# Enemies and Neighbors by Ian Black - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Get a solid primer on the history of the combative relationship between Israel and Palestine.

A great deal has happened since Enemies and Neighbors came out in 2014 – but it was a book of its time.

In the years before its release, a lot of historians – including Israeli historians – were looking at the past conflict between Israel and Palestine with fresh eyes using newly released archival documents to fact check the historical narrative that had been coming from government channels for so long.

Black’s effort tries to pin down a factual narrative to show how the relationship between these two has been in conflict from the start, and how efforts toward peaceful coexistence have been repeatedly hampered.

It’s a long and tragic tale which effectively started in the 1880s.

The seeds of conflict

This story could start in December 1917, when World War I was drawing to a close, and the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem surrendered to the British Army, giving them control of a land that was considered sacred to Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

But even though Britain’s decisions would bring plenty of conflict to the region, friction had already been brewing.

Since the 1880s, small groups of Jewish settlers had been establishing new agricultural colonies in the Palestine region alongside older communities in Arab cities like Jerusalem and Hebron.

This community was known as the Yishuv, and it faced harsh living conditions.

To get by, it relied heavily on local Arab labor and transport.

But this cross-cultural relationship soon deteriorated.

At the turn of the twentieth century, modern political Zionism  began to take shape.

Sparked by European and Russian antisemitism, there was an organized push for a secured home.

Palestine was an attractive option.

By 1909, the Yishuv had built Tel Aviv out of the sands north of Jaffa.

But as more Jewish immigrants arrived, the less they relied on Arab labor.

This exclusionary attitude, mixed with the settlers’ indifference toward cultural integration and the continued influx of immigrants buying up land and displacing tenants, was bound to spark conflict.

But then, following Britain’s conquest at the end of World War I, London issued the Balfour Declaration, which supported a national home for the Jewish people.

To many Arabs – who made up roughly nine-tenths of the population at the time – it felt like a deal made over their heads.

The League of Nations soon issued a mandate that locked in the Balfour framework – known as the British Mandate for Palestine.

It established a Jewish Agency, though no equivalent Arab body was created.

Local Arab leaders were essentially sidelined and often ignored in negotiations.

Tensions were reaching a boiling point.

That point came in 1929.

In August, a dispute over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem sparked a deadly riot.

Horrific violence broke out, with the worst scenes unfolding in the neighborhood of Hebron, an area with religious significance to both Jews and Arabs.

By the time British police restored order, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were dead, with hundreds more injured.

Commissions were created to investigate the riot.

One report highlighted Arab fears of dispossession, but London was at a loss in how to respond.

The Great Uprising

The 1930s was a decade of great change.

At its start, the Jewish population was still under a fifth of the total.

By 1936, this number had doubled.

A lot of that had to do with the trouble brewing in Europe, with many Jews fleeing persecution.

Everything was becoming more urgent for the Yishuv while at the same time it was becoming apparent that the Arab population was at a disadvantage.

The Zionist movement had funding and expert legal maneuvering that made it hard for the Arabs to gain traction.

When efforts to set up an Arab national land fund failed, the resentment hardened into activism.

The Arabs were finding their own national voice – and it was growing louder and more radicalized.

Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam, a fiery Syrian preacher, began calling for armed resistance.

When he was hunted down and killed by British forces in 1935, his death became a rallying cry and Palestine erupted.

What began as a protest soon turned into a full-scale revolt – what Palestinians call the Great Uprising.

It allowed rival Arab families to set aside their feuds and form the Arab Higher Committee, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

The outlook for the region wasn’t great.

A group known as the Peel Commission spent months analysing the rebellion and reached a bitter conclusion: there was no reconciling these two national movements.

Its radical solution was partition – two states, one Arab and one Jewish.

The Jewish state would occupy about a quarter of the country; the Arabs would control the rest, with Jerusalem kept under British administration.

It was the first official endorsement of dividing the land.

Zionist leaders hesitated but eventually decided that such a partition could work as a foothold for statehood.

But the Arab Higher Committee rejected it outright.

Palestine was Arab land, they insisted, and they wouldn’t accept its dismemberment.

This history has many what-if scenarios, and the AHC’s rejection of the Peel proposal in 1937 remains a significant one.

By the time the rebellion was crushed in 1939, thousands were dead, villages destroyed, and Arab politics shattered.

Yet, the Zionists had gained military experience, tightened their organization, and set up 57 new Jewish settlements in just two years, some doubling as strategic fortresses.

