An Intractable Problem
It would be a colossal 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 homeland that would be called Israel.
Of course, there were both Jews and Arabs already living in these Mandate lands and the British hadn’t really thought through how this was going to work, particularly for the Arabs, many of whom had ancestral ties to the land that went back centuries. The majority of these Arabs were also Muslim, the religion of the Ottoman Empire, though there were also many Christians, no surprise given that Bethlehem is here.
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.
Some years back I drove from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, a drive that would take me through the West Bank and Judean Desert. Along the way I passed several new settlements built by the Israeli government to accommodate newly assimilated diaspora Jews. These settlements, built on land that was supposed to be part of a future Palestinian state, were de facto Israeli annexations of these lands.
This had been going on for some time, settlements built illegally in the West Bank as a way to demoralize the Palestinians and scuttle their hopes for a future state.
The contrast between the gleaming new Israeli settlements and ramshackle Arab homesteads was stark. Soon, I was descending from the rugged Judean Desert where no one seemed to live, and onto a plain where I came upon acres of ruined greenhouses, the plastic sheeting shredded by windy salt air off the Dead Sea.
And yet, in these ruined greenhouses were melons still on the vine, many ripe and going unharvested. Whether this was hopeful or not, I couldn’t say.
