If you are a person bewildered by the animosity between Arabs and Jews, and if you scratch your head trying to understand the centuries-long conflict between Palestinians and Israelis – a bitter fight over a claim both make on a piece of land called Israel (if you are an Israeli) and Palestine (if you are an Arab), then I would encourage you to read this short summary of the Arab/Israeli conflict.
The next few minutes of reading might save you from a lifetime of confusion.
In 2000 B.C., a young man named Abram was “called by God” out of the land of Ur (Babylon) to a land that God promised to give “to your descendants, from Egypt to the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18-21). This land, called the Promised Land, was already inhabited by the Canaanite people, but God promised Abraham that He would give him this land. Over 500 years later, under Joshua's leadership, the descendants of Abraham drove the Canaanites from their land and established the new nation called Israel.
What Happened to the Canaanites?
The Canaanites got into ships and left the land of Israel. The evidence is clear that the Canaanites left Israel for North Africa.
Close to the Pillars of Hercules (e.g., Gibraltar), on the south side or African side of the Mediterranean, the vanquished Canaanite refugees built two cities:
"They [the Canaanites] built THE CITY OF TINGE AND TANGER IN NUMIDIA, where were two pillars of white stone, placed near to a great fountain, in which, in the Phoenician tongue, was engraved: WE ARE CANAANITES, WHOM JOSHUA THE THIEF CHASED AWAY" (Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages, Samuel Purchas, Book I, Chapter XVIII, p.85)
In The Complete Works of Josephus, translated by William Whiston, there is a footnote on page 110 that corroborates the Canaanites went to North Africa:
Moses Chorenensis sets down the FAMOUS INSCRIPTION AT TANGIER [TANGER] concerning the old CANAANITES driven out of Canaan by Joshua thus:
"We are those exiles that were governors of the Canaanites, but have been driven away by Joshua the robber, AND ARE COME TO INHABIT HERE'." (Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids. 1988)
In time these inhabitants of Northern Africa became known as Berbers and Moors.
From the city of Numidia, the Canaanites eventually made it across the Straits of Gibraltar and reached as far north as Scandinavia and the British Isles. In these countries, and in Europe in general, the Canaanites have left evidence of their existence over large land areas. They are known to anthropologists as the "Beaker People."
Meanwhile, Back in Israel
After 400 years, the nation of Israel united under kings. First Saul, then David, then Solomon.
The nation of Israel split in 931 B.C. over a dispute concerning taxes. As a result, 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel composed “the northern Kingdom of Israel” with their capital in Samaria. Only two tribes (Judah and Benjamin) made up “the southern Kingdom called Judah.”
In 722 B.C., the northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, whose capital was Ninevah. The wicked Assyrians took captive the men of the 10 tribes of the north (after that known as “The 10 Lost Tribes”) and forced pagans to move to northern Israel and intermarry with the remaining Israeli women.
The “half-breed’ descendants of Israeli women and pagan men came to be known as “The Samaritans.”
The southern kingdom of Judah had help from God and successfully resisted the Assyrians. Therefore, it is only AFTER 722 B.C. that the name “Jew” comes into existence, an abbreviation of “Judah” or “Judeans” (e.g., people from Judah). Also, since the northern kingdom of Israel was wiped out after the Assyrian invasion, after 722 B.C., the kingdom of Judah would often go by the ancient name Israel.
The Jews stayed in the land God had given them until 586 B.C., when a new world empire – Babylon – conquered the Jews and took them into Babylonian captivity. Then, when the Persian Empire defeated the Babylonians and conquered the city of Babylon in 539 B.C., the Jews were allowed to return to their land of Israel.
