What can I possibly add to the debate that festers in the Middle East concerning Israel's place amongst a hostile and unforgiving Arab majority? I read a parable about the dilemma that spoke to the heart of the matter:

          A man was standing on top of a burning building, in which many members of his family had already perished, when the flames became so intense that he had to jump.  He managed to save his own life, but as he was about to hit the ground, he struck a man standing below him, breaking the man's arms and crushing his legs.  Ironically, the terribly hurt man on the ground had saved the falling man's life.  Unfortunately, neither man saw this tragic situation through the other's eyes.  The injured man, extremely angry with the falling man, accusing him of deliberately hurting him, and failing to see that the tragedy that had occurred was a horrible accident, swears revenge.  The falling man, for his part, instead of apologizing for the grievous injury caused to the man on the ground and thanking the man for saving his life, became incensed at the man's anger, insults him, kicks him, and beats him every time he sees him.  The kicked man again swears revenge and again is punched and punished.  The bitter enmity hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds.
          To try and sort out this complicated mess requires a brief history lesson as free from bias as possible.  The problem one encounters when trying to be unbiased is the charge of anti-Semitism whenever the sorting out starts to be critical of Israel or Zionism.  The other problem is trying to have a historical discussion about Palestine/Israel without just ceding the field to the Jews on the basis that the land was given to them by God.  This argument is like the person that tells you, in the course of a debate, that "God told them such and such," which effectively ends the debate.  If one is to have a reasonable chance of untangling the complexities of the Israeli-Arab problem, this Biblical Manifest Destiny can only be a part of the picture as it historically fits in, not the end of the story. Where I would like to pick up the story is in the 19th century.  
          There is no doubt that throughout history, the Jewish people have been one of the world's most oppressed minorities, no matter where they ended up settling.  Periodically, Jews would be blamed for whatever ills had befallen a particular kingdom or country, though they rarely had little or anything to do with the problems.  They would often be given jobs that no one else wanted, like tax collecting and money changing.  Being outsiders, they provided a convenient scapegoat for the ruler to rally the masses around in common hatred, to deflect them from the real ineptitude or corruption, and there would be pogroms, or periods of intense, violent repression aimed at the Jewish people.
          Enter Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist and founder of modern political Zionism.  Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1860, Herzl was deeply affected by the anti-Semitism he saw in supposedly liberal late-19th century Western Europe.  His pamphlet, entitled "The Jewish State," called for the immediate exodus of Jews from Europe.  Originally Herzl, who was a secularist, had several places in mind as a homeland for the Jews, including Uganda, Angola, and Argentina, before settling on Palestine.  He died in 1904 before achieving his goal, but is generally recognized as the father of Zionism.
          Followers of Zionism believed the Jewish people had an inherent and inalienable right to Palestine. Religious Zionists referred to God's promise of the land to the tribes of Israel.  Secular Zionists thought of Palestine as the one and only answer to the worldwide problem of anti-Semitism.  In formulating this plan, the Zionists had some pretty strange allies: the anti-Semites in many European governments, not the least of which was Great Britain.   
        Meanwhile, at the turn of the 20th century, there were around one million Palestinian Arabs living in Palestine, which is slightly smaller in size than the state of New Hampshire, and the Jewish population living there numbered less than 10% of the whole.  Contrary to popular belief, these were not simply nomadic tribes or Bedouins, but farmers and villagers just like other parts of the settled Arab world.  They were ruled nominally by the Ottoman Empire, which was in the final years of decay.  Theirs was a feudal society of landowners, shopkeepers and peasant-farmers, basically unchanged over many hundreds of years.  The city of Jerusalem had been in Arab hands for much of the past millennium, and was home to one of the holiest sites in Islam, the Dome of the Rock, or the el-Aqsa Mosque, where Mohammed was said to have ascended into heaven.  The el-Aqsa Mosque is built on the site of Solomon's Temple, which was said to have housed the Arc of the Covenant, and which is one of the holiest sites in Judaism.  This situation was treacherous before it started.
          In 1917, the British government, with their backs to the wall in World War I and desperate for help, produced the Balfour Declaration, which opened the way to widespread Jewish immigration to Palestine.  Many credit the Balfour Declaration with clearing the way internationally for what was to be the state of Israel.  This agreement was aimed at two main groups, the Jews in revolutionary Russia, who had just dropped out of the war, and more importantly, the Jews in America, who were an influential minority in a country just deciding to go to war on behalf of the Allies.  The Brits, in fact, were talking out of three sides of their mouths.  In 1915 they agreed to include Palestine in a zone of independence for Arabs in return for an Arab revolt against their Ottoman masters (led by T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia), and then in 1916 agreed via the Sykes-Picot Agreement with the French and Russian governments to place Palestine under international supervision.  The British were to pay a heavy price for the next thirty years of conflict-ridden rule over Palestine.
