Israel at 60 - Israel History 101

"...[a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse....A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action....We never saw a human being on the whole route....There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."
Mark Twain,
In reference to his travel to Palestine in 1867

All you need to know about the Arab Israeli Conflict, in about five minuets of reading:

Palestinians claim that Israel was built on stolen land from a country heavily populated by native Arabs who today call themselves "Palestinians" but who in 1948 simply called themselves "Arabs." These are the facts:

First, there wasn't, nor has there ever been a country called "Palestine", only a region that was given that name by the Romans as an insult to the Jews who rebelled against them in the year 66 CE. "Palestine" is named for the ancient enemies of Israel called the "Philistines" who are referenced many times in the Bible and who's civilization no longer exists.

The region changed hands many times over the centuries but since the days of ancient Israel, had never been an independently governed country.

In the modern era; According to every census done on the matter, by 1914 there were no more than a little over 700,000 Arabs living in the entire area of what became known shortly thereafter as the British Mandate of Palestine. Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917 declared Palestine to be the future Jewish national homeland. On may 26th, 1923, the British separated over two thirds of the territory (all of the eastern areas of Palestine) and gave it to the Arabs; That area is today called the country of Jordan.

Up to 1948, the Jewish population in western areas of Palestine rose significantly as a result of immigration encouraged by the Zionist movement who purchased large amounts of land through the 'Jewish National Fund' to reestablish the State of Israel in its historic location as a refuge for persecuted Jews the world over. At the same time, the Arab population rose significantly as a result of Arab immigration as well (almost doubling between 1922 and 1936). The Jewish immigration is usually presented by Israel's foes as illegitimate, whereas the Arab immigration is almost never mentioned.

The Arab claims to Jerusalem are particularly galling:
Jews have been in the a majority in Jerusalem for centuries; Jerusalem was established by King David as the capital of the Jewish people since biblical times, long before there was such a thing as an Arab or a Muslim. Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran even once, but is mentioned in the Judeo-Christian texts 632 times (in the new testament at least 154 times). The Muslim claim to Jerusalem is backed neither by history, religion, demographics or by any other legitimate standard.

Before and during World War Two, Palestinians under the leadership of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, allied themselves with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi's, while the Jews joined the war efforts to defeat the Nazi's.

Following the events of World War II and the Nazi Holocaust, the urgent need for the creation of a Jewish homeland became glaringly apparent to the civilized world and immigration of Jewish war refugees accelerated.

Upon the declaration of the State of Israel on roughly half the land of western Palestine (about 1/5th of the original Palestine Mandate, as drawn up and approved by the United Nations) in 1948, and despite UN approval and public Jewish pleas for peaceful co-existence, Palestinians and all of the Neighboring Arab states attacked Israel in an all-out invasion to wipe the tiny new entity off the face of the map. The Jews defended themselves, the Arab attack failed and roughly 700,000 Palestinian refugees fled. This failure to destroy Israel in 1948 is described by Palestinians as the "Nakba" or "catastrophe".

As a consequence of the events of 1948, 856,000 Jews were forced out of Arab lands, of which Some 600,000 of these refugees resettled in Israel, leaving behind in Arab countries property valued today at more than $300 billion. Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands has been estimated at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the entire State of Israel).

Indeed, the entire series of events in Palestine up to and after 1948 might be loosely and imperfectly compared to the population exchange that occurred between India and Pakistan upon the departure of the British and the creation of an Independent India, with one glaring difference:

While Jewish refugees who fled from Arab lands were absorbed into Israel, Arab refugees who fled to neighboring Arab lands were not allowed to be absorbed, were kept in squalid camps by fellow Arab regimes and left to fester in poverty, ignorance and hate. They were, and still are told today that the only way to improve their condition is to kick out the "evil Jews" who "stole" their land generations ago. Indeed, generations of Arab children have been indoctrinated with the most hateful forms of classic, primitive antisemitism and Islamic radicalism in the service of the Palestinian cause.

Meanwhile, Israel, a refuge and source of hope to millions, moved forward as the only free and democratic entity in the Middle East, and developed into a modern powerhouse of science, technology and culture.

That, ladies and gentlemen in a nutshell is the early history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. You can read a thousand books on the subject (and I have) but the words spelled out in the above short paragraphs by me cuts through the entire matter and lays out the very basics that every person on earth should know about the roots of this conflict.

Joe Gelman