A Mid-East History You Don't Often Hear

A Mid-East history you don’t often hear

        Pre-dinner party conversation the other night turned to a comment on the Islamic Congressional representative from Minnesota’s fifth district regarding what she refined, in further explanation, as Zionism. I made the off-hand comment that it was critical to differentiate between being anti-Semitic and anti- Zionist. I added that I found it odd that we give so much foreign- aid money to Israel which is economically strong and doing it partially on stolen land (uh-oh!). My friend (yeah, it’s possible to be friends with those with whom you have opposing points of view!) after simmering a bit, defended Zionism on several grounds, principally that, “If Israel falls the entire region would be Islamic!” and “look what the Palestinians did to them in 1948.” (No, he didn’t say “1948,” because he didn’t know the exact date, but I do, so there.) There are several ways this analysis and discussion could go from here.

         One, simplistic but accurate, view I share, but have heard from no one in public, is that, as an American citizen with a Somali ethnic background, Ms. Omar is welcome to her opinion, but would seem to have no “nation-of-origin” dog in this hunt. Somalia and Palestine are far apart and have relatively little in common. Or do they? Oddly, the same religious divergence which has led to so much violence in the region formerly known as Palestine, now Israel, has a sort of parallel in Somalia, in that there are increasing attempts to institute Islam as a state religion. If Ms. Omar’s argument was intended as an argument in favor of (any) state religion, then we are diametrically at odds. If it was intended to express her distaste for the almost slavish pro-Israel stance of some Evangelicals on the Far right (the farther right, the more radical) and Liberals as well, then we may have some common ground.

        There are those who view any any-Israeli sentiment as anti- Semitism. This position elides over several relevant facts. To begin with, the term “anti-Semitic” has been appropriated by some, well-meaning or simply ignorant, to mean anti-Jewish. In point of fact, all persons native to the region are “Semites” by definition and ethnicity, Arab or Jew. [“Semite, member of a people speaking any of a group of related languages presumably derived from a common language, Semitic. The term came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians, and Aramaean tribes.” {OED}] Additionally, many currently residing in Israel and regarding themselves as Israelis have relatively little blood/DNA tie to the region or to a far distant, or even assumed, Semitic ancestry. I say this not to make any particular point other than that many who use the term are ignorant of all its implications. 

        Zionism, on the other hand, is fraught with even more nuance and a simplistic “Israel is our friend” is an incredibly naïve and simplistic point of view also. This, of course, is complicated by the belief of many that somehow the region was divinely appropriated to the current Israelis in a deal brokered somewhere around 4000 years ago between a desert nomad and a supernatural sky being. Seldom have so many died from such an obscure germ of an idea. In fact, Israel in Old Testament times was only independent for 70 years (the reigns of Solomon and David).

        For American Christians of a fundamentalist bent, this has come to mean that it is our national duty as a "Christian Nation" to facilitate the solidity of the state of Israel so the sky spirit can swoop down and escort all the true believers to some paradise. Oddly enough, this is the same end that is supposed to be accomplished by all those extremist Muslims who sacrifice their corporeal selves in the process of killing any and all Jews within range of their Semtex laden vests.  Of course, most of these simplistic naïfs don't recognize that Abraham's deal, including the ritual fleshy sacrifice, is as sacred to Muslims as it is to Jews.

        With all that in mind and stipulating that numerous scholarly works by real authors precede this poor effort, I shall try to provide a simplified chronology of the problems and actions of others in laying the groundwork for the current quagmire/crises.

        Current Israeli claims to ownership of this relatively small area on the Mediterranean are baseless from the standpoint of "who was here first?" The region is a cradle of civilization and one of the places which first experienced the Neolithic Revolution, sometimes referred to much more descriptively as the Agricultural Revolution. As such, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics.

     Over millennia, Palestine has been controlled by numerous different peoples, including the Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, , Ancient Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, early Muslims caliphates (dynasties)  such as the Umayyads, Abbasids, Seljuqs, Fatimids), European  Crusaders, later Muslims (Ayyubids, Mamelukes, Ottomans), the British, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (1948–1967, on the "West Bank") and Egyptian Republic (in Gaza), and modern Israelis and Palestinians. Other terms for the same area include Canaan, Zion, the Land of Israel, Southern Syria, Jund Filastin, Outremer, the Holy Land and the Southern Levant. The name "Israel" is recent and strategically chosen to imply/affirm to the world that this is, indeed the "promised land" referred to in Genesis in the Hebrew Torah and Christian Bibles.