The Jews rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, the Temple and re-instituted the sacrificial system. During their Babylonian captivity, they learned how to build synagogues since they had no access to the Temple. In addition, they had learned Aramaic, the business language of the known world. For the next five centuries, until the coming of Jesus Christ, the Jews remained in their land, building a nation and seeing the rise of various Jewish religious sects, including the Pharisees and the Sadducees. These years are the years “between the Testaments” (e.g., between the Old Testament and the New Testament). During this time, Persia was conquered by the Grecian Empire, and then the Greeks were conquered by the Roman empire.
Rome Rules the World
Around the time Jesus walked the earth two thousand years ago, Rome ruled the world. The Romans began having trouble with that portion of the empire called Israel. The natives of Israel, called “Jews” (e.g., short for “Judeans” or people who descended from the family or tribe of Judah), were expecting a coming Messiah who would lead their little country to global prominence. The Jews were often resisted Roman rule, and they were in the habit of assembling unlawfully, protesting regularly, and arguing forcefully against Roman rule.
The Roman emperor raised a wary eye against the Jews and their seditious ways. However, knowing that Rome was threatened by any claim of a Jewish Messiah, Jewish religious leaders used Rome’s fears for their own advantage to thwart the influence of a young Jewish carpenter from Nazareth. Jewish religious leaders brought Jesus before the Roman governor Pilate and claimed that “This man says he is the Messiah, the King of the Jews!” Pilate acquiesced to the Jewish demand that Rome crucify him who dared to claim himself “King of the Jews.”
Around four decades after Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross, a new Roman emperor could no longer ignore the ever-increasing Jewish rebellion against Rome. More Roman soldiers were tied up in Israel fighting sedition than anywhere else in the world, and the Roman emperor’s patience ran out. He needed his troops elsewhere, so he decided to handle the Jews once and for all. Nobody knows why the Roman emperor didn’t just kill the Jews, possibly because he was too superstitious to utterly obliterate them, fearing an offense against the gods.
Instead of killing the Jews, the Roman emperor decided to forcibly remove the Jews from their land using Roman legionnaires and relocating them to the far-flung corners of the Roman empire. In America during the 1820s, the American empire did the same thing to the native Americans, in a forced relocation to “Indian Land” (Oklahoma) that we call “The Trail of Tears.” The Romans forcibly relocated the Jews in a long, sad journey that Jewish history calls the diaspora. The word diaspora comes from Greek and means “scattering.” We get our English word dispersion from this Greek word. The diaspora begins in A.D. 70.
Judea Becomes Philistia (Palestine)
Judea (Iudaea) was the Roman name for the Land of Israel during the heyday of the Roman Empire. This meant not only the area called Judea in Israel today (the West Bank), it also included the whole area ruled and/or chiefly inhabited by Jews. We can see this in Latin and Greek writes of that period like Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus in Latin, Plutarch, and the geographers Strabo and Ptolemy in Greek. Judea stretched along both sides of the Jordan and included, besides Judea proper, most of the coastal plain, Samaria, most of the Galilee, the Golan Heights of today, and considerable land to the east of there. The Romans called this land Iudaea, a translation of the Hebrew Judah.
However, to spite the Jews, after the Diaspora, the Romans changed the land of the Jews Palestinia (Palestine) in honor of the Philistia people (Canaanites) that were the mortal enemies of the Jews before Abraham. Thus, Palestine was a word Romans used to spite the Jews.
In the Jews’ absence from their former homeland beginning in A.D. 70, a now-empty patch of beachfront real estate on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea begins to fill up with people from Arabia. The Arabs migrate slowly to the former land called Israel. It was never their land in the beginning. And there is no such thing as Palestinian people. It’s Arab people in the land of Israel, a land that the Romans began calling Palestine.
After the diaspora in A.D. 70, the Jews lived in little communities worldwide, but especially in Europe. This is because the Romans had scattered these Jewish people all over the Roman empire, and Europe is where most of the Roman Empire was located at the beginning of the diaspora.
Rather than Jewish culture and religion coming to an end through the diaspora, this forced exile from their homeland became a defining event in Jewish history.
