You Started It First

I want to learn more about the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, don't you?

We're still reeling from the immediate aftermath of the Hamas massacre of Israeli people these last few days. What’s about to happen next will undoubtedly have global implications, given the eschatological beliefs that billions of religious people have, which are all critically vested in the question of What Happens in Jerusalem.

My knowledge of the history of Israel is almost exclusively derived from my experience reading the Old Testament. I don’t know much of anything about the nuances or substance around what’s been happening in the region over the last 100 years. And I want to learn.

While the shocking images and videos of today and tomorrow will keep our perceptions “zoomed in”, to me it’s important to “zoom out” to try to get some semblance of independent opinion formed on what’s going on, before the global narratives begin to calcify and amplify via the provocation of the masses.

Frankly, look at what happened with the Russia-Ukraine War. 3 years ago, no one could have told you anything about Ukraine, let alone locate the country on a map, if you asked them to. Now it’s become the Most Important Thing to many of those same Average Jack and Jills.

The same is about to happen now, albeit to a far greater extent. Mark my words.

But back to the main point — I really don’t know anything. So I want to learn. And if you don’t anything either, you probably should too.

As a start, I went to Wikipedia* and spent some time reading the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (as well as asking ChatGPT some follow up).

Here are some unstructured raw notes for what I’m seeing there:

(*Of course, despite its intended design, Wikipedia can often be biased, so take this in for what it’s worth).

• In the 19th century you had rising nationalism both within Jews who were scattered across Europe as well as Arabs under Ottoman rule.

• The Jewish movement was formalized into Zionism, which sought to establish a (and return to the original) homeland for the Jewish people.

  • Zionism grew in reaction to anti-Semitism and from Haskalah, the intellectual movement of Jewish enlightenment (which mirrored the Western Age of Enlightenment).

• At the time, the region of Israel was under Ottoman rule, as a province of Syria.

  • To refresh, let’s go back to the monarchy of Israel (under King David, Solomon, etc.) and loosely bridge to today….

  • Israel was conquered by Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Then came the Greeks with Alexander the Great, some intermediate period, and then the Romans. After the split of Rome were the Byzantines, and then came the Islamic Caliphate for many centuries. There was a brief period during the Crusades in the 12th century where there was an establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. But after this, Muslims took over and had been in control for the centuries leading up to modern times (from the Ayyubid dynasty to the Ottoman Empire).

• “Palestine” was a term that had common usage in 1840 to both describe the areas under the jurisdiction of Western consuls (Britain and France were exercising influence there) and refer to a geographic region stretching from Rafah to the Litani River.

  • As a side note, the word “Palestine” echoes the Philistines from Ancient times (think David the Israelite vs. Goliath the Philistine, as well as Samson vs the Philistines).

• In some capacity the legal system there was personal, not territorial, where each individual citizen carried his nation’s law with him wherever he went.

  • The Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities of Palestine were allowed to exercise jurisdiction over their own members according to charters granted to them.

• In 1917 the Ottoman Empire, and consequently their control of the region, collapsed.

• What, then, to do with the Palestine and Levant region?

  • The British and French had a secret agreement in 1916 (Sykes-Picot) deciding how they would divide the broader region between themselves.

  • Specifically as it relates to Palestine, the agreement was to have it be an international zone (kind of like the UN headquarters in NYC), rather than be controlled by Britain or France.

    

    
    

  • These plans contradicted what the UK had promised to Sharif Hussein, leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans: a broad Arab kingdom in the region.

  • Britain also put forward the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

• As the dust settled in the region from WWI, the League of Nations issued the British Mandate, which had Britain administer rule of the Palestine and Jordan area (France let go of the idea of Palestine being an international zone).

  • The Mandate required Britain put into effect the promise of Balfour to create the national Jewish home.

  • Britain controlled Palestine for almost 3 decades (1920-1948).

• According to the wiki page, the Arab population in Palestine opposed the increase of the Jewish population because the new immigrants refused to lease or sell land to Palestinians, or hire them.

• In the census of 1922 the Jewish population in Palestine was 11%. By the end of 1947 it was 31%.

• Between 1922 and 1947, the annual growth rate of the Jewish sector of the economy was 13.2%, mainly due to immigration and foreign capital, while that of the Arab sector was 6.5%.

  • Per capita, these figures were 4.8% and 3.6% respectively. By 1936, the Jewish sector had eclipsed the Arab one, and Jewish individuals earned 2.6 times as much as Arabs.

  • The literacy rates in 1932 were 86% for the Jews against 22% for the Arabs.

• In 1933 the Third Reich and the Zionist Federation engaged in an agreement to facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine.

  • This not only benefitted German Jews who could escape the increasingly hostile environment, but also it gave Jews living in Palestine access to immigrant labor and economic support.

  • 62,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine in 1935, the highest number since the British Mandate began in 1920.

• Later in 1941, Muslim leader Amin al-Husayni asked Hitler to oppose the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, to which Hitler agreed.
  

  

• Various conflicts and revolts happened during the British Mandate.

• Italy attacked Palestine in 1940, air bombing Tel Aviv and Haifa.

• Britain’s influence became tenuous after WWII due to their post-war depression, as well as the rise of Jewish paramilitary organizations Hagana, Irhu, and Lehi.

• Britain desired to end the mandate and asked the UN to make a decision.

• You then had the partition of the land and full scale civil war and various other conflicts over the decades since then, which I haven’t gotten up to speed on yet. . .

All of this is just what I read on Wikipedia (much of it verbatim). Of course, the Wikipedia entries have, no doubt, omitted various other details that are important to the long, complicated history.

And I’m sure there’s other bias as well. Let me know if you see anything glaring.

Again, prior to this exercise, I really didn’t know much and there are a lot of gaps in my understanding. But I hope this summary also gives you some value because we will be inundated with the effects of this war and what’s to come, and we might as well get up to speed on the details.

Keep musing,
Drago