     In the past this "promise' has been invoked by the ancient Hebrews to justify brutal acts against peoples such as the residents of Jericho and Ai whose offence, apparently, was simply already being there when the Hebrews wandered out of the desert (allegedly having fled Egypt, a fact which even some Israeli archeologists now question) and claimed ownership. Of course, the Jericho site has ruins going back as far as 6000 years before Abraham's chat with the sky spirit, but that's just another  inconvenient truth.

        Hebrews were not the political dominant force in the region now called Israel for well over 1900 years. The Diaspora, the Jews’ cultural /political/religious dispersion, began with the 6th century B.C. conquest of the ancient Kingdom of Judah by Babylon, the destruction of the First Temple (c. 586 B.C.), and the expulsion of the population, as stated in the Bible. The Babylonian ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, allowed the Jews to remain in a unified community in Babylon.

       Another group of Jews fled to Egypt, where they settled in the Nile delta. From 597 B.C. onwards, there were three distinct groups of Hebrews: a group in Babylon and other parts of the Middle East, a group in Judaea, and another group in Egypt. Although Cyrus, the Persian king, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland in 538 B.C., most chose to remain in Babylon. A large number of Jews in Egypt became mercenaries in Upper Egypt on an island called the Elephantine. Most of these Jews retained their religion, identity, and social customs; both under the Persians and the Greeks, they were allowed to conduct their lives according to their own laws.

     In 63 B.C., Judah/Judaea became a 'protectorate' of Rome, and in 6 B.C. was organized as a Roman province. The Hebrews, now generally referring to themselves by the religious and culturally inclusive name "Jews" began to revolt against the Roman Empire in 66 AD during the period known as the First Jewish–Roman War which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. During the siege, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and most of Jerusalem.  In 132 A.D., the Jews rebelled against Hadrian. In 135 A.D., Hadrian's army defeated the Jewish armies and Jewish independence was lost. Jerusalem was turned into a pagan city called Aelia Capitolina and the Jews were forbidden to live there, and Hadrian changed the country's name from Judea to Syria Palaestina, which presages the name "Palestine."

     Muhammad (c. 570 CE – c. 8 June 632 CE), considered by Muslims as the last Prophet of God, based on his alleged conversations with the same sky spirit as Abraham 2600 years earlier,  originated a new strenuous and proselytic monotheism, which he called ""Islam," meaning "submission" and, oddly enough, included  some of the same concessions to the spirit in the sky as Abraham's - dietary restrictions, ritual killing of animals, circumcision, and ritual prayer.  Muslims (Semites just as the Hebrews had been) gained political control of the region in question and ruled it as part of one caliphate or another for somewhere around 450 years.

        In 1096, in response to Papal propaganda and political concerns of the Byzantine Emperor, the Crusades were initiated, ostensibly to redeem the "Holy Land" (holy to many, but holy with a capitol "H" to European Christians. Most Crusaders were driven, however, by purely human motivators, including freedom from serfdom, a chance to grab an empire, especially among third and fourth sons of nobility who were unlikely to inherit, and the commands of their monarchs, who were motivated by greed and the urge to make a religiously significant name for themselves.   The crusades influenced the attitude of the western Church and people towards warfare. The frequent calling of crusades habituated the clergy and monarchies to the use of violence. The crusades also sparked debate about the legitimacy of taking lands and possessions from pagans on purely religious grounds that would arise again in the 15th and 16th centuries with the Age of Discovery.

     With its power and prestige raised by the crusades, the Papacy also gained greater control over the entire western Church.  One glaring facet of the Crusades in general, is that, although, ostensibly aimed at "reclaiming" the "Holy Land', technically, no European since pagan Rome had ever "claimed" the region in any case. Another spinoff was that although the Saracens (Turks/Muslims) were the targets, European and Levantine Jews, themselves, suffered horribly as a sort of zealous collateral damage. Jews living peacefully in Jerusalem were slaughtered in the thousands, not by Muslims, in whose caliphate they resided peacefully, but by Crusader Knights, all in the name of God. In Germany, synagogues were burned, sometimes with the congregation huddled inside. The Fourth Crusade, as an example of the depravity of the entire concept, actually attacked Byzantine Christian Constantinople, and sacked the city, taking many of its priceless and art and artifacts to Germany, Italy and throughout Europe. Persecution of Jews in the First Crusade began a thousand-year tradition of organized attacks on the Jews of Europe.