The diaspora became a crucial part of the Jewish heritage and tradition, a permanent fixture of their rituals. It soon became prominent within their holy commentary on Scriptures, a book called the Talmud. For the past two thousand years, in thousands of little communities worldwide, Jewish fathers have passed to their sons, and rabbis have passed to their synagogue congregations, the importance of remembering the diaspora.
There is no better example of the permanence of Israel culture than the contemporary existence of the Hebrew language, the same language Moses, David, Solomon, and all the Jewish people have spoken for over 5,000 years. Latin, the language of the Romans, is the basis for French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. But nobody speaks Latin anymore. Only the Roman Catholic Church uses it in church services. People don’t speak it. Groups of medical students worldwide study it for their medical classes, but Latin is not a language of conversation.
Language Represents a Culture.
After being scattered by the Romans, the Jews learned the local languages and became a part of the local population. However, the rabbis kept the Hebrew language alive, and the Jews used the language in their worship. Just as Christian monks kept knowledge and literacy alive through the Dark Ages, the rabbis used Hebrew in synagogue services. They required all Jews to learn at least enough to actively participate in worship.
From the mid-1500s until well into the current century, the dominant pattern in the world was European colonialism. First, the Spanish, then Dutch, and finally the British were the preeminent powers in the world -- challenged with varying degrees of success by the French, Germans, and Italians. The Jews stayed in the background, minding their own business.
No matter where the Jews settled, they were seen as just a little bit on the outside by their different religion, their "secret" language of Hebrew, and even their ethnicity.
Since the Jews were mostly prevented from holding public office, becoming military leaders, or even entering institutions of higher learning. As a result, they'd entered the only field left open to them: business.
As it turned out, they'd seemed to have a knack for it, too: by the late nineteenth century, Jews in Europe were widely perceived as rich, mostly because many of them had entered jewelry and banking, being forced out of politics and government.
About this time, a pro-Jewish political movement called Zionism arose in Europe. Its purpose was "to return the Jews to their rightful historical homeland.”
Here’s Where It Gets Complicated
For the past two thousand years, over 75 generations of Arabs have lived and died on that Eastern Mediterranean soil that the Arabs now called Palestine. So naturally, these Arabs figured that they had a bit more right to determine who was going to live on what was now their homeland than a bunch of European nations, which had still been a bunch of wild barbarian tribes when the Romans had booted the Jews out in the first place (the following is an excellent summary from an anonymous writer at http://www.wwco.com/religion/israel.php).
Why the Arabs Hate the Jews
One of those wild barbarian tribes, now calling itself the British, was perhaps a bit influenced in its thinking by Zionist arguments and the idea that European Jewry was a rich and influential group one would do well to have one's side. Besides, the British Empire was at the height of its power and glory: India was the jewel in its crown about which books by Rudyard Kipling were being written, Sherlock Holmes was stalking the streets of London, Stanley and Livingston were making their way around Africa, and Queen Victoria was on the throne.
The sun never set upon the British Empire, she had the largest and most influential navy in the world, and by George, she'd do whatever the heck she bloody wanted to -- and without any guff from any bleeding Arab beggars! Besides, the whole point was academic: Palestine had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire (Turkish Muslims) for centuries, so the Arabs living along the Eastern Mediterranean had no say about anything anyway.
What harm would it do, then, to issue a meaningless policy statement to win the favor, support, and financial attention of the European Jews? So it was that British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour issued the appropriately-named Balfour Declaration in support of an independent Jewish homeland located in Palestine.
The Jews loved it, of course, but it remained just that -- a meaningless policy statement. It was certainly forgotten a couple of decades later, in 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by an anarchist in Sarajevo. The French, Germans, and Russians mobilized their troops and, before anyone knew what had happened, a million mothers' sons were charging out of their trenches only to cough their lungs up from the mustard gas or be mown down by machine-gun fire. The Great War, the War to End All Wars, had begun.