By the end of the decade, Palestine had changed beyond recognition.

The Jewish population had doubled to nearly half a million, one in three inhabitants of the land.

The Arabs, leaderless and weary, had lost both confidence and cohesion.

The War of 1948

When the Second World War ended, Britain was exhausted and eager to withdraw from the region.

So it handed the problem over to the newly formed United Nations, who, in 1947, voted to partition the area into Jewish and Arab states.

The plan led to chaos and collapse.

The vote was celebrated by Jews who saw it as long-delayed recognition of their national home.

By Arabs, it was considered a betrayal.

They rejected the idea that foreign powers could give away their own country.

Within hours of the UN vote, violence broke out: Jewish buses ambushed, Arab workers massacred, retaliations spiraled in every direction.

As British forces prepared to withdraw, entire neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Jaffa fled almost overnight.

By March 1948, Jewish commanders were planning for the decisive phase of the war.

Under “Plan D,” they sought to secure key territory and roads – expelling or subduing Arab communities that resisted.

Whether the plan amounted to a blueprint for “ethnic cleansing” is still fiercely debated, but in practice it led to widespread displacement.

The Palestinian’s refer to it as the Nabka, the catastrophe.

As the offensive gathered pace and captured more neighborhoods, panic increased.

The future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir described Haifa as a “dead city,” its homes abandoned, coffee still warm on the tables.

By the time the British left and Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence on May 14, 1948, roughly 300,000 Palestinians had already fled or been expelled.

The next day, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq invaded – not to rescue Palestine, but to secure their own interests.

Disorganized and wary of one another, they were quickly pushed back by the new Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, now uniting all Jewish militias under one command.

As the fighting continued, towns like Lydda and Ramle were emptied, their populations forced into the searing summer heat in what became known as the “Lydda death march.

” Others were herded across borders into Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, joining the swelling ranks of refugees.

By 1949, Israel had captured 78 percent of the land of Mandatory Palestine – far more than the UN had allotted – while Jordan absorbed the West Bank and Egypt took control of Gaza.

Around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, their villages razed or repopulated by new Jewish immigrants.

The map had been redrawn, but not the underlying struggle.

Israel had been born.

Arab Palestine had ceased to exist.

And lasting wounds had been created.

Unsettled lives

After 1949, Palestine was unrecognizable.

Israel was a newborn state while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were scattered, bewildered and dispossessed, across neighboring lands that were largely unwelcoming.

Israel made its position clear almost immediately: the refugees would not return.

The United Nations disagreed.

Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, insisted on the refugees’ right to return or to receive compensation – but Israel brushed it aside.

For 150,000 or so Palestinians who remained in Israel, life changed overnight.

Once the majority in their homeland, they were now a small, closely monitored minority within the nation’s new borders.

Under military rule, they now needed permits to travel, work, or even visit nearby towns.

Israel’s intelligence gathering methods became part of the process.

To get a business license, a travel pass, or even access to a phone, Israeli Arabs often had to provide information about their neighbors.

Across the region, though, the idea of Palestine was rekindling.

Despite the fact that the word “Palestine” itself became taboo in Israel, writers and poets published verses that celebrated endurance and identity – sumoud, steadfastness, they called it.

In the refugee camps, families held on to keys, deeds, and fading memories as proof that they still belonged.

In the ’50s and early ’60s, there was a question of who could actually speak for the Palestinians.

After Arab states came together for a summit in Cairo in 1964, new leaders and organizations finally came to the forefront.

In the mix was Yasser Arafat’s clandestine Fatah, or Palestinian National Liberation Movement.

And emerging as a much needed umbrella organization was the PLO, or Palestine Liberation Organization, which had the support of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Even under occupation, resistance was starting to take shape.

The Six-Day War and the rise of the PLO

While the PLO offered more organized representation, it was far from unified.

Arafat kept Fatah at arm’s length in his desire to operate independently and more aggressively.

By 1965, Fatah’s fedayeen were staging small raids, adding to the tension in the area and raising questions as to whether the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and neighboring nations would hold.

That friction caught fire in 1967, leading to the Six-Day War.

It was, once again, a war that would reshape everything.

Israel’s preemptive air strikes gutted Egypt’s air force within hours, and swift ground offensives rolled through Sinai and Gaza, took the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and seized the Golan Heights from Syria.

In mere days Israel had more than tripled its territory and came to rule over roughly 1.

