Israel and Palestine

IT IS A COLLISION between two nationalisms – both forged substantially in exile. It is a struggle between two peoples whose militant wings both still lay claim to the same territory. It is perceived by some as a clash between the first and third worlds or between Islam and Judaism, even between Islam and the West. At its heart lie thousands of years of history and some of the holiest places on earth. But how did this epic conflict arise and what are the histories of the peoples involved? Today there are 15 million Jews scattered across the world. But originally many of their ancestors came from ancient Judea (formerly the area covered by part of the Biblical kingdom of Judah). The first Israelite (or proto-Jewish) period of statehood lasted from around 1000 BC to the partial destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC. According to biblical tradition there was initially a single Israelite kingdom but after a century or so it seems to have split into two separate Israelite states – the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. The second period of statehood lasted from 165 BC to the Roman Conquest of 63 BC (a period when the area was ruled by an independent Jewish dynasty known as the Hasmoneans). Two short periods of independence followed revolts against Rome in 66 and 132 AD. In between all these periods of statehood, the area was ruled successively by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. The long exile of Jews from Judea started in earnest after the Babylonian onslaught and accelerated after each revolt against Rome. From the second century onwards the Jewish population of Palestine – the geographical region covering what is now Israel and the West Bank – shrank massively. A limited return of some Diaspora Jews to Palestine only seriously got underway in the 13th century following the Muslim defeat of the crusaders. More than a dozen relatively small waves of Jewish immigration, mainly for religious reasons, took place over the next 700 years. Large Jewish communities developed in Safed (in what is now northern Israel) and in Jerusalem – but as a percentage of the total population of Palestine the Jewish element was small – only around six per cent by 1880. But two phenomena combined to change the situation. Firstly, from 1881 onwards, violent anti-Semitism massively increased in Russia. Secondly most of the peoples in Europe had been developing nationalist ideologies and the continent’s Jewish population now did likewise and developed the concept of Jewish nationalism (Zionism). Over the next 30 to 40 years the Jewish population of Palestine quadrupled – by 1914 accounting for 14 per cent. In 1917/18 Britain captured Palestine from the Turkish Ottoman Empire shortly after Britain’s foreign secretary Balfour had announced that the UK favoured the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. After the rise of Hitler and after the Holocaust, Jewish migration to now-British-ruled Palestine speeded up massively. By 1948, 40 per cent of Palestine’s population was Jewish. As Britain prepared to withdraw, the UN approved a plan – opposed by the Arab countries and the Palestinian Arabs – to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. In late 1947 hostilities broke out between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab populations. British control ended in May 1948. The Jewish population immediately declared the State of Israel and regular troops from Arab countries became involved in the fighting. Israel succeeded in capturing substantial amounts of additional territory and emerged victorious. Only the West Bank and Gaza remained of what the UN plan had envisaged as a Palestinian state – these areas were taken over by Jordan and Egypt respectively. The year 1948 marked the final end of partial Jewish exile from Palestine, but it also marked the beginning of a partial Arab exile from the land. We have charted the Jewish relationship with Pa