Trench warfare held the war at a stalemate in Europe for the better part of four years. In charge of the "Southern Front," British General George Allenby was under pressure from his superiors at the War Office in London for some progress against the Ottoman Empire, a British enemy in the war and the power that controlled the Middle East as it had for centuries. By manipulating Arab tribesmen into fighting the Turks in exchange for tentative implications of Arab independence, Allenby ensured that the Middle East was British-held territory by the end of the war.
The League of Nations
Immediately after the war, the newly-created League of Nations, really just an old boys club of the same old European colonialist powers, legitimized continued occupation of territory captured by the victors in the war by ceding areas to their victorious occupying forces as "mandates." The idea was that the "big brother" nation would prepare the mandated area for eventual independence. However, in practice, it was colonialism by any other name... which still smelled just as bad.
Britain got the League of Nations mandate for the Middle East, which included Palestine. Zionist groups and Jews worldwide immediately began pressuring the British to live up to the promises they'd made decades earlier in the Balfour Declaration. If they did nothing, the Jews would accuse them of going back on their word, but if they started airlifting massive numbers of Jews into Palestine, the local Arabs would riot. So they tried to go to the middle ground and brought in a slow trickle by sea.
This went on for nearly thirty years while the British controlled the area, and the Arabs certainly did riot more than a few times. But, nevertheless, the population of Jewish immigrants slowly swelled, living in an uneasy peace with the Arabs. Then one day, a man with a severe little mustache started raving about how the Jews had ruined his country, the rest of Europe, and the world besides. The joke was on him, of course; Adolf didn't realize that he himself had Jewish blood, but his countrymen bought it hook, line and sinker, and the Second World War was on.
During the war, Palestine remained under British control, never seriously threatened by the massive tank battles in the North African desert between British General Bernard Montgomery and German Field Marshal Erwin 'The Desert Fox' Rommel. At war's end, though, the world was a very different place. All the great powers of Europe were totally tapped out, shattered, and economically devastated. Even England, which had resisted the invasion, had taken a beating from German bombs.
Suddenly only one country had a healthy economy. Suddenly only one country had no domestic damage at all from the war. Suddenly only one country had the largest and most powerful navy globally, and it wasn't England anymore. Suddenly only one country had the atomic bomb. Suddenly only one country had the undivided attention of every other country in the world, was calling the shots, could do whatever it wanted to, and had the force to back up its foreign policy initiatives.
The United States started pressuring all former colonial powers to grant independence to their colonies. Her moral high ground for doing this was that she herself had been a colony and had had to fight for her independence, so she sympathized with other colonies that wanted independence.
A more likely reason for doing this is that since colonies trade exclusively with their host countries, excluding other nations, the U.S. wanted to get those host countries out of those colonies as quickly as possible so that she could get access and start selling Coca-Cola and other fine American products.
They grumbled, but Britain and the other former colonial powers of Europe started vacating their colonies rapidly, not only because the United States was pressuring them to but also because they could no longer spare the troops, funds, or resources to maintain those colonies when so much reconstruction needed to take place back in their home countries. Amongst others, Britain was making plans to vacate its League of Nations mandates in the Middle East -- including Palestine.
Modern Zionism
No one could conceive of anything that anyone could ever have done to deserve such a fate. The hearts of everyone on Earth went out to the Jews. Everyone felt guilty for not having stopped Hitler sooner before six million Jews had gone to their deaths. Filled with shock, compassion, guilt, shame, remorse, and regret, the world of 1945 could deny the Jews nothing.
The British were rapidly vacating the land of Palestine, the Jewish homeland of two thousand years ago. Many Jews had emigrated there during the last thirty years. Many European Jews were wandering around the continent as "Displaced Persons," sole survivors of their families or villages with nowhere to go. The world felt shamed and wanted to "do something for the Jews" to "make up" for what had happened. Some Jews themselves and other Zionists were clamoring about the Balfour Declaration, made by the British in a very different world over fifty years and two world wars ago.
