An Intractable Problem
It would be an understatement to say that Israel and the West Bank are difficult places to understand. The formation of the state of Israel in 1947 was the culmination of a 2000-plus year odyssey where Jews finally returned to their ancestral homelands. Of course, these lands were also occupied by Arab people, Palestinians, who had their own ancestral claims.
Rather than descend into the various arguments of each side, let’s consider the big picture history for a second. In ancient times, this part of far west Asia along the eastern Mediterranean was known as the Levant. Here were the lands of Judea and Samaria, once the kingdom of Solomon and David.
Conquering empires came and went during the thousand years before what we now call the Christian Era began. The Assyrians, Babylonians, the Egyptians, and then the Persians. Alexander the Great removed the Persians around 332 BCE, until the Roman Empire took over after Pompey’s siege of Jerusalem in 63 BCE. The Roman Empire then ruled Judea through the Byzantine period until the Ottomans came in the late Middle Ages. Crusaders from Europe went back and forth but it wasn’t until the end of WWI when Britain and France carved up the possessions of the Ottomans and the Brits got what became known as the ‘Palestinian Mandate.’
Jews had been trying to return to Israel for some time but these efforts ramped up during the late 19th century. After the second World War, it became apparent that Jews needed a homeland from which no one could ever expel them again. The pressure was on Britain, then winding down its far-flung empire, to turn the Mandate lands into a Jewish and Palestinian homeland called Israel.
How these lands with such a long and complex history would be apportioned and governed in the new nation was something the British had not really thought through. This kind of murky thinking was mirrored in their hand-off India as well, and we all know how that went…
There were both Jews and Arabs already living in these Mandate lands. Arabs in particular, had ancestral ties to the land that went back centuries. The majority of these people were also Muslim, the religion of the Ottoman Empire, though many were also Christian and Jewish, both religions having been tolerated by the Ottomans. Now they would either be citizens of Israel, a majority Jewish state, or Palestinian in one of two territories set aside for a future Palestinian state.
Fast forward almost eighty years later and here we are with an intractable situation that continues to fester. It’s led to an ongoing global instability that’s existed my entire life and shows no sign of resolution.