    From about 1300 CE through the 18th century,  control of the region (we’ll call it Palestine for simplicity’s sake) remained under the auspices of  various governments with little in common except Islam, which was enough, to insure that Christians and Jews remaining in the area, referred to as "people of the Book," were significantly less persecuted than in Europe where Jews remained objects of hostility and persecution and Christian dissenters fared little better.

      The current Arab–Israeli conflict is a relatively modern phenomenon, which has its roots in the end of the 19th century. After almost two millennia of existence of the Jewish Diaspora without a national state, the Zionist movement was founded in the late 19th century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to rising anti-Semitism in Europe, exemplified by the Dreyfus affair in France and the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire (see "Fiddler on the Roof"). There was institutionalized social anti-Semitism in most European nations throughout the 1700s and 1800s.  The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in 1897 following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). 

       At that time, the movement sought to encourage Jewish migration to Ottoman (Turkish) Palestine.  Zionism grew rapidly and became the dominant force in Jewish politics with the World War II era destruction of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. The conflict became a major international issue with the birth of Israel in 1948.

        In point of painfully avaricious reality, prior to the petroleum age, much of the Levant was more curiosity than concern for most European governments.  Since then, however, The Arab–Israeli conflict has resulted in at least five major wars and a number of minor conflicts. It has also been the source of two major Palestinian intifadas (uprisings).

        Tensions between the Zionist movements and the Arab residents of Palestine started to emerge after the 1880s, when immigration of European Jews to Palestine increased.  Herzl, a strong advocate for the cause of Zionism, encouraged contributions from a broad spectrum of Europeans, Jewish and gentile, said monies to be used to sponsor European Jews as settlers in Palestine. In a sense, this is analogous to Europeans encouraging settlement in the New World, in that the land wasn't empty in the first place. As an alternative to stealing the land and evicting residents as Europeans did with American Indians, Zionists purchased land, albeit, land with poor farmers already there!

           This immigration increased the Jewish communities in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, by the acquisition of land from Ottoman and individual Arab landholders, known as effendis, and establishment of Jewish agricultural settlements. At the time, Arabs lived in an almost feudal existence on the effendis' land. This is an important status distinction, as there is a tendency to overlook that, more than anything else, Palestine’s pre-Zionist occupants have been victims rather than aggressors.

       It is important to understand that the same rich Arabs who decry Israel's existence today were the very social group who sold their tenants' land out from under them. Additionally, in as much as Zionist settlers tended to be literate and better educated, they had political skills and clout disproportionate to their numbers.   Demographers have "guesstimated" (from Ottoman Turkish census data) that the population of Palestine in 1882–3 was about 468,000, consisting of 408,000 Muslims, 44,000 Christians and 15,000 Jews.  By the outbreak of World War I, these numbers had increased to 602,000 Muslims, 81,000 Christians and 39,000 Jews, plus a similar but uncertain number of Jews who were not Ottoman citizens. As of 1920, the ratio of Arabs to Jews was 15:1 with a Christian population greater than the Jewish count.

        Following WWI, Europeans set about deciding the political fate of the Middle east, with an eye towards control of lands and resources, facilitated by a fabricated "mandate" concept established by the League of nations. This, of course flies in the face of self-determination, but is consistent with the Colonialist policies prevailing in Europe at the time.  The process of establishing the mandates consisted of two phases: The formal removal of sovereignty of the state (Ottoman Turk or Austro-Hungarian) previously controlling the territory and the transfer of mandatory powers to individual states among the Allied Powers (France or Great Britain). Palestine, Jordan and Iraq (their modern names) fell under British mandate, while Syria and Lebanon were French. Put plainly, to the victor belonged the spoils, among which were Palestinians who were now voiceless (again).  This now transferred responsibility and control of these largely Islamic regions to Christian, European control, with Palestine, while majority Muslim, containing a growing portion of educated European and Levantine Jews, and under nominal control of Christian Britain. What could possibly go wrong?

