Summary of the 15 Essays/Questions to Explore
I have completed all the essays I plan to write on “The History of Palestine – From Abraham to the End of the First Arab Israeli War”. The essays are divided into 4 segments.
Segment 1 covers the two Biblical eras. The first one aligns with the Old Testament which ends in about 400 BC with the dedication of the second temple by the post-exilic Jews. The New Testament era spans about 75 years – from Jesus’ advent to the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Romans in 70 AD.
Segment 2 covers the time span between the Old and New Testament. For approximately 100 years, there was an independent nation of Israel ruled by the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty. It became a vasal state of Rome in 63 BC. Almost exactly 2,000 years would pass before most of this geographic area would again become an independent nation – the nation of Israel in 1948.
Segment 3 (8 essays) covers the period from the two Roman-Jewish Wars that resulted in the destruction of The Temple, the death of over half of the Jewish population, and the exile of nearly all other Jews in Palestine. Segment 3 ends with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in WW I. To address what I considered to be key relevant events regarding the history of Palestine, I ended up writing a total of 8 essays. One of the themes that continue to reappear was how much better the Jews fared under the rule of Muslims than they did in Christian ruled countries. Time and again, the Christians would persecute and plunder the Jews within their realms and the Jews would flee to Muslim countries where they received much better treatment. In Muslim lands, Jews were given the option of paying an extra tax if they wished to continue practicing their religion, or converting to Islam and avoiding the tax. The Jews did both. True history debunks the myth that Jews and Arab/Muslims have been implacable enemies since the days of Abraham.
Segment 4 (5 essays) begins with the Paris peace talks following WW I and goes through the conclusion of the first Arab Israeli War which ended in 1949 with the total defeat of five Arab nations surrounding Palestine by the one-year-old nation of Israel. As a result of that war, Israel controlled about 80% of the land area of heretofore Palestine and the people now residing within Israel’s borders were over 80% Jewish. The Jewish population of Israel had increased nearly 10-fold over the previous 30 years due to a huge influx of Jewish immigrants. During the War, most of the Palestinian Arabs, who had represented over 80% of the area’s population for two millennia, fled to neighboring countries or to the remnants of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank.) Within Israel, Arab Muslims were now only 10% of the population. The Israeli government refused to allow the Arab Muslims aka “the Palestinians” to return and confiscated their homes and businesses.
There have been five subsequent Arab Israeli Wars and Israel has prevailed in all of them. It would not have been able to without the staunch support of the United States. The Arab families that were displaced in 1949 have remained refugees ever since the first war. While Israel does not own, it now totally controls Gaza and the West Bank. The people within those two areas have suffered greatly at the hands of the Israelis, and never more so than now with the ongoing Hamas-Israeli War. No doubt, it is terrible and certainly “wrong” that so much misery, destruction, and death has been inflicted on the civilian population of Gaza.
Rather than giving my own set of “Conclusions”, I think it will be best if we explore the possibilities together. There are two sets of questions to consider:
#1. What could or should have been done previously that would have produced a better set of circumstances than the one that currently exists?
#2. What is the best way forward from now?
If you have thoughts on these questions, please post them here on my Facebook page.
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