          Each side took these agreements for what they wished them to mean.  The World Zionist Organization was better organized and financed than any comparable Arab group, and had been making plans for sometime for a democratic Jewish state in which Arabs would have minority rights.  The problem with this plan was that even with a large influx of immigration in the 1920's and 30's, the Jewish population in Palestine comprised only 28 percent of the total in 1936, and 32 percent by 1947.  Obviously, the Zionists were not going to have a democratic Jewish state in which they were the minority.  However, the well-financed WZO had a further plan to buy large tracts of land in Palestine from absentee landowners and "transfer" the indigenous population that lived and worked on this land to other surrounding Arab countries.  Once this land was bought, it could never be sold to anyone that wasn't Jewish.  This amounted to nothing less than systematic ethnic cleansing.  From the point of view of Chaim Weizmann, president of the WZO, speaking in 1930, the needs of 16 million Jews of the Diaspora had to be balanced against those of one million Palestinian Arabs.
          The Palestinian Arabs revolted no less than three times in these years, aiming their anger mainly at the British Colonial government, whom they thought had lied to them about their own political aspirations and had sold them out to the Jews.

          "For the last two and a half years there has been war in Palestine, a war waged by an oppressor against a colonial people. All the devastation measures employed by the oppressor, the aerial bombardments, the razing of villages to the ground, the imposition of fines, the taking of hostages, the enactment of martial law, the establishment of concentration camps, along with old-time methods of bribery, intrigue, corruption, all these failed to break the determined will of a united Palestinian people to attain national liberation."

 That familiar-sounding quote was from a writer in 1938, speaking of Palestinian resistance to British Imperialism.
          Meanwhile, hardworking Jewish settlers tilled the soil, built Jewish schools, towns, and a civic infrastructure, and started arming themselves for the inevitable confrontation with their reluctant and angry cohabitants and neighbors.
          The Holocaust, in which six million Jews from all over Europe and Russia were systematically massacred during World War II by Hitler's Nazi killing machine, changed the moral equation in the Jewish/Arab debate over Palestine.  The inability or unwillingness of the Western Allies to do anything about the slaughter was a dark stain on the governments of Great Britain and the United States.  The US government turned away a large ship of Jewish refugees in 1939 and sent the passengers back to almost certain death in concentration camps.  The British, tired of fighting the Arabs and gearing up for a fight with Germany, severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939 just when the Jews needed to flee the most.  The Allies' strategy of winning the war before doing anything about the Jewish tragedy, when from 1942 on they knew what was going on in the death camps, led to feelings of collective guilt that paved the way for the United Nations in 1947 to agree to a partition of Palestine into two states: a Jewish state, and a Palestinian Arab state.
          This is where it gets tricky again.  The Arabs were unhappy because the Jews got 55% of the new state although they constituted only a third of the population.  The Jewish leaders claimed that the new state of Jordan (or Transjordan as it was known then), granted independence in 1946 by Britain, was actually part of Greater Palestine and constituted almost 70% of the land promised by the League of Nations as a Jewish National Home.  Plus, the city of Jerusalem was to be an international city (which may have been the smartest part of the plan).  With the annexing of the West Bank by Jordan in 1950, the Jewish leaders could claim that they actually only controlled 17.5% of the original land promised to them.  There was enough fuzzy math to go around for everybody.

          I wanted to pause for a moment and look at some of the ways that we are taught our history as we are growing up.  What got me thinking about this was the way that the Zionists (and many Westerners, too) felt that it was their "right" or their destiny to have a homeland in Palestine.  Because of the religious overtones, this would be understandable, except for one thing: people already lived there.  The idea that they could eventually outnumber and then ethnically cleanse the area of the indigenous population reminded me of the European settler's position on the people who lived in America before they did.
          More significantly, I was focusing on the types of language that we use when describing these great movements of peoples.  When it is the large migration of European immigrants crossing the Mississippi River to settle the West, this is referred to as our "Manifest Destiny."  This is an elegant turn of phrase that I always thought was some sort of law when I was in grade school; it was presented in Social Studies as a sort of inevitable right of the Euro-settlers; a foregone conclusion that the indigenous population would move out of the way or be moved out of the way for the superior race.  Because the native population had no concept of "ownership of land"––the idea was absurd to them that you could "own" the earth––the settlers simply "bought" or were given the land from the US government, who "claimed" it, and then moved the natives out.  It's interesting to ponder some of the words used to describe the various movements and migrations of peoples around the world.  When it's Central Asians moving west, then it's the "Mongol barbarian hordes" brutally invading. (It's telling that the word "barbarian" has been used by peoples all over the world to describe foreigners ((including us)) that are different from themselves.) When it's the US government moving west, it's Manifest Destiny, and it is the native population that is "heathen."  Ah, but we were bringing civilization to the natives.  What we brought them was gunpowder and disease.  At least fifty million natives, and probably many more, up and down the Americas were killed as a result of disease brought upon them by the Europeans.  All the while, it was just assumed that it was our inalienable right to govern them, to teach them our ways, whether they wanted to know them or not, and most of all, to "civilize" them.
