April 1
April 1
April 1
Brief Paper
Israel is the world's only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea.
Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the
territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same
land. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over who gets what land and how it's controlled.
Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand
years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century. Jews fleeing persecution
in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab- and Muslim-
majority territory in the Ottoman and later British Empire. The Arabs resisted, seeing the land
as rightfully theirs. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed,
and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today's
lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in 1948 and another in
1967.
Social and political developments in Europe convinced Jews they needed their own country,
and their ancestral homeland seemed like the right place to establish it. European Jews 90
percent of all Jews at the time arrived at Zionism partly because of rising anti-Semitic
persecution and partly because the Enlightenment introduced Jews to secular nationalism.
Between 1896 and 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled from Europe to what was
then British-controlled Palestine, including large numbers forced out of Europe during the
Holocaust. Many Arabs saw the influx of Jews as a European colonial movement, and the
two peoples fought bitterly. The British couldn't control the violence, and in 1947 the United
Nations voted to split the land into two countries. Almost all of the roughly 650,000 Jews
went to the blue territory in the map to the right, and a majority of the Arab population went
to the orange. Israeli forces defeated the Palestinian militias and Arab armies in a vicious
conflict that turned The UN partition promised 56 percent of British Palestine for the Jewish
state; by the end of the war, everything except the West Bank and the eastern quarter of
Jerusalem , as well as the Gaza Strip . It left Israelis with a state, but not Palestinians.
Reflection/Conclusion
The saga of the Holy Land, ancient and modern, reminds someone with no personal
connection to it of nothing so much as the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. There seems to
be something about Palestine that afflicts the innocent, tests the righteous, and causes
incomprehensible suffering to past and present inhabitants. Israeli Jews and Palestinians both
claim descent from the ancient peoples of the lands they now contest. Their competing
narratives are at the heart of the perverse drama there. In this drama, the spiritual descendants
of Jews who left Palestine assert a religious duty to dispossess the biological descendants of
Over the course of centuries, the Jews of the Diaspora were grievously persecuted by
Christians. This experience helped to inspire Zionism. It culminated in the horrors of the
Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile, under Byzantium and the Caliphate, all but a few of the Jews of
Palestine sought refuge in conversion to Judaism’s successor faiths: Christianity and Islam.
have inhabited from time immemorial. And yet another Jewish-descended Diaspora — this
time, Christian and Muslim has been ejected from Palestine to suffer in exile. Not even the
most imaginative writer of fiction could have composed an account of traumatic suffering
and human tragedy comparable to that which Zionists and Palestinians have undergone and
The moral harm that these distant cousins continue to do to each other is huge. So is the
damage they are doing to their sympathizers and supporters abroad. The resort to terrorist
acts by Palestinians, especially suicide bombings in crowded public places, has caused them
to forfeit much of the international sympathy their cause would otherwise enjoy. The
massacre of civilians in the West by Arabs enraged by Western support for Israeli
mistreatment of the Palestinians and other affronts has generated intense European and
American suspicion of all Arabs. The diffusion of Arab rage to non-Arab regions of the realm
of Islam has aroused global antipathy to Islam even as it has inspired acts of terrorism among
Muslims.
Similarly, the cruelties of Israelis to their Arab captives and neighbours, especially in the on-
going siege of Gaza and repeated attacks on the people of Lebanon, have cost the Jewish
state much of the global sympathy that the Holocaust previously conferred on it. The racist
tyranny of Jewish settlers over West Bank Arabs and the progressive emergence of a version
of apartheid in Israel itself are deeply troubling to a growing number of people abroad who
have traditionally identified with Israel. Many — perhaps most of the most disaffected — are
Jews. They are in the process of dissociating themselves from Israel. They know that, to the
extent that Judaism comes to be conflated with racist arrogance . Israeli behaviour threatens a
rebirth of anti-Semitism in the West. Ironically, Israel conceived as a refuge and guarantee
against European anti-Semitism has become the sole conceivable stimulus to its revival and
globalization. Demonstrably, Israel has been bad for the Palestinians. It is turning out also to