Almost before the British were out of Palestine, the United States stepped in and declared that the area would again be the Jewish homeland. The Americans were trying not only to make up for the Second World War but also to correct an ancient historical wrong. As a result, huge waves of Jewish immigrants flocked to their ancient ancestral homeland.
As these European "displaced persons" found a home once again, they created a whole new flood of "displaced persons" -- Arabs whose umpteenth great-grandfather had farmed the same land 75 generations ago, forced to leave because a newly-arrived European Jew had become the new owner. These Arabs, today called the Palestinians, left in droves.
It took two years from the war's end for the British to finish vacating and for the brief period of American assistance with Jewish immigration to conclude. Jews worldwide had been delighted with the idea; those who didn't emigrate to live there were quite generous financially. The United States gave much financial and military assistance so that in 1947 the area known as Palestine for two thousand years declared itself the state of Israel.
The brand-new state was promptly attacked at the same time by several of its outraged Arab neighbors. They themselves had been under the boot of the Ottomans for centuries, then had had to endure the British, but now that the entire Middle East had looked as though it were finally going to be free and self-determining, here had come the meddling Americans to eject the Palestinians —brother Arabs— and move Jews in their place!
Aside from this strange and offensive new outpost, there were no Jews for thousands of miles around — only Arabs. For the Arabs, it was like surgically transplanting a tuft of blond hair onto a head full of black. They saw these Jews sitting proudly on land that had been Arab land for two thousand years, while the 'rightful' Palestinian-Arab owners sat shivering in refugee camps just outside the borders of the new state. Outraged and offended, they attacked with their combined military force.
Unfortunately for the Arab states that attacked in 1947, U.S. weapons and training provided to the Israeli military allowed Israel to trounce them. In other Arab-Israeli conflicts (1956, 1967, and 1973), almost always started by the Arabs, the same has been the result: one was called the Six-Day War because that's all the time it took the Israelis to win, while another was called the Yom Kippur War because the Arabs tried to win by surprise-attacking on the holiest Jewish day.
The previous Palestinian inhabitants haven't been sitting idly in their refugee camps on Israel's borders for fifty years, while fellow Arabs from other Arab countries have been fighting and dying in attempts to win back their land for them. So the Palestinians formed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), a terrorist group that has been bombing Israel and conducting other terrorist raids on her for decades.
For many years now, Yasser Arafat has been the leader of the PLO, and thus Public Enemy Number One of the Israeli state. He was controversial in the 1980s for once wearing his customary pistol on a visit to the Pope and because the United States didn't want to grant him a visa to enter the U.S. so he could speak at the United Nations.
The first real progress in the Arab-Israeli situation was President Carter, who got Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign a peace treaty. We later found out what ordinary Arabs thought of when some of Sadat's own people assassinated him as he stood on the reviewing stand during a parade.
The fact that Israel recently allowed the Gaza Strip to become an 'autonomous Arab zone' with its own police force and Yasser Arafat (Israel's Public Enemy Number One), of all people, as its leader, is probably the most encouraging move towards peace since the Americans started the whole mess in the 1940s. But, of course, we found out what ordinary Israelis thought of that when a former member of his own security forces assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the guy who made the Gaza Strip thing possible, as he moved through a crowded public square a few months ago.
The Oslo Agreement
Since historic agreements signed in Oslo, Norway, in September of 1993 between the Israelis and the PLO set the Gaza Strip aside for the Palestinians, the PLO and its leader have been kept busy with the headaches of self-rule. Those Palestinians and other Arabs who felt that this arrangement was not good enough and still more for which Israel must answer felt that the PLO had gone soft and sold out; they became dissatisfied with the PLO as the representative of their interests.
Extreme anti-Israelis formed a group called Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Islamic force composed of Palestinians and other sympathetic Arabs. Backed by the sympathetic Islamic countries of Iran and Syria, since the 1993 Oslo accords, Hezbollah has set up shop in Israel's chaotic bordering neighbor to the North, Lebanon, which has been paralyzed for decades by civil war.
