Thursday, April 13, 2006
Middle East IV
The history of Israel’s reemergence, while long enough to fill volumes, can be summarized this way:
Romans crushed the final Jewish revolt in 135 CE. The Jewish population was reduced to a fraction of its former total and Israel ceased to exist as a political entity.
For centuries and centuries the region was controlled by the Romans, Byzantines, and finally Muslims in the 7th century. By 1517 Ottomans conquered the area. Around 1800 Napoleon conquered Egypt and gave control of the region to Egypt, but Egypt returned control of the region to the Ottomans in 1840.
The first Zionist settlement was established in 1882. Britain seized control of the region in WWI under the campaigns of Lawrence of Arabia. With the Balfour declaration of 1917 Britain indicated that it intended to support a national Jewish homeland in Palestine. Britain took control of Palestine in 1918.
Jews began to migrate to the region in large numbers. Hitler’s persecution of Jews in Europe greatly increased this migration in the 1930s and 1940s. Relations between the Arabs and the new Jewish immigrants in the area deteriorated.
The UN voted to partition Palestine in 1947.
The population of Israel has now grown to 6 million people as of today, 2006.
Arabs see the state of Israel as a legacy of colonialism. Muslims have controlled the area for 1400 years. Ottomans kept the region of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan as one nation for 400 years.
Then, Zionist settlers began to migrate in as of 1882. For 35 years, from 1882 to 1917, their population grew steadily. Then a colonial power (Britain) took control of the region and greatly increased the number of Zionist settlers that would be allowed to immigrate to the region, to the consternation of the Arabs. For 31 more years immigrants flooded the region, and then Israel declared it independence with the support of the West but without the support of any of the nations in the region.
The strife that has ensued is very understandable in the light of history. A people who had controlled the region under one culture for 1400 years and one government for 400 years was suddenly faced with the actions of the West. For three generations, a heartbeat from a cultural and historical standpoint, Zionist immigrants flooded the area. And then it declared its independence from the region.
Arabs see the state of Israel as a product of colonialism. Their borders, drawn up by colonial powers in the twentieth century, are artificial borders that have never made any sense from a cultural perspective. The borders were placed where they were simply to denote different zones of control by western powers.
Today Arabs in the Middle East live in nations whose borders were drawn by western powers. The people of the region have shared a common language and religion for over 1000 years.
The Zionist migration to the region and subsequent independence looked like a crusade to a people who have largely considered themselves one community. It would be like Mexican immigrants concentrating in southern California and suddenly declaring themselves an independent nation. America wouldn’t tolerate it, even if a score of nations in Central and South America recognized the new state.
The Jews of Israel are a castoff of European and Middle Eastern nations as surely as the Palestinians are a castoff of Arab nations. The West was happy to shed its Jewish population and then advocate for their homeland in a far-off region.
It doesn’t help that the Zionist’s holy land that they seized happened to also be a place revered by Muslims.
Israel asserted it right to exist in subsequent wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, and won all the wars with massive military and financial aid from the West. The US has given nuclear arms to Israel, the only nation in history to receive a gift of nuclear weapons from another, and a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In it conflict with its neighbors Israel has been condemned hundreds of times by the UN, the most of any nation in history. Israel has repeatedly violated the sovereignty of its neighbors. Israel started the 1956 and 1967 war, invaded Lebanon in 1982 and 2002, bombed Iraq in 1981 and Tunis in 1985.
Palestinians have resorted to acts of indiscriminant anger and utter desperation, including suicide bombs and airline hijacking, neither of which have proven effective at altering Israeli policy. Several times more Palestinians have died in Israeli reprisals than Israeli citizens have died from Palestinian terrorism.
Arab nations have come to terms with Israel as a nation. This would have averted the 1948 war. Unfortunately, Israeli has moved the goalposts. Now Arabs not only have to deal with Israel sitting on their holy sites but also the fact that Israel has settled land it conquered in 1967 and has refused to return about half of it for forty years.
I suppose I must mention that seizing land in the course of a war you start is illegal under international law. Israel has defiantly stood atop conquered land for 40 years.
Israel is a little frankenstinian monster spawned in the laboratory of the British Empire. The Arabs don’t have the strength to defeat Israel in war. Perhaps that 3 billion a year we give them has something to do with it.
It is long past the time when Israel needs to be called to the carpet. Britain and the United States need to address the Israeli Prime Minister very simply and say, “Ehud, we need you to get off of the land your nation seized in 1967. You’ve been in standing on other people’s land for 40 years. We’ll give you a generous timetable, but if you stall, bicker, or balk we will send the U.S. army to escort you off the land. That means East Jerusalem, too.”
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 4:22 PM 
