foundations of the Arab Israeli crisis. It traced the roots of the crisis to British diplomatic double dealings and betrayals during the first world war. Relying on declassified British diplomatic correspondences and a wide range of literature on Arab Israeli crisis, this paper concludes that the misguided strategies and conflicting promises of Britain to win the First World War inadvertently created a deep divide and reinforced the agelong hatred between the Arabs and the Jews leaving a legacy of bloodshed and destruction in the region.