     While the British, duplicitous colonial masters in other areas as well, had made promises to give both Arabs and Jews land, (the Balfour declaration) the British claimed they had never promised to give either side all of the land. Historically, most of British foreign policy and commitment in the region was aimed at forwarding the progress of what would eventually become T.E. Lawrence’s “Arab uprising” which, it was hoped, would engage the Turks in the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean coastal region-Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon.)  In 1915, the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence was formed as an agreement with Arab leaders to grant sovereignty to Arab lands under Ottoman control to form an Arab state in exchange for the “Great Arab Revolt” (watch Lawrence of Arabia) against the Ottomans.

         However, the Balfour Declaration in 1917 also proposed to "favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” but that “nothing should be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Earlier, in 1916, the Anglo-French Sykes–Picot Agreement had granted mandatory status to the British Empire for the area of present-day Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the area of present-day Iraq. The Balfour Declaration was seen by Jewish nationalists as the cornerstone of a future Jewish homeland on both sides of the Jordan River, but as one might expect, increased the concerns of the Arab population in the Palestine region. And so, the “troubles” began.

         Rising tensions had given way to violence, including civilian  riots in 1920 and 21. In an attempt to placate  the Arabs, and due to Britain's demonstrated  inability to control Arab violence in the Mandatory Palestine any other way, the semi-autonomous Arab Emirate of Transjordan was created in all Palestinian territory east of the Jordan river (roughly 77% of the Palestine mandate).  Cementing this reality in 1922, the League of Nations formally established the British Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan, assigning all of the land east of the Jordan River to the Emirate of Jordan, ruled by Hashemite king Abdullah but closely dependent on Britain, leaving the remainder west of the Jordan as the League of Nations Mandatory Palestine.

        The British now found themselves in a politically charged situation at home and abroad. The loss of much of a generation of young men left Britain shorthanded and sickened by  matters military, while thousands of miles away in a part of the world most Britons couldn't even locate on a map, the conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and the Zionist movement created a situation which the British would neither resolve nor from which they would be able to extricate themselves in any rational manner. Meanwhile on the continent, and closer to home for the British, continuing pogroms (semi-genocidal purges of entire Jewish communities) in Russia and the Ukraine as well as the first hints of  Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany created a new urgency in the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab resistance and attacks against the Jewish population most notably in the preceding 1929 Hebron massacre, and during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine, historically referred to as “The Great Revolt”.

        The British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led Arab opposition to the idea of turning part of Palestine into a Jewish state. "The Great Revolt", therefore was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home". 

 

       Following the killing of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in 1935, a declaration was made by Hajj Amin al-Husseini of 16 May 1936 as 'Palestine Day' and call was made for a General Strike. The revolt was branded by many in the Jewish Yishuv as "immoral and terroristic", often comparing it to fascism and Nazism. Now for a different interpretation, remarkable because it is the opinion of Israel’s first prime minister and a life-long Zionist: “Ben Gurion however described Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish immigration and fear of the English identification with Zionism.” 

       Simply put, the Jews, with British support, were doing in Palestine what the English had done centuries before, in Ireland! When reflecting upon Palestinian refugees and those remaining occupants’ attitudes toward Israel today, reflect on the facts in the following paragraph:

       According to official British figures covering the whole revolt, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, 108 were hanged, and 961 died because of what they described as "gang and terrorist activities". In an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead: 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead because of "terrorism", and 14,760 wounded. Over ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. In June 1937, the British imposed the death penalty for unauthorized possession of weapons, ammunition, and explosives, but since many Jews had permission to carry weapons and store ammunition for defense, this order was directed primarily against Palestinian Arabs and most of the 112 executed in Acre Prison were hanged for illegal possession of arms.

        Estimates of the number of Palestinian Jews killed range from 91 to several hundred. Even at the higher estimate that’s a ratio of 25 Arab Palestinians killed for every Palestinian Jew! In 1936 an Air Staff Officer in Middle East Command based in the Kingdom of Egypt, Arthur Harris, known as an advocate of "air policing", commented on the revolt saying that "one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn" would satisfactorily solve the problem. Later, in World War II, Harris would become better known as “Bomber” Harris in the press, and “Butcher” Harris within the RAF.