The situation in Lebanon is so fractious and its government so weak that Hezbollah has actually taken over the running of schools and hospitals in some areas, gaining its popular support amongst some Lebanese. Its primary purpose for existence being to inflict harm upon Israel; however, in April 1996, Hezbollah began raining fire down upon its hated enemy in the form of Katoushka rockets.
Surrounded as it is by hostile neighbors who would prefer to see the blood of all its citizens running through the sands, Israel has perhaps understandably developed a 'massive retaliation policy over the years. In addition, to guerrilla attacks by the Egyptian-backed Palestinian terrorist group fedayeen ("self-sacrificers," the predecessor of the PLO and Hezbollah) in the 1950s, Israel invaded Egyptian army posts in the dead of night, shooting hundreds of Egyptian troops as they slept and on 29 October 1956 actually invaded Egypt herself, taking the entire Sinai Peninsula from her.
In Israel's belief that she must show a tough face to deter aggression, she has not hesitated even to operate far outside her home region. On 3 July 1976, she reacted to the hijacking of an airplane containing her Olympic team by storming the plane with a massive assault force as it sat on an airport runway in Entebbe, Uganda, a country well into Africa and decidedly not in Israel's home region, the Middle East. Israel had refused to negotiate or even talk to the hijackers, it attacked without regard to casualties, and it took no prisoners. The message was clear: don't mess with us.
When terrorists attacked Israel from bases in Southern Lebanon in March of 1978, Israel responded by invading Lebanon. Likewise, when Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence service, learned in 1981 that its neighboring country of Iraq (with its new leader Saddam Hussein) had an atomic reactor near its capital city of Baghdad that would enable it to manufacture nuclear weapons, Israeli jets invaded Iraqi airspace, flew on over to Baghdad one fine day and blew the atomic reactor to Kingdom Come.
When Israel's ambassador to Great Britain was wounded in a PLO terrorist attack on the streets of London —just one man, mind you— Israel responded by launching a massive, all-out, coordinated land, sea, and air attack against PLO bases in Lebanon on 6 June 1982. By 14 June, they had the PLO trapped and surrounded in Lebanon's capital city of Beirut and were pummeling them into oblivion with the round-the-clock bombing.
If Ronnie Ray-gun hadn't yanked on the leash of his Israeli pit bull and forced him to wait while the United States Navy evacuated what was left of the PLO from Beirut, the Israelis almost certainly would've done there and then to the Palestinians what the Romans hadn't done to the Jews almost two thousand years earlier. In any case, the message "don't mess with us" was once again clear.
Israel's Right to Exist
With the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Israeli prime minister in 1992 on a campaign of peace and reconciliation with Israel's Arab neighbors, it looked as though perhaps such stiff reprisals might no longer be necessary. In the historic Oslo accords of 1993, the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist, and Israel acknowledged the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. The Gaza Strip and the West bank of the Jordan River were designated as Palestinian homelands, and Israel and Jordan (the country) signed a treaty ending their 46-year state of war in 1994. Things were really looking up.
A few months ago, however, we found out what at least some ordinary Israelis thought of all this 'peace with the Arabs' stuff when a former member of his own security forces assassinated Rabin as he moved through a crowded public square. Shimon Peres became Israel's new prime minister and tried to continue as best he could his predecessor's policies of peace and reconciliation with Arabs.
When the extreme Palestinian-Arab Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group Hezbollah started firing salvos of deadly Katoushka rockets at Israel from its guerrilla bases in Lebanon in April of 1996, frightened, disappointed Israelis began to cry loudly to their government that perhaps those ingrate Arabs would only take advantage of peace and reconciliation, would only understand the language of force. Perhaps, some said, the only sure policy for security was the old 'massive retaliation.'
