Understanding Conflict in the Middle East–Part Two (Resources & Notes)
[Note: “Most of the Jews who established Israel came from Europe to establish their new country in an area that had been Arab for centuries with no invitation from the Arab inhabitants, the Palestinians, to do so. The success of the Jewish-Zionist movement owed much to the support it received from Britain earlier in the century, though the 1948 military campaign was fought wholly by Jewish fighters using resources they had largely gathered themselves. In order to survive, Israel has needed the support of Western nations, principally the United States, for whom Israel is something of a client state, an outpost of the West in the locale where much of the world’s reserves of petroleum is found. Jews, of course, are descendants of the Israelites, many of whom were driven from their ancient homeland in a series of invasions stretching from the Assyrians in the seventh century B.C. and the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C down to their final expulsion from Jerusalem and environs by the roman emperor Hadrian in AD. 131. Romans named the area Palestina, in order, as Mordecai Chertoff says, “to erase even the memory of Jewish sovereignty.” The Latin word Palestina (in English ‘Palestine’) is a derivative of ‘Philistine,’ the name of Israel’s ancient enemies who lived along the Mediterranean coast. One quickly recognizes the irony in using a word derived from Israel’s past enemies for the people with whom they are now in conflict” (Islam, Christianity, and the West, A Troubled History, by Rollin Armour, Sr., Orbis Books, 2004, p. 148).] [Note: “For Muslims, Jerusalem, known in Arabic as al-Quds, ‘the Holy,’ was also a sacred city. Although the Islamic worlds most sacred center in Mecca, the “sacred sanctuary” that Muslims face five times a day in prayer, Jerusalem was the ‘Remote House of Worship’ to which the Prophet had been miraculously transported one night by God (Surah 17:1). Following the death of the Prophet in 632, his followers sent an embassy to Heraclius, declaring: God has given this land as an inheritance to our father Abraham and to his posterity after him. We are the children of Abraham. You have held our country long enough. Give it up peacefully and we will not invade your country. If not we will take with interest what you have withheld from us. After capturing the city, its new Muslim rulers intervened in the sacred geography of Jerusalem. On the ruins of the ancient Temple Mount they established a mosque, al-Masjid al Aqsa, and a shrine, the Dome of the Rock. By appropriating this sacred site of the religion of ancient Israel, Muslims verified their claims on a sacred history that went back to Abraham, who, as the Qur’an taught, was neither Jew nor Christian. While respecting the earlier revelations of Jews and Christians—the Torah of Moses the gospel of Jesus—Muslims embraced the Qur’an as the ultimate revelation disclosed to the prophet, messenger, and servant of God, Muhammad. Under Muslim rule, Jews and Christians were in principle tolerated as “people of the Book.” Having been denied access to the city for nearly five hundred years, Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem in 638 and reestablish their major yeshiva for training rabbis. Like Jews, Christians were allowed to practice their religion under Muslim authority, but both were subject to special taxes. By contrast, Emperor Heraclius marked the loss of Jerusalem by ordering every Jew in his shrinking empire to be baptized. A religious toleration enshrined in the Qur’an, however, promised to maintain peaceful interreligious relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians within the world of Islam” (Christianity, A Global History, by David Chidester, Harper One, 2000, pp. 160-161).] [Note: The United Nations resolutions regarding Palestine (GA resolution 181 and 194) made allowance for two independent states that were not explicitly divided along ethnic lines or any previously understood borders, which meant that the mandates would still allow for both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to be living in Israel and in the West Bank.] [Note: “The emergence of the Palestinians as a separate factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict was one of the most dramatic developments in 1967. The idea that the Palestinians constituted a distinct peoples is novel. Never before in Middle East history have the Arabs living in Palestine sought or gained status as a separate and independent state. Quite the contrary, the Arabs of that region had usually chosen, if indeed they could exercise any choice at all, to claim a major identity: Muslim, Arab, or Greater Syrian. Before Israel’s rebirth, Jews and foreigners often used the term Palestinian to denote the inhabitants of Palestine, but rarely had Arabs themselves used that label. Between 1948 and 1967, the Arabs from Palestine especially the refugees in neighboring countries, had been the most ardent backers of pan-Arabism. They hoped to end all distinctions between them and the other Arabs whose aid they sought” (A Concise History of the Middle East, by Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., 7th ed., Westview Press, 2002, p. 23).] [Note: “The reality, to say it yet one more time, is summed up in the word—jihad—that Arafat and so many other Arabs have never stopped invoking when speaking among themselves in their own language. On those occasions they have never bothered to pretend that the formula for peace is a ‘two-state-solution.’ Nor have they had to pretend that this formula represents anything more than a temporary abandonment of the direct military action that failed in five previous wars, or a shift to a ‘strategy of stages’ that will more circuitously and cunningly head toward the same ultimate consummation in the destruction of the Jewish state” (The Mideast Peace Process, An Autopsy, “Intifada II: Death of an Illusion?,” by Norman Podhoretz, Edited by Neal Kozodoy, Encounter Books, 202, p. 104).] [Note: Israel’s security fence, or wall, sometimes referred to as the security barrier, began to be built in April of 2002 during the administration of Ariel Sharon and during the time of the second intifada. And even though