Western Mindanao State University

College of Liberal Arts

Department of Political Science

Brief Paper

PALESTINIAN ISSUE: CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

SUBMITTED BY: APRIL ANN BARRIOS

Introduction

Israel is the world's only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea.

Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the

territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same

land. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over who gets what land and how it's controlled.

Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand

years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century. Jews fleeing persecution

in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab- and Muslim-

majority territory in the Ottoman and later British Empire. The Arabs resisted, seeing the land

as rightfully theirs. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed,

and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today's

lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in 1948 and another in

1967.

History of Palestinian Issue

Social and political developments in Europe convinced Jews they needed their own country,

and their ancestral homeland seemed like the right place to establish it. European Jews 90

percent of all Jews at the time arrived at Zionism partly because of rising anti-Semitic

persecution and partly because the Enlightenment introduced Jews to secular nationalism.

Between 1896 and 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled from Europe to what was

then British-controlled Palestine, including large numbers forced out of Europe during the
Holocaust. Many Arabs saw the influx of Jews as a European colonial movement, and the

two peoples fought bitterly. The British couldn't control the violence, and in 1947 the United

Nations voted to split the land into two countries. Almost all of the roughly 650,000 Jews

went to the blue territory in the map to the right, and a majority of the Arab population went

to the orange. Israeli forces defeated the Palestinian militias and Arab armies in a vicious

conflict that turned The UN partition promised 56 percent of British Palestine for the Jewish

state; by the end of the war, everything except the West Bank and the eastern quarter of

Jerusalem , as well as the Gaza Strip . It left Israelis with a state, but not Palestinians.

Reflection/Conclusion

The saga of the Holy Land, ancient and modern, reminds someone with no personal

connection to it of nothing so much as the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. There seems to

be something about Palestine that afflicts the innocent, tests the righteous, and causes

incomprehensible suffering to past and present inhabitants. Israeli Jews and Palestinians both

claim descent from the ancient peoples of the lands they now contest. Their competing

narratives are at the heart of the perverse drama there. In this drama, the spiritual descendants

of Jews who left Palestine assert a religious duty to dispossess the biological descendants of

those who chose to remain.

Over the course of centuries, the Jews of the Diaspora were grievously persecuted by

Christians. This experience helped to inspire Zionism. It culminated in the horrors of the

Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile, under Byzantium and the Caliphate, all but a few of the Jews of

Palestine sought refuge in conversion to Judaism’s successor faiths: Christianity and Islam.

As an ironic result, the home-grown descendants of Palestine’s original Jewish population —

the Palestinians now suffer because newcomers proclaim them to be interlopers in lands they

have inhabited from time immemorial. And yet another Jewish-descended Diaspora — this

time, Christian and Muslim has been ejected from Palestine to suffer in exile. Not even the

most imaginative writer of fiction could have composed an account of traumatic suffering

and human tragedy comparable to that which Zionists and Palestinians have undergone and

continue to inflict on each other.

The moral harm that these distant cousins continue to do to each other is huge. So is the

damage they are doing to their sympathizers and supporters abroad. The resort to terrorist

acts by Palestinians, especially suicide bombings in crowded public places, has caused them

to forfeit much of the international sympathy their cause would otherwise enjoy. The

massacre of civilians in the West by Arabs enraged by Western support for Israeli

mistreatment of the Palestinians and other affronts has generated intense European and

American suspicion of all Arabs. The diffusion of Arab rage to non-Arab regions of the realm

of Islam has aroused global antipathy to Islam even as it has inspired acts of terrorism among

Muslims.

Similarly, the cruelties of Israelis to their Arab captives and neighbours, especially in the on-

going siege of Gaza and repeated attacks on the people of Lebanon, have cost the Jewish

state much of the global sympathy that the Holocaust previously conferred on it. The racist

tyranny of Jewish settlers over West Bank Arabs and the progressive emergence of a version

of apartheid in Israel itself are deeply troubling to a growing number of people abroad who

have traditionally identified with Israel. Many — perhaps most of the most disaffected — are

Jews. They are in the process of dissociating themselves from Israel. They know that, to the

extent that Judaism comes to be conflated with racist arrogance . Israeli behaviour threatens a
rebirth of anti-Semitism in the West. Ironically, Israel conceived as a refuge and guarantee

against European anti-Semitism has become the sole conceivable stimulus to its revival and

globalization. Demonstrably, Israel has been bad for the Palestinians. It is turning out also to

be bad for the Jews.