Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Two Peoples One Land

The Seattle Times

     The land Abraham is said to have been given by God sits at a busy continental crossroads that has been claimed, conquered and carved up by armies since recorded time.

     Today, the Israelis and Palestinians--whose dominant religious roots both trace to Abraham--continue a long and bitter fight for control of the area. Both groups rely on force, aid from stronger nations and persuasive arguments that tell why each has a rightful claim to the land, and why the other does not.

     These arguments encompass a range of thorny issues: religion, history, politics and national identity. Here's a look at those issues, and how the children of Abraham came to be locked in a violent dispute that has become this era's most intractable conflict.

Shared Roots in Ancient Times

The Seattle Times

     It's called the Holy Land, its ancient history dear to the world's three main monotheistic religions--Judaism, Islam and Christianity. While many argue that the theological past has little to do with the nationalistic forces driving the region today, protection of religious areas and icons remains a rallying cry for the faithful.

     In the Beginning

     Abraham, the Bible says, was called by God to leave his home and move to a new land, where he was to become the father of a mighty nation. His journey has become a tale of faith and transformation embraced by Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

     As the story goes, some 4,000 years ago Abraham traveled from the Chaldean city of Ur--in present-day Iraq--to the land of Canaan--essentially modern-day Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

     The book of Genesis says God then spoke to Abraham in Canaan, saying: "To your offspring, I will give this land."

     Abraham's offspring included two sons. The first was Ishmael, whom he fathered with Hagar, his wife Sarah's former servant. The other was Isaac, whom he fathered with Sarah. Jews believe they are descendants of Isaac, who, as the legitimate son of Abraham, was the intended inheritor of God's promised land. Muslims believe they are descendants of Ishmael, Abraham's first-born. They say Hagar was Abraham's second wife and believe their claims to the Holy Land are as valid as those of the Jews.

     Abraham is said to have lived 175 years, and then buried in a cave called Machpelah, in what is now the city of Hebron in the West Bank.

     Abraham has become revered by three religions. In the Christian New Testament, Abraham is called "the ancestor of all who believe." The Koran mentions Abraham more often than the prophet Mohammed, who is believed by Muslims to have been a direct descendant of Abraham. Jews see Abraham as the first person to recognize their God.

     The Exodus

     Famine drove the Israelites from Canaan to Egypt and then, as recounted in the book of Exodus, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and back to conquer Canaan around 1200 B.C.E. (Before Common Era)

     Until about 721 B.C.E., the Israelites ruled Canaan, calling it Israel in the north and Judea in the south, where they built their first temple in Jerusalem.

     Then the Israelites were conquered by the Assyrians and Babylonians, their temple destroyed and the Israelite tribes scattered.

     In 539 B.C.E., some Israelites returned to Jerusalem and built their second temple, which was subsequently destroyed by Romans in 70 C.E., after a Jewish revolt. The Jews were then expelled.

     This second expulsion is seen by many Jews as lasting about 2,000 years--until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948--though small Jewish populations remained while the land was in the control of others. Palestinians have said their people lived in the land throughout history, and that their ancestors predate Abraham's arrival in Canaan.

     New Religions

     The rise of Christianity and Islam forever altered the Holy Land. It became filled with sites sacred to three religions whose adherents now compose more than half of the world's population. Islam arose about 600 years after the birth of Christ, when the prophet Mohammed is said to have begun receiving divine revelations later compiled in the Koran. The religion spread quickly, growing into a power that for a time controlled lands from Spain and northern Africa to India. The Islamic world's dominance then declined, eventually ending with the rise of European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

     Holy Sites

     Islam's two holiest sites are in Saudi Arabia--Mecca, the birthplace of Mohammed, and Medina, where he is buried.

     But Islam's third holiest site is in Jerusalem, in the area that holds the Al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock.

     The Dome of the Rock covers a stone promontory from which Muslims believe Mohammed ascended on a miraculous night journey to heaven and back.

     Jews also revere the site, which is where they believe Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, before being told by God that that no longer was necessary.

     The Al-Aqsa mosque, which was built around 700 C.E., sits across from the Dome of the Rock, which was completed about 15 years earlier. Both buildings sit on top of the small hill that held the two Israelite temples before they were destroyed.

     The Muslims refer to this hill as Haram al-Sharif, meaning "the noble sanctuary." Jews call the hill the Temple Mount, and consider one of the hill's retaining walls, the Western Wall, a holy shrine.

     Many Conquests

     In addition to being home to the shrines of three religions, the Holy Land has been home to a series of conquerors. It has been ruled by Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Persians, Muslims, Christian Crusaders, and finally, the Ottoman Empire, which lost the land in World War I to the Allied powers.

     Britain then ruled the area under a mandate from the League of Nations, and it was under Britain's watch that the modern struggle between Jews and Arabs for independent national homelands began.

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The Revolts: Zionism and Arab Nationalism

By Eli Sanders
The Seattle Times

• The push for Jewish and Palestinian nations arose primarily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In all the talk of ancient hatreds and religious feuds, it is easy to lose sight of this basic fact: The concepts for states of Palestine and Israel as we now understand them are younger than even the concept of America.

