Life's adventures: What is it with this Israeli/Palestinian issue anyway? PART I

I want to start by saying I am NOT a political person, but I am Jewish. I have been to Israel several times and I have family there. I support Israel as a nation and feel it MUST be supported.

That being said, there are problems. The concept of a Two State Solution seems to be the one that has the highest possibility to bring peace. I have heard "yes, but...." so many times that I decided to TRY to put this in terms I understand.

Maybe I can help you too. I may have some facts wrong altho I did spend some time researching. I used Israeli resources, Palestinian resources, Jordanian resources and good old Wikipedia. Please let me know if I have commited a grave error. The hope here is to symplified to achieve some level of understanding, not cause another war.

I started with a look at maps of the region. I love maps, so forgive me but they show one thing VERY CLEARLY: this is real estate that has been fought over for millennium.

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This first map is c1200 BCE, Canaan at the time of Joshua. I figured this is as good as any place to start. You can see there are a number of communities. JEWS nor PALESTINIANS lived here at that time, although the Israelites arrived from their time of slavery in Egypt, promised the land by God. Read your Bible. The peoples who lived here were conquered and either killed or absorbed over time by the conquerors, an age-old tradition no matter where in the world it took place.

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This colorful map shows the division of territory in the time before Christ. It shows how the tribes have spread over the land. Note that the territory shown is on both sides of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.

This is the territory at the time of Jesus. You'll recognize some names. Others you won't. To simplify, that means they were conquered or absorbed.

This map, shows the territories occupied by the 10 Tribes.

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So by this time, the land has been ruled over by the Greeks, the Babylonians, and the Romans, and was part of the Byzantine Empire, each conquering and subduing the people. Each being consequently pushed out. Destruction of the two Temples and exile of the population occurred. And people always went back.

Following Mohammad's unification of the Arabia peninsula in the 6th Century, the Caliph capture of Jerusalem in 638 permitted the rights of all non-Muslims to live as they chose in the territory. The Arab name for the Byzantine province of Palaestina Prima became Palestine and this is where the regional name comes from. In 691 the Caliph ordered the Dome of the Rock built on the ruins of the Temple Mount. It is believed that Mohammad began his journey to heaven from this site. About a decade later the Al-Aksa Mosque was also built. The Caliph passed an edict that Jews and Muslims were both "Peoples of the Book" to underscore the common monotheistic roots that they shared.

Meanwhile, in Europe, grave concerns rose when the Caliph recommended demolishing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. His successor, with the acceptable amount of money handed over, permitted the Byzantines to rebuilt the church. As the Arabs began to understand that the pilgrims coming to visit the holy sites brought a lot of money, persecution of the Christians diminished. As time went on the concept to recapture the territory grew. The decision by the Pope was that a holy war to unite the lands that were occupied by Christians was allowable. There was a lot of bloodshed of Jews throughout Europe as well as the people in the lands along the way. This black and white map shows the region that the Crusades fought to conquer.

This colored map shows the Kingdom of Jerusalem as established between the First and Second Crusades. The political power ended in 1291 when the Europeans were ousted by the Caliph. They either went home or were absorbed into the population. The rulers at this time were the Mamuks from the Damascus area and they remained in power until 1516, when the Ottoman Empire expanded into the territory. (Black and white map below.)

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After the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, most Jews fled the land and dispersed throughout Europe, Asia and Africa The history of the Jewish people has been an almost continual time of persecution interspersed with times when they were accepted by the local government and were able to achieve based on education and land ownership. Each time in history that there has been a "golden period", there has followed times of persecution. All through the millenium, Jewish people returned to the land. Each day in prayer there is a call to return. This map shows towns and settlements in 1845.

In the late 1880s the movement to recognize that Jews are a people who deserve a land where they can live in pe

ace and control their own lives started to gain strength. The term Zionism was coined by a journalist in 1891 and in 1897 Theodore Herzl founded the Zionist Movement. Zionism is NOT a religious movement. Nor did Zionism originally set its goal on the current land of Israel. In fact, the Zionist movement was a huge factor in why so many Eastern European Jews emigrated to the United States from the 1880s-1930. Prior to the Zionist movement, people had been moving to the land and emigration stepped up in the late 1800s. This map, with the red dots, shows settlements by 1878. And the black and white map shows the increased distribution of Jewish settlements by the beginning of World War I.

So, here we are, at the point in time many of us have heard about. World War I saw the end of the Ottoman Empire and the land in the Middle East was distributed between European powers. France was assigned Lebanon and Syria, which is why there is the French language spoken there. Great Britain was assigned the area of the British Mandate.

This map clearly shows the territorial lines that we know. In 1921 the Balfour Declaration declared that Palestine would be separated into a Jewish region, Palestinian region, and the area of Transjordan. At the same time, a group of leaders from Syria worked with the British to establish the Hashimite Kingdom in the Transjordan region and Jordan became an independent Kingdom in 1946.

The next year, 1947, is when the British Mandate over the land ended. Based on population centers of Jewish and Muslim residents, several partitions were suggested and finally,
November 29, 1947 the United Nations voted to separate the land into a Jewish State and a Palestinian State. This is a map of the world that shows how the voting occurred. Green voted in favor of partition, brown against and the yellowish color are countries that abstained. By the way, the UUSR was the first to vote yes with the US second.