          It was a selling point of the Zionists to recalcitrant European governments that the Jewish settlers would be bringing civilization to the East; an outpost of European and Western intelligentsia and values in a sea of Arab nomads.  The invading Ottomans of the Middle Ages similarly thought it their spiritual duty to bring Islam to the "infidels" and "polytheists" of Europe, and got as far as the gates of Vienna before finally being rebuffed.

          The British, having won the war (WWII) but lost their Empire, were bailing out of positions all around the globe.  They simply didn't have either the money or the manpower to keep or administer their far-flung possessions.  Besides, they had made all kinds of desperate deals regarding independence when their backs were to the wall during the war, and now the bill was due.  The British turned over the impossible problem of Palestine to the new United Nations, and the fledgling Jewish Nation turned to the United States, home of the largest and wealthiest remaining Jewish population in the world, to be their new benefactor and protector.
          Although anti-Semitism wasn't unknown in America, it was a less significant factor than, for example, prejudice against blacks.  In fact, the Jewish minority maintained a political position in the Democratic Party that far outweighed their numbers.  There were many influential and wealthy Jews especially on the East Coast who carried great sway with the powers in Washington.  This, added to the fact that there was no such comparable Arab lobby, made it inevitable that the United States would become Israel's "special friend."  The major counterweight to this scenario was that oil was being uncovered in Arab-controlled Middle Eastern lands at an astonishing rate.  The United States had to walk a tight rope to keep its hands on the gas pump while still appeasing the powerful Jewish lobby at home.
          The UN Partition of 1947 left all sides feeling like their glass was half-empty.  The day after the Jews declared independence in May of 1948, they were attacked on all sides by a coalition of Arab states that included Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.  Just about everything that happened during this war is a matter of dispute.  The Arabs claimed that the Israeli Army had already taken up positions inside the Palestinian sector and so the Arabs were defending the Palestinian land.  The Israelis, obviously, say they were attacked.  Both sides accused the other of horrible civilian massacres.  
          The Israelis claimed the huge masses of Palestinian refugees that went streaming into Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan were the result of an overconfident Arab military, who urged the Arab populations to remove themselves for a short period of time until they defeated the Jews, and then they could return.  The Arabs say that this is nonsense, and point to the Arab exodus as the ultimate goal of Zionism––a pure Jewish State.  It is safe to say that no one's hands were clean in this mess.  In the end, after initial setbacks, the feisty Israeli Army defeated the Arab coalition and ended up with a much larger piece of territory than they started with.  When the cease-fire was declared, the only parts of the original whole Israel didn't control was a strip of land in Gaza, and what the Jewish people knew of as the lands of Judea and Samarra, which the Jordanians controlled and renamed the West Bank.

          Between the establishment of Israel in 1948, the conclusion of the 1973 war, and the disengagement agreements in 1975, Israel’s borders did not see even one day of quiet.  The years from 1948 to 1973 can be regarded as a twenty-five year war between Israel and its neighbors––one war, with five rounds, taking place over one generation.  Israel’s border wars with its neighbors during the years 1949-1956, which began as actions attempting to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes, quickly evolved into days of limited warfare between the Israeli Defense Force and the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies respectively.  These years were marked by repeated attacks on Israeli settlers by Arab fedayeen, which means both "sacrifice," and "commando" in Arabic.  These attacks killed over four hundred settlers during this period, and were countered by vicious retaliatory raids into Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip led by the recent Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon, killing 20 people, mostly women and children.  This raid was followed up by a nighttime attack on the Jordanian village of Qibya, killing 70 villagers inside their homes.  It is telling that many of the pivotal political leaders of later years––Menachim Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon were all either underground resistance fighters (some would call them terrorists), or major military figures in the middle of the action against the Arabs in the years preceding their political careers.
          It was also during this period that the Cold War came to the Middle East.  The Soviet Union, which had supported the creation of Israel and had sold arms to it, switched sides and began supporting Arab interests and selling them arms.  Included in this were $200 million worth of Soviet made weapons purchased by Egypt from Czechoslovakia in 1955, after the West had turned down President Nasser.  The United States, angered over the purchase, reversed a decision to loan Egypt a large amount of money to build the Aswan Dam on the Upper Nile River.  Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956, hoping to use its profits to pay for the dam.  This was one of the high points of the new Arab nationalism, and made Nasser a huge hero in Arab countries throughout the Middle East.