1 million Palestinians.

For Palestinians it was a naksa – a staggering setback that produced another wave of displacement.

But had Israel overplayed its hand?

By occupying places like Gaza and the West Bank, it was now faced with having to manage a much larger situation, and people who were more energized in their resistance than ever before.

As Israel would soon see, the Palestinian movement was only gaining steam.

In March 1968, Israeli forces struck the town of Karameh, a Fatah stronghold in the Jordan Valley.

The battle was a one-sided victory for the IDF, but it was Arafat who emerged a hero.

The fact that his fighters hadn’t fled was enough to electrify the Arab world.

Recruitment soared, weapons poured in, and suddenly the Palestinian struggle had a figurehead.

By 1969, Arafat had become the official head of the PLO and for the next decade, its notoriety only increased.

The most infamous came in 1972, when Palestinian gunmen murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

During this time, the Palestinian cause became synonymous with terrorism in Western eyes, and sympathy was hard to find.

But something was beginning to stir – a conviction that even under occupation, a strong national identity could emerge.

The first shaking off

Arab pride reached new heights in 1974, when Yasir Arafat made a historic speech at the United Nations, offering Israel both “the gun and the olive branch,” and leaving it up to them to choose.

As the PLO’s program kept the rhetoric of armed resistance it was quietly opening the door to diplomacy.

It was a tactical compromise, but it also ran the danger of splitting the movement.

Peace talks stalled through much of the ’80s as the IDF pushed Arafat into exile in Tunis.

And yet, the PLO’s political infrastructure inside the territories kept growing.

A tighter, more local Palestinian movement was taking shape under occupation.

By the end of 1987, that movement was ready to explode.

The spark came in Gaza, when an Israeli truck plowed into two taxis carrying Palestinian workers home from Israel.

Four men were killed.

After the funerals, crowds poured into the streets, hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at IDF soldiers.

The troops opened fire.

Within hours, Gaza was ablaze.

Within days, the West Bank had joined in.

What began as a local riot became something new – a word that would echo for years to come: intifada, or the shaking off.

The intifada was unlike anything that came before.

Kids became heroes.

They faced rifles with stones and slingshots, their courage broadcast across the world’s television screens.

Israel tried to crack down, but the scenes of the IDF beating teenagers with clubs deepened Israel’s moral crisis.

In two months, nearly 100 Palestinians were dead; thousands were injured or jailed.

The events of 1987 fed right into the ongoing battle for international legitimacy.

The exiled PLO leadership reawakened.

In November 1988, Arafat proclaimed the independent State of Palestine with a declaration written by poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Void of combative rhetoric, it evoked coexistence.

Significantly, the declaration nodded to UN Resolution 242 – implying recognition of Israel – and called Palestine “the land of three monotheistic faiths.

” For the first time, the PLO formally renounced terrorism and accepted a two-state solution.

It was massive, and the US responded by opening talks with Arafat’s envoys.

Israel refused to budge and continued to view the PLO as a terrorist gang.

But the ground was shifting.

Inside Israel, peace activists and groups like Yesh Gvul, which supported soldiers who refused to serve in the territories, were multiplying.

But at the same time, the PLO’s move toward negotiation and compromise opened the door for a new force that emerged from the mosques of Gaza: Hamas.

The illusions of peace

Founded in late 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas blended nationalism with religion.

Its charter portrayed the conflict as a holy struggle rather than a political one.

It didn’t recognize Israel, and all of Palestine was considered an Islamic trust that could never be surrendered.

But while Hamas considered Arafat’s moderation a betrayal, the peace talks continued.

As the 1990s began, anything seemed possible.

The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union crumbled, and in 1991, US officials orchestrated an Israeli-Arab peace treaty summit in Madrid.

For the first time, Palestinians sat across from Israelis at an international table – as equals.

Israel’s new prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, kept the talks alive by utilizing a Norwegian backchannel.

By mid-1993, “mutual recognition” – something that had been unthinkable for decades – was on the table.

Each nation would recognize the other, renounce violence, and start building Palestinian self-rule.

This culminated in the Oslo “Declaration of Principles”, a monumental agreement that took place September 13, 1993 on the White House lawn.

But the asymmetry was glaring – Israel got immediate recognition from the PLO and a pledge to end armed struggle, while Palestinians got limited authority without any control over settlers or borders, and their economy would continue to be locked to Israel’s.

Critics on both sides were eager to pounce.