        Unsurprisingly, the 1936–39 Arab Revolt has been, and still is marginalized in much of both Western and Israeli historiography on Palestine. Most progressive Western scholars of the era and the region have relatively little to say about the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinian Arab rebels against the British Empire.  One searching for American parallels can look at almost any account of US Cavalry encounters with native Americans, which are, too frequently, "sanitized" in similar manner. According to Swedenburg’s (Ted Swedenburg, “The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past”) analysis, for instance, the Zionist version of Israeli history acknowledges only one authentic national movement: the struggle for Jewish self-determination that resulted in the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948. Swedenburg writes that, "The Zionist narrative has no room for an anticolonial and anti-British Palestinian national revolt." Zionists often describe the revolt simply and prosaically as a series of "events," "riots", or "happenings", the deaths of thousands of Palestinians having been relegated to the status of a collateral damage statistic.

        The appropriate “official” description was debated by Jewish Agency officials, who were anxiously  keen not to give a negative impression of Palestine to prospective new Jewish European immigrants. In private, however, Prime-Minister-to-be, David Ben-Gurion was unequivocal, stating flatly that “The Arabs, were fighting dispossession ... The fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people." And there you have it. One can imagine that description applied to Lakota, Cheyenne, Cherokee, Seminole, and the list goes on.

        In search for help in expelling British forces from Palestine, (thus removing the enforcer of the Zionist enterprise), the Grand Mufti sought alliance with the Axis Powers. The response of the British government was to banish the Mufti from Palestine, curb Jewish immigration, and reinforce its police force. As an “interesting” side note: He (the grand Mufti, banished Palestinian Arab leader) spent much of World War II in Germany and helped form a Muslim SS division in the Balkans, (perhaps sowing the seeds of the 1990's "ethnic cleansing" in reverse?)

        The Jewish leadership then adopted a policy of "restraint and static defense" in response to occasional Arab attacks and criticized the British for what they considered to be a British retreat from the conditions promised by the Balfour Declaration and its (Britain's) less than enthusiastic response to Arab violence.  This sense of "we're on our own" led to a break- away from the more pacifistic Hagana (the Jewish self-defense organization of the Yishuv) and created the more right-wing militant Irgun, which would later be led by Menachem Begin in 1943 and would result in the group’s bombing of the King David Hotel. Irgun led attacks against Arab policemen and civilians in the 1930s.

     The King David Hotel bombing was a terrorist attack carried out on Monday, July 22, 1946, by Irgun, by then a militant right-wing Zionist underground organization. British administrative headquarters for Palestine, were housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel. (Now who’s your terrorist?)

       But now, back to the timeline. In 1936, A British Royal Commission of Inquiry that came to be known as the Peel Commission was established to attempt resolution of what was now the continuing and widening split in its mandate.  The commission proposal was a two-state solution that gave the Arabs control over all of the Negev, much of the present-day West Bank, and Gaza and gave the Jews control over Tel Aviv, Haifa, present-day northern Israel, and surrounding areas. Per the conditions proposed, The British would to retain control over Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and surrounding areas. The two main Jewish leaders, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion had convinced the Zionist Congress to approve the Peel recommendations as a basis for more negotiation. The Arabs, however, emphatically rejected it while demanding "an end to Jewish immigration" and land sales to Jews, calling for independence of Palestine as an independent Arab state. Sound unreasonable? We American colonists didn’t think such a concept was all that bad in 1776, did we?

       While the Arabs held a large numerical advantage, the Zionists had far more resources, organization and political skill, not to mention a steady infusion of funds from wealthy Jews in Europe and America.  Jewish violence against the Mandatory Palestine continued to mount throughout the latter half of the 1940s, with attacks by the Irgun, assassination of British authorities’ officials by the Lehi, and the 1946 King David Hotel bombing. In 1947, the population was reported as 1,845,000, consisting of 608,000 Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs and others, making the region still 2:1 Arab to Jewish population, even with the new flood of European refugees and holocaust survivors, for whom the West (the former Allied Powers) had significant and appropriate sympathy and concern.

     The 1948 Arab–Israeli War (1948–49), known as the "War of Independence" by Israelis and al-Nakba ("the Catastrophe") by Palestinians, began after the UN Partition Plan and the subsequent 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine in November 1947.

