What The Fight In Israel Is All About

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What the Fight in Israel Is All About

by Max Singer

The fight between Jews and Arabs over Israel and Palestine goes back to 1922. The Romans had given Palestine its name when they conquered it from the Jews nearly 2,000 years earlier. After the Romans were thrown out Palestine was part of one Arab or other Moslem empire after another since the 7th century. Finally, in the 400 years before it became available in 1922, Palestine had been a small part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. But in World War I the British and French defeated Germany and the Ottoman Empire and stripped them of their colonies. Thus the League of Nations had to decide what nations should become sovereign in Palestine and the rest of the vast lands lost by the Turks. The League awarded more than 90% of these lands to Arab states, with Britain and France as temporary trustees.

But there were two claimants to sparsely populated Palestine. The Arab countries insisted that since it had been ruled by Moslems for more than a millennium, and since its small population of less than a million inhabitants were mostly Arabs, Palestine should become part of an Arab country, presumably Syria. The British government, following the policy it had announced 5 years earlier in the Balfour Declaration, urged that Palestine be set aside as the site for a homeland for the Jewish people. They argued that Jewish kingdoms had ruled various parts of Palestine for over a thousand years and that the land and especially Jerusalem the ancient Jewish capital were central to the Jewish religion. Furthermore they pointed out that the Jewish people had been praying to return to the land for nearly 2,000 years, and that throughout those millennia there were always Jews living in the land and returning to the land. They added that while the Arabs had a number of countries, with millions of square miles, the Jews suffered from having no homeland at all. Also the small numbers of Jews who had come to Palestine in previous decades had begun to build up the country – attracting many Arabs from neighboring countries – and that the Jews could be expected to provide economic development and a lawful society which would help the development of the whole region.

At the time no one suggested turning the land – which had never been a separate country -- over to the Arabs who lived there, who were not thought of as a separate people. The inhabitants thought of themselves as Moslems, or in a few cases as Christians, and as Arabs. They had loyalties to family and clan, but not to the region of Palestine which had been divided into various Ottoman districts, in none of which had Jerusalem been the capital.

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In fact there has never been any “Palestinian land” anywhere because there has never been a Palestinian country. But a majority of the people of the Kingdom of Jordan, which had been created out of the Eastern part of Mandatory Palestine, are Palestinians. While Arabs – that is native Arabic-speakers who consider themselves part of Arab history – had been a majority in Palestine for hundreds of years before it became part of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine had never been a separate Arab country; it had always been an unseparated part of other countries or empires. Except for Egypt, the idea of separate Arab countries – or nationalities – distinct from Islam or Arab – is less than two centuries old. Palestine had been an “Arab land” only in the sense of being part of various Arab empires, just as it had been part of Egyptian or Persian or Greek empires before. But no Arab government had paid much attention to Palestine or to Jerusalem. And no government that had ever been sovereign in Palestine since the Jewish kingdoms now claims the land.


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A Servant of Christ,
Drew