In Palestine, Hamas rejected it outright.

In Israel, protesters chanted “Death to Rabin” with the support of Likud’s new leader, Binyamin Netanyahu.

The process quickly met a series of violent and tragic stress tests that culminated on November 4, 1995, when an Israeli law student shot and killed Rabin.

When news of his murder reached Arafat in Gaza, he went pale.

“Today,” he said quietly, “the peace process has died.

” Still, in 1996 came the first Palestinian elections and Arafat became president of the Palestinian Authority.

But he was unable to stop Hamas bombings, which killed 60 Israelis in eight days, just weeks after the elections.

In September 2000, things only got worse as Ariel Sharon, the architect of countless wars, marched onto the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound under heavy police guard.

Sharon was campaigning for the next election and was being deliberately provocative.

Within hours, stones flew, shots were fired, and four Palestinians lay dead.

It was the spark for the Second Intifada – the al-Aqsa uprising.

This time the fighting was darker and heavier.

It saw a marked rise in suicide bombers – a sign of how far Palestinians felt they’d been pushed.

Israeli helicopters answered with Hellfire missiles.

By early 2001, hundreds more were dead.

That spring, Sharon was elected prime minister.

His campaign slogan said it all: “Let the IDF win.

” The dream of Oslo had died.

Gaza and the widening divide

As the new millenium got underway Palestinian leadership was in crisis.

Yasser Arafat was in ill health and losing influence.

In 2003, Mahmoud Abbas, another PLO leader, became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, and he would become president when Arafat passed away in 2004.

But Abbas wasn’t very charismatic and proved unable to keep his party in power.

It all fell apart in early 2006, when an international push for a new round of elections backfired in spectacular fashion.

The world was demanding Palestinian democracy – and the world recoiled when Hamas soundly defeated the PLO establishment.

Washington and Brussels responded by cutting off aid.

Israel froze revenues and, after an IDF soldier was kidnapped, launched “Operation Summer Rains”, which resulted in bridges, roads, and Gaza’s only power plant being bombed.

Over 200 Palestinians were killed along with the strip’s fragile infrastructure.

Internally, the political rift between Fatah and Hamas turned into open warfare.

When the US and Israel pushed Abbas to contain Hamas, it triggered a coup and Hamas seized full control of Gaza.

Abbas retreated to the West Bank, dissolved his government, and declared a state of emergency.

By 2008, Israel had declared “economic warfare” on Gaza, followed by “Operation Cast Lead”, which was aimed at ending Hamas’s rocket fire and arms smuggling operations.

But it also flattened entire neighborhoods while leaving over 1,300 Palestinians dead, including hundreds of children.

Israel lost 13 people over the course of the three week war.

In 2014, with peace talks dead and Gaza suffocating, violence erupted yet again.

The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank triggered “Operation Protective Edge” which lasted 51 days and pulverized Gaza, erasing entire neighborhoods and leaving over 2,000 Palestinians killed.

Israel lost 73 people.

Netanyahu, emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidency, pushed laws to legalize settlements and silence dissent.

And yet, amid the fear and fatigue, there have been more organized groups calling for peace in Israel – bi-national schools and joint NGO coalitions trying to bridge cultural gaps between the Israelis and Arabs.

A banner hanging in front of a bombed out building in Jerusalem read, “We refuse to be enemies.

” These are the hopeful signs, even as so many events continue to suggest that, on both sides of the divide, the conflict had hardened into permanence – a managed tragedy, endlessly replayed.

Final summary

The main takeaway of this Blink to Enemies and Neighbors by Ian Black is that the modern story of Israelis and Palestinians dates back to the 1880s, when Jewish settlers began immigrating to the Palestine region.

By 1910, Tel Aviv emerged and the area was chosen by the Zionist political movement as the land for a potential Jewish statehood.

As development and immigration increased, the settlers relied less and less on Arab labor and became more exclusionary towards their neighbors.

During the British Mandate era, the tensions increased and boiled over into the 1929 riots, which started a cycle of reprisal violence.

After World War II, and the founding of Israel, wars with neighboring Arab countries began.

Some of the wars resulted in Israeli expansion as they occupied new territories and displaced more Palestinian refugees.

In the later decades, the Oslo Accords promised peace but delivered further entrenchment.

Israel grew richer, more confident, and more right-wing, while Palestinian politics fractured into uncompromising religious nationalism.

The conflict endures but efforts toward peace remain for those who can imagine a shared future.

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