          The British and the French, two colonial powers on the wane, and the two biggest users of the canal, plotted with Israel to regain control of the Suez Canal and open the Straits of Tiran in the Gulf of Aqaba, which was Israel's only outlet to the Red Sea and points beyond.  This led to the second Arab-Israeli War, at the end of October 1956.
          Israel initiated hostilities on October 29 by invading Gaza and the Sinai and then moved into the Suez Canal zone on October 30.  The United States, furious with Israel, Britain, and France and motivated even more by the understandable fear that the Soviet Union would be drawn into the fray, sponsored a U.N. resolution condemning the attack, which passed on November 2.  Meanwhile, British and French troops, an ultimatum to Israel and Egypt having been ignored as expected, were busy trying to take control of the Canal Zone.  Hostilities ended on November 6 after a ceasefire took effect.  In December, a U.N. emergency force was stationed in the area.  The Suez Canal was then returned to Egypt.  This was one of the pivotal moments in world history where the child (the US) became father to the man (England and France).  From then on, there was no question that the Americans were wearing the pants in this relationship.  And while Nasser was the loser militarily, he was the big winner politically.  His stature in the Arab world rose sharply, quickly dwarfing other leaders like Jordan's King Hussein and Iraq's Nuri al-Said who were perceived to be too beholden to Western interests.
          In 1957, Yasir Arafat, a civil engineer living in Kuwait, together with Khalil Wazir and Salah Khalaf, formed the Palestinian movement al-Fatah ("conquest" in Arabic; also, in reverse, an acronym for Harakat at-Tahrir al-Filistini, "Movement for the Liberation of Palestine").
          In 1963 and 1964, Israeli and Syrian forces battled twice over water and cultivation rights on their common border.  1964 also saw the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
          In April of 1967, another border clash between Israel and Syria broke out over cultivation rights.  In May, Nasser mobilized his Egyptian army and moved into the Sinai Peninsula in support of his Arab brethren in Syria.  When he then blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba and signed a five-year mutual defense pact with Jordan's King Hussein, Israel mobilized for war.
          The third Arab- Israeli War lasted six days between June 5th and June 10th, 1967.  It was a huge victory for the Israelis, and by the time an armistice was declared, Israel controlled the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Desert, the Golan Heights in Syria, and the West Bank, including the ancient regions of Judea and Samarra.  Perhaps most importantly, for the first time in 1,800 years, the whole city of Jerusalem was under Jewish sovereignty.  This was a humiliating defeat for the Arab nations.  
          The United Nations on November 22, 1967 issued Resolution 242 calling upon Israel to withdraw from "territories occupied in the recent conflict."  The resolution underscored "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war," and "the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from acts of force."  Resolution 242 also called for a "just settlement of the refugee problem."  A fundamental problem with U.N. Resolution 242 was that there were two versions, one French the other English.  The French version stipulated that Israel was obligated to withdraw "from the territories" occupied during the war, while the English version read only "from territories."  Israel was to argue fifteen years later in 1982 that it had complied with the latter sense of the resolution when it returned the Sinai to Egypt.  In a problem with such complexity and almost intractable obstacles to peace, even a word as small and insignificant as "the" assumes immense importance.
          In February 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died and was succeeded by Golda Meir.  On June 15, 1969, Golda Meir was quoted in the Sunday Times of London as saying, "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist...”
          At the Olympics in 1972, Palestinian commandos assassinated members of the Israeli Olympic team at Munich.  Eleven Israelis and five Palestinians died.  Israel avenged this attack the following year, with an attack by Israeli commandos led by Ehud Barak, the future Prime Minister, on PLO headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon.  In this attack, three high-ranking PLO officials the Israelis claimed were responsible for the Olympic killings were assassinated.
          In October of 1973, the Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria, launched a surprise attack against Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish Calendar, Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement.  The Arabs were motivated this time by the desire to redeem their honor after their major defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War.  The Israelis were initially caught off guard, and suffered heavy casualties.  Before long, the United States was airlifting supplies to the Israelis, and the Soviets were doing the same to their Arab counterparts, threatening for a time to evolve into a full-scale war between the two major powers.  The Israelis recovered, and once again their forces proved too much for the combined Arab armies.  Stung by yet another defeat at the hands of their Jewish enemies, and angered at the US support of Israel, the Arabs, including Saudi Arabia, employed a full-scale oil embargo on the United States, with the result that the price of a barrel of oil rose from $4 a barrel to $30.  The Americans, stung by rising gas prices and long lines at the pump, embarked on a new strategy to control the flow of oil from the Middle East by whatever means necessary––a policy that continues to this day.