     Palestinian Identity

     For the people who would become the Palestinians, the seeds of a strong national identity began in the early 1800s with struggles against the ruling Ottomans, who had controlled the territory since the 1500s, and in 1834 against the Egyptians, who for a short time ruled the area. These revolts, and later revolts against other outside powers, unified Arabs from diverse backgrounds--peasants, urban traders, religious leaders--by pitting them against common enemies.

     When Zionist Jews fleeing persecution in Europe and Russia began arriving in increasing numbers in the 1880s, the influx of immigrants raised tensions. A series of confrontations between Jews and Arabs began in 1920. When the British, who voiced support for Zionism, won control of the area after World War I, there was a major Arab revolt against them, too.

     Rise of Zionism

     For Jews, the longing to return to the Holy Land had been a unifying force for thousands of years before the creation of the Jewish state.

     "Next year in Jerusalem." These words are spoken annually by Jews during Passover, the holiday that commemorates the Israelites' exodus from Egypt. The prayer reflects the longing of an exiled people to return to their first land, a home they believe was given to them by God.

     In the late 1880s Jews faced rising anti-Semitism in Europe and violent pogroms in Russia. A few decades later, 6 million Jews died in Adolf Hitler's Holocaust in World War II. Because of all this, the idea of Zionism--the establishment of a Jewish state--gained widespread support among Jews.

     The British Mandate

     The British were given a League of Nations mandate over the former Ottoman area they called Palestine after World War I.

     Frustration of the Jews and Arabs of Palestine grew as they saw no sign of imminent statehood under the mandate. Other Arab areas were granted statehood, but Palestine remained under mandate control. Jews and Arabs clashed with each other and fought the British almost immediately.

     In 1936, the Arabs began a major revolt against British policies and ever-increasing Jewish immigration. The revolt ended in 1939, the same year the British released a document known as the White Paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over five years--and none thereafter. It also prohibited future land sales to Jews, and promised Palestine independence within 10 years, presumably as an Arab-dominated state.

     As tensions between Arabs and Jews became increasingly volatile and the enmity both groups felt toward the British escalated, the British mandate became ever more tenuous.

     The U.N. Partition

     In 1947, Britain told the United Nations it was ending the Palestine mandate and handed the problem to the United Nations.

     A U.N. commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem under international control. The United States supported that idea. The recommendation was endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly on Nov. 29, 1947 as U.N. Resolution 181.

     The Arab states and the Arabs of Palestine rejected the U.N. partition, feeling that all the land was theirs. The Jews accepted the plan and on May 14, 1948, led by David Ben-Gurion, declared statehood for Israel. U.S. President Truman recognized Israel immediately, shortly followed by the Soviet Union.

     Israel was attacked the next day by the Arab states and Palestinians.

     What followed was the first major Middle East war over the conflicting national aspirations of the Jews and Palestinians.

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The Endless Wars: Modern Strife in the Holy Land

By Eli Sanders
The Seattle Times

     The war of 1948 gave birth to Israel and cemented the psychology of distrust and anger that plagues Arab-Israeli relations to this day. That war was followed by ongoing confrontations between Israel and its neighbors, including the wars of 1956, 1967, 1973 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. These conflicts were followed by a series of Palestinian uprisings and some halting steps toward regional peace--a process that is now stalled with the latest Palestinian uprising and the Israeli military response.

     In following these epic struggles over the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, it is easy to forget how small an area is involved. Modern-day Israel and the occupied territories comprise about 10,500 square miles, an area some 10 percent smaller than Vancouver Island.

     The Creation of Israel and the 1948 War

     To the Jews, the 1948 war proved they were alone in the Middle East, surrounded by hostile populations that would rather kill them than share the Holy Land. The story of how Israel was attacked in 1948 by the combined forces of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt--just a day after it declared independence--is an important part of the Israeli consciousness.

     To the Arab world, the war was a humiliating defeat, another instance of pan-Arab unity proving unequal to the power of outsiders. It remains a source of bitterness to this day, with the story of how the war drove Palestinians off their lands referred to as al-Nakba, "the disaster."

     By the time the 1948 war ended--through a 1949 agreement called the Rhodes Armistice--some 700,000 Palestinians had left their homes, most moving into the area now known as the West Bank and creating the refugee crisis that still exists.

     At the same time, a similar number of Jewish refugees fled their homes in neighboring areas and other Arab countries because of the turmoil.

     U.N. Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, endorsed the right of refugees "wanting to live at peace with their neighbors" to return to their homes or receive compensation for lost land and property. Palestinian refugees were neither compensated nor allowed to return. Arab countries, with the exception of Jordan, refused to absorb them, preferring to maintain the refugee camps for more than half a century as a way of keeping the issue from fading away.

     Jewish refugees were eagerly absorbed by Israel.

     After the 1948 war, Israel possessed approximately 8,000 square miles of Palestine--reducing the Arab lands set up in the 1947 U.N. partition by some 50 percent. Jerusalem was divided, with Arabs on the east side of the armistice line--the Green Line--and the Jews on the west.