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, facing an upcoming election and terrorist rockets raining fire down on those who would be deciding whether or not to vote him into office again, didn't take long to decide. On Thursday, 11 April 1996, Israeli ground-based planes and helicopter gunships operating from navy vessels in the Mediterranean launched a massive, non-stop bombing assault on Lebanon.
On Wednesday, 24 April 1996, the Israeli bombing is still going full-force, but Hezbollah's rocket attacks from Israel against Lebanon remain unabated. The Israelis, who have code-named their bombing campaign "Operation Grapes of Wrath," pledge to continue it until Hezbollah's rocket attacks cease. In years to come, it may be Israel who will taste the sour grapes, since its military offensive in the first six short days already produced 800,000 homeless refugees in Lebanon -- many of whom will probably become embittered towards Israel and provide excellent new recruits for Hezbollah.
On Monday, 15 April 1996, the United Nations Security Council in New York spent the entire day debating the situation but, in the end, could reach no decisions. Finally, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Madeline Albright made it clear that the U.S. position was that Israel's actions were appropriate and justifiable and implied rather obviously that the U.S. would use its veto power as a permanent member of the Security Council to block any punitive measures the council might attempt.
The reactions of Syria and Iran, the two Islamic Arab countries which helped establish Hezbollah in the first place and continue to fund and supply her, have been no surprise: they have loudly decried that Israel is committing a monstrous crime against humanity and must be stopped. Israel, for its part, has pointed out that both Hitler and Hezbollah launched attacks trying to kill Jews and reminds the international community what the countries of the world felt was necessary to do about Hitler. Yet, with all this rhetoric, the average confused bystander surely must be wondering what to believe.
Summary
Two thousand years ago, the Romans committed a great wrong against the Jewish people. One hundred years ago, the British made a promise that that wrong would be made right. Fifty years ago, after the Germans committed another great wrong against the Jewish people, the Americans tried to make up for it by honoring England's promise. But, unfortunately, in the process, they committed a great wrong against the Palestinians, who even today still sit shivering in their refugee camps.
The Palestinian Arabs hate the Jews for taking away their homes. The rest of the Arabs hate the Jews for taking away the homes of their brethren. Finally, all the Arabs hate the Americans for what they did to the Palestinians. So now today, in a region consisting of dozens of Muslim countries twice as wide as the United States, stretching from Morocco on the West coast of North Africa to Pakistan on the Indian Subcontinent, everyone speaks a form of Arabic, obeys Islamic law, and worships a single god most recently revealed to him by Muhammad the last Prophet...
...everyone, that is, except for those living on one tiny little strip of land, forty-seven miles long. For two thousand years, the people there also spoke Arabic, obeyed Islamic law, and worshipped the god most recently revealed by Muhammad. However, those people are shivering in camps on the borders of what used to be their land. Today the people on that strip of the land speak Hebrew, follow the Talmudic law, and worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, and Sarah.
It has been suggested that there are historical parallels between the Arab-Israeli situation and the plight of the native inhabitants of North America (Native Americans / American Indians). However, very few people suggest that everyone whose ancestors came to North America after A.D. 1500 should go back where they came from so that the Native Americans can have their lands back.
Why, then, was Palestine "returned" to the Jews?
We were all taught as children that two wrongs don't make a right, so why did the U.S. try to right a two-thousand-year-old historical wrong by wronging the Palestinians?
Such speculation, however, is merely crying over historically spilled milk: wouldn't removing the Israelis yet again, or blasting them out of existence as the Arabs tried so many times to do, simply be more of the same?
Viewing the Middle East as it is today, should we not seek to learn from past mistakes?
Shouldn't we seek to learn not only from the mistakes of the Romans and the Nazis but also from the mistakes we as Americans made a mere half-century ago when we sought to offer a quick fix to someone else's problems?
Good intentions are not enough; surely only listening to and understanding the problems of those who must LIVE there and then giving help if requested will finally bring peace.