        The plan proposed the establishment of both independent Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. The Arabs had rejected the plan while the Jews had accepted it. As a point of interest, a modern-day point of Palestinian discontent seems to be lack of independent territory, which they rejected almost 60 years ago! For four months, under continuous Arab provocation and attack, the (we'll say "Israelis" from here on) were usually on the defensive while occasionally retaliating. By March 1948 however, the United States was actively seeking a temporary UN approved trusteeship rather than immediate partition, known as the Truman trusteeship proposal, a proposal rejected by Israeli leadership.  By now, both Israeli and Arab militias had begun campaigns to control territory inside and outside the designated borders, and an open war between the two populations emerged.

     At this point the stage was set for all the violence and hatred of the following 60 years.  Palestinian Arabs felt they had lost their land even if it had been sold out from under them by other absentee rich Turkish, then Arab, landlords. Having no recourse, they were primed to turn their disaffection on the Israeli settlers who had bought it.  It must be noted that regardless of how one views land ownership, that, while Israelis didn't steal Arab land, they certainly stole Palestinian sovereignty.  Adjoining nations, following Israel's declaration of statehood and Britain's 1948 withdrawal, admitting they were powerless to stop the flood of Jewish immigration, declared the mantra which survives today - "Israel has no right to statehood." Further in an act of hubris and epic underestimation, Israel's neighbors assured the Palestinian Arabs that their troubles would be short lived as they (Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon, fueled with Saudi money) were about to annihilate the Israelis. They were encouraged to leave until hostilities were over and they could reclaim "their" lands and independence. Note, and this is a crucial point, most Palestinians, in what would soon be a proliferation of refugee camps, had simply gotten “out of the way” of other Arab troops, and were refused the right to return after Syria., Egypt and Jordan, Lebanese and Saudi troops had been defeated 

     Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Saudi troops invaded Palestine subsequent to the British withdrawal and the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. Israel, the US, the Soviet Union and UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie called this "illegal aggression", while China broadly backed the Arab claims. The Arab states proclaimed their aim of a "United State of Palestine" in place of Israel and an Arab state. The Arab Higher Committee said, that in the future Palestine, the Jews would be no more than 1/7 of the population. i.e. only Jews that lived in Palestine before the British mandate, not specifying what would happen to the other Jews. They considered the UN Plan to be invalid because it was opposed by Palestine's Arab majority and claimed that the British withdrawal led to an absence of legal authority, making it necessary for them to protect Arab lives and property. About two thirds of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territories which came under Jewish control; the rest became Arab, and generally second class, citizens of Israel. As a further cultural nightmare for the Arab neighboring states, Israel humiliated them militarily. All of the much smaller number of Jews in the territories captured by the Arabs, for example the Old City of Jerusalem, also fled or were expelled. The official United Nations estimate was that 711,000 Arabs became refugees during the fighting. These, then, are the progenitors, several generations removed, of today's current crop of violently anti- Israeli terrorists, encouraged into exile by their fellow religionists and left to ferment in refugee camps. Of course, the further (and continuing) expulsion of Arab Palestinians and the seizure of what lands they may still hold, continues to exacerbate the situation.    

     The fighting ended with signing of Armistice Agreements in 1949 between Israel and its warring neighbors formalizing Israeli control of the area allotted to the Jewish state (per the original UN partition plan, rejected by Palestinian Arabs) plus just over half of the area allotted to the Arab state. The Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan until June 1967 when they were seized by Israel during the Six-Day War. The  711,000, or so,  Palestinians who fled or were expelled from the areas that became Israel were not allowed to return to their homes, and took up residence in refugee camps in surrounding countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the area that was later to be known as the Gaza Strip; they were usually not allowed to leave refugee camps and mix with the local Arab society either, leaving the Palestinian refugee problem unsolved.  Around 400 Arab towns and villages were depopulated during the 1948 Palestinian exodus.  Post war, the surrounding Arab states created a group of their own whom they neither recognized or significantly assisted financially. 

     After the 1948  war,  the (defeated) Arab states insisted on two main demands, neither of which were accepted by Israel: 1. Israel should withdraw to the borders of the UN Partition Plan — Israel argued "that the new borders—which could be changed, under consent only—had been established as a result of war, and because the UN blueprint took no account of defense needs and was militarily untenable, there was no going back to that blueprint."  2. The Palestinian refugees deserved a full right of return back into Israel — Israel argued that this was "out of the question, not only because they were hostile to the Jewish state, but they would also fundamentally alter the Jewish character of the state." It is worthy of note that Arabs who had not left were integrated into Israeli society to a large extent unless demonstrably hostile to the established order.

