STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU III

Here is the Jewish side of the Palestine story. While it has a different tone, it is not markedly less biased.

JEWS IN PALESTINE
The name Palestine, which means rolling or migratory, refers to a region of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the sea to the Jordan valley and from the southern Negev desert to the Galilee lake region in the north.

In AD 135, after putting down the second major Jewish revolt against Rome, the Emperor Hadrian wanted to blot out the name, "Provincia Judaea," so it was renamed, "Provincia Syria Palaestina," the first use of the name as an administrative unit. It was later shortened to Palaestina, from which the modern "Palestine" is derived.

After the fall of the crusader kingdom, Palestine was no longer an official designation. The name, however, continued to be used informally for the lands on both sides of the Jordan River. Under Ottoman rule (1517 to 1917) Palestine was attached administratively to Damascus and ruled from Istanbul. After WWI, the name was applied to the territory under the British Mandate for Palestine.

Confirmed historical dates and a continuous Jewish historical record in Palestine begin with the Second Temple period, starting with the return of exiled Jews from Babylonia (roughly, today's southern Iraq) in 538 BC. In 1099, Christian Crusaders conquered Palestine and took Jerusalem. It has not been under Arab rule since. The Christian Crusader kingdom lasted less than 100 years. Thereafter, Palestine was joined to Syria as a subject province, first of the Egyptian Mameluks, and then of the Ottoman Turks, whose capital was in Istanbul.

Arabs began a series of conquests in the 7th century AD under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad during the rise of Islam. Muhammad was born in Makkah (Mecca) in the western part of the Arabian Peninsula. In 622, Muhammad founded the first Muslim community in Medina. His immensely popular message confronted the weakness of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires and led to the success of a series of dramatic conquests. Within 20 years of Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim Arabs ruled a territory extending from Egypt deep into Iran. Palestine was invaded by Muslim Arab armies during this period, capped by the capture of Jerusalem in 638 A D. This was the start of 1300 years of Muslim presence in Palestine. In 715 AD, the site from which the prophet was believed to have ascended to Heaven on a night journey was arbitrarily associated with Jerusalem where the Dome of the Rock Mosque had been built in 687 AD by Caliph Abd al-Malik. Based on this association, the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built at the same site and the city became, after Makkah and Medina, the third holiest city of Islam.

THE SIGNIFIGANCE OF JERUSALIEM
Judaism made Jerusalem a holy city over three thousand years ago and through all that time Jews remained steadfast to it. The destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD looms very large in Jewish consciousness. In the words of its current mayor, Jerusalem represents… “the purest expression of all that Jews prayed for, dreamed of, cried for, and died for in the two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple.”

For Muslims, the role of Jerusalem is more complex, a combination of religious and political aspects. Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran and did not occupy any special role in Islam for a long period after Mohammed's death. Following the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 636 AD, the new government did not make Jerusalem the political center of the area. This was fixed at Lydda. But in the Muslim view, Jerusalem, the city of David and Christ, became a very holy place, third only after Mecca and Medina, because of political developments.

Between 684 and 705 A.D., the people of what is now Iraq conquered the region in eastern Saudi Arabia, including the cities of Mecca, Madina, and Jedda. Syrian Muslims could no longer go to those cities. In order to give his followers a substitute for Mecca and Medina, the Caliph resolved to make Jerusalem a center of pilgrimage. He therefore set about to build a splendid mosque on the site of the Temple. In 691 'Abd-al-malik replaced this with the exquisite "Dome of the Rock" (Qubbet-es-Sachra), built by Byzantine architects, that still stands in the middle of the Temple area.

Then, in 715, to build up the prestige of their dominions, the Ommaid caliphs devised a masterstroke: they built a second mosque in Jerusalem, again on the Temple Mount, and called this one the Furthest Mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa, or Al-Aqsa Mosque), from a passage of the Koran (17:1) describing the Prophet Mohammed's Night Journey to heaven (isra'). With this simple act they retroactively gave Jerusalem a pivotal role in Mohammed's life, an entirely fictional role, however, since Mohammed never actually visited Jerusalem. (emphasis mine)

ZIONISM
The biblical word "Zion" is often used as a synonym for Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. Zionism is the international movement dedicated to the return of the Jewish people to Israel and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.

Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist who wrote The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) (1896), called for the formation of a Jewish nation-state as a solution to European anti-Semitism and the Diaspora (world-wide dispersion of Jews). Herzl, in Paris to cover the Dreyfus trial, was appalled by the virulent anti-Semitism he witnessed.

The term, Zionism, was first coined in 1893 by Nathan Birnbaum, who played a prominent role in the First Zionist Congress. From that gathering came this mission statement: "Zionism aspires to establish a homeland for the Jewish people, guaranteed by international law, in the land of Israel."

The close identification of the Jewish people with the Jewish land is manifest in every page of the Jewish Liturgy. To this day the Jewish people preserve the calendar of the land from which they were exiled. The seasons, which they mark with observance - the times of sowing and of planting, of harvest and of vintage - are not the seasons and the times of the lands in which they dwell, but of the land of their forefathers. With this emotional attachment to Eretz Yisrael, it is little wonder that, when conditions were right, a movement arose in Europe to bring about their return. Political Zionism invented neither the concept nor the practice of return. Rather, it appropriated an ancient idea and an ongoing active movement, and adapted them to meet the needs and spirit of the times.

Zionism was further fueled by continuing episodes of anti-Semitism that rose in frequency and intensity in the 19th century. The Zionist movement sought to solve the “Jewish problem," the problem of a perennial minority, a people subjected to repeated pogroms and persecution, a homeless community whose alienation was underscored by discrimination wherever they settled. Zionism aspired to deal with this situation by affecting a return to the historical homeland – the Land of Israel. The secularization of Jewish life in Eastern Europe led many assimilated Jewish intellectuals to seek a new basis for a Jewish national life. Opposed to Political Zionism were those like Chaim Weizmann, who were critical of Herzl's diplomatic efforts to bring about the realization of Zionism. Weizman called such efforts "naive and bound to failure."

Zionism synthesized the two goals - liberation and unity - by aiming to free the Jews from hostile and oppressive alien rule and to re-establish Jewish unity by gathering Jewish exiles from the four corners of the world to the Jewish homeland. However, Zionism itself was never a unitary endeavor - there were constant squabbles and internal political upheavals. Plus, not all Jews were Zionists; for many reasons, large numbers of Jews did not support all or part of the Zionist agenda. But because the Zionists were always in desperate need of money, non-Zionists became irreplaceable as generous givers. After World War II and the revelation of the true scope of the Holocaust, the militant Zionists and their goal of an immediate refuge homeland for Jews gained ascendancy. The end of the British Mandate and declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 was the culmination of almost a century of Zionist efforts.

THE BRITISH MANDATE
The British Mandate for Palestine was created by the League of Nations in 1920, following the defeat of the Turks, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Mandate (the dimensions are noted in a previous post) was international recognition for the stated purpose of "establishing in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people." For its own political reasons, Britain used three-fourths of the Mandate to create Jordan, from which Jews were legally barred.

In 1923, Britain ceded the Golan Heights to the French Mandate of Syria. Jews were also barred from living there. Jewish settlers on the Golan Heights were forced to abandon their homes and relocate inside the western area of the British Mandate.

The balance of the Mandate was just 14,000 square kilometers. Jewish immigration was limited by the British from time to time, especially after Arab riots, and severely restricted after 1939, though Arab immigration was not restricted or even recorded.

By 1948, when the State of Israel was founded, 1.8 million people lived the western area of the Mandate, estimated to be 600,000 Jews and 1.2 million Arabs. Following the war of independence in 1948, the 14,000 square kilometers allotted to Israel were divided along cease-fire lines between Israel and Jordan/Egypt. In the end, Israel was left with 8,000 square kilometers, or 6.7% of the original Mandate territory. The remainder of western Palestine was annexed by Jordan – and renamed the West Bank - while 360 square kilometers were occupied by Egypt and called the Gaza Strip.

BACK TO THE FUTURE
As you can see, the historical view of Israelis is different from the Palestinians. I don’t find that shocking. During the American Revolution the founding fathers were a tad less than honest. Realizing that they were part of an historically important moment, and that they would be judged by future generations, they often distorted the reporting of events to make them fit some imagined ideal.

If some ancient Caliph was smart enough to see the political advantage of associating Jerusalem with Mohammad, more power to him. Whether or not that actually happened is impossible for us to know.
Final comments to come.

One foot on either side.

1 XCZR