       Over the next two decades after the 1948 war ended, between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews fled or were expelled from the Arab countries they were living in, in many cases owing to anti-Jewish sentiment, expulsion (in the case of Egypt), or, as in Iraq,  legal oppression but also quite often to promises of a better life from Israel; of this number, two-thirds ended up in refugee camps in Israel, while the remainder migrated to France, the United States and other Western or Latin American countries. The Jewish refugee camps in Israel were evacuated with time and the refugees were eventually integrated in the Jewish Israeli society (which in fact consisted almost entirely of refugees from Arab and European states). Over the ensuing 60 years there have been numerous hostilities, overt and terrorist, between Israel and her neighbors. They include armed conflicts in 1950, 1956, 1964 (the Six Day War), 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), anti-terrorist incursions into Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, and in 1987-1993 the first Intifada.

     While the principle conflict of previous wars had been by uniformed services one against the other, the Intifada was far more of a terrorist nature. It began as an uprising of Palestinians, particularly the young, against the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the failure of the nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve any kind of meaningful diplomatic solution to the Palestinian issue. The exiled PLO leadership in Tunisia quickly assumed a role in the intifada, but the uprising also brought a rise in the importance of Palestinian national and Islamic movements and helped lead to the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988. The intifada was started by a group of young Palestinians who began throwing rocks at the Israeli occupying forces in the Gaza Strip in December 1987. In May 1989, the government of Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir, suggested that violence cease, and that elections should be held in the West Bank and Gaza for "a political delegation with whom Israel would come to terms regarding the implementation of Palestinian interim self-governing authority in these areas." These elections however never materialized as Israel had and continues to have internal divisions over ways and means of dealing with "The Palestinian Problem."

     Backing the wrong horse has become a way of life for Palestinian separatists in more recent years. The First Gulf War was a political disaster for the PLO due to their support of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Following Iraq's crushing defeat by coalition forces, Kuwaiti authorities forcibly pressured nearly 200,000 Palestinians to leave Kuwait. This forced expulsion was a response to the alignment of PLO leader Yasser Arafat with Saddam Hussein. They (oil rich Kuwait) also withdrew their financial support from the Palestinian cause due to PLO support of Saddam Hussein. This large political setback created the conditions that allowed for the PLO to begin talks with the United States and Israel. The First Palestinian Intifada ended with the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the signing of the Oslo Accords by Israel and the PLO in 1993.

     A second Intifada, of 2000, triggered by Israeli PM Sharon declaring the temple Mount in Jerusalem to be “an eternal Israeli territory” lasted another several years and was characterized by suicide bombings and large numbers of civilian casualties, in a sort of prequel to current events.  In 2002, as the second Intifada raged on, Saudi Arabia offered a peace plan in The New York Times and at a summit meeting of the Arab League in Beirut. The plan essentially calls for full withdrawal, solution of the refugee problem through the Palestinian "right of return" (to?), a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem in return for fully normalized relations by Israel with the whole Arab world. This proposal was the first to receive the unanimous backing of the Arab League. In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Peres said: "... the details of every peace plan must be discussed directly between Israel and the Palestinians, and to make this possible, the Palestinian Authority must put an end to terror." Curiously, following the Saudi plan, in 2005, the United States Congress acknowledged that our regional ally, then and still, Saudi Arabia, had been funding Hamas and other Palestinian insurgency terrorist groups.

      In an effort of its own in 2005 Israel unilaterally evacuated settlements, and military outposts from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. The Disengagement Plan was a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, adopted by the government and enacted in August 2005, to remove a permanent Israeli presence from the Gaza Strip and from four Israeli settlements in the northern West Bank. The civilians were evacuated (many forcibly) and the residential buildings demolished after August 15, and the disengagement from the Gaza Strip was completed on 12 September 2005, when the last Israeli soldier left. The military disengagement from the northern West Bank was completed ten days later.

     In January 2006, elections were held for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas won these elections, and thus secured a majority of seats. Due to the nature of their Parliamentary system, this meant they also controlled the executive posts of the Palestinian Authority, including the Prime Minister's post, and the cabinet.  Hamas gained popular support because it appeared much more efficient and much less corrupt than Fatah (political, relatively non-violent). Unfortunately, it was also far more willing to resort to violence to achieve its aims.  While it built various institutions and social services. Hamas also openly declared that it did not intend to accept any recognition of Israel. It stated it would not accept the Oslo Accords, and would not accept or recognize any negotiations with Israel. Throughout previous years, it had openly stated that it encouraged and organized attacks against Israel. This created a major change in previous Israeli-Palestinian interactions, which had previously been going through various periods of negotiations. This also signaled a huge step back from resolution, triggered by the Saudi plan and the Israeli unilateral withdrawal of 2005. 

         Most Western nations and international organizations did not give the Hamas led government official recognition and responded by cutting off funds and imposing other sanctions.  In June 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza, violently routing the forces of Fatah. This effectively severed control of the Palestinian territories. Those in the West Bank were under Fatah's control, with those in Gaza under the control of Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, dissolved the government. The fighting had numerous casualties, and gave rise to even more refugees, who fled to Egypt and other countries

       And so, we come to the present. With or without their Palestinian serfs’ approval, more than 100 years ago wealthy Turks first, Arabs later, freely sold Jewish immigrants land on which their Arab tenants lived. Powerless against their former landlords, Palestinian Arabs turned their hatred upon the Jews. The holocaust left numerous European Jews stateless, so they fled to Palestine.   European nations, having made promises and pseudo political divisions they had no ability to enforce or maintain, simply left. Fueled by cultural and religious hatred, Arab neighbors turned military force upon the new state of Israel after it took unilateral steps to create a nation. While Israel may have acted alone, they did not create an exclusionary policy until they were attacked on all sides. Meanwhile Arab states, having created a huge number of Palestinian refugees, did little to deal with them or incorporate them into their own Arab societies. In fact, due to Islamic sectarianism, some were regarded as poorly by others as if they were Israelis, not fellow Arabs.  

      Several wars and six decades later, even though Israel had withdrawn from Gaza, Hamas forces seized control in Gaza, ousted the Palestinian authority and destabilized the region. Hamas terrorists in Gaza built tunnels used for terrorist raids inside Israel. In some ways, this is Israel reaping as they had sowed 60 yeas previously. By its nature, terrorism endangers those who sponsor it, in this case Hamas and, unfortunately those innocent civilians in whose presence terrorists hide. In the face of Hamas' intransigence and continued terrorist actions, Israel was (is) faced with really only two choices: sit in Israel and allow continued tunnel incursions and rocket bombardments from and by Hamas or defend its own civilians. What Israel is doing has had horrific effects on civilians, yet what is the option?  If they do nothing, they will be continually assaulted. What did Britain do when the Germans lobbed v-1s and v-2s into London? They bombed Berlin, hardly a military or industrial target, and civilians died, same in Dresden, same in Frankfurt. There is a choice in Gaza as there was in Germany - stop projecting deadly force at your neighbors. Hamas isn't the moral standard setter for anyone. It is a rogue terrorist organization which has hijacked Gaza and endangered all its occupants. Where should world anger focus in the current situation? Stopping Hamas' use of deadly force. This may be hard since they have broken three cease fires since their action triggered the most recent horror.   

       But what provocation is there for the continued violence? Amnesty International has a pretty good idea: “Since January (2018) the Israeli government, emboldened by President Donald Trump’s inauguration, has authorized the construction of more than 6,219 illegal settlement homes in the occupied West Bank, including 719 in East Jerusalem. These announcements not only mark a shift from the Israeli government’s more cautious approach under the Obama administration but also fly in the face of UN Security Council resolution 2334, passed in December last year, which calls on Israel to immediately cease all settlement activities in the OPT."

       Israel has consistently demonstrated willingness to shoot at anything or anyone and ask questions later, as the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli naval vessels and aircraft firmly established. 34 US sailors died, 171 were wounded. Israel said they were sorry and paid off the families of the survivors.

        And yes, all this ultimately emanates from a single concept – Zionism.

" We stress that there are hundreds of thousands Jews around the world who identify with our opposition to the Zionist ideology and who feel that Zionism is not Jewish, but a political agenda...What we want is not a withdrawal to the '67 borders, but to everything included in it, so the country can go back to the Palestinians and we could live with them.”

Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss