"What is the root cause behind the conflict between Israel and the Arab world that has led to multiple wars, multiple acts of terrorism and to the development of specific terrorist organizations with the goal of Israel's destruction?"
I've asked a similar question, by the way, of high school students and of adults in a Sunday School class. Some of the students, who were studying or had recently studied World History, were able to point to the post World War 1 chaos that led to a couple of treaties and a military occupation of the Middle East by Great Britain, which eventually opened up Palestine to a flood of Jewish immigration, as the catalyst for the conflict. That's an A minus answer.
The Sunday School class, on the other hand, based their answers on the Biblical text, written before the siege of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The conflict, according to that version, has its roots in the ancient hatreds of the people who lived around Palestine who are the ancestors of the modern Arabic population, not an accurate historical fact, and one that leaves out the complete destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and the expulsion of the Jewish population from Jerusalem. The Old Testament prophets don't cover this later conquest and destruction, though many Christian Bible teachers incorrectly make inferences to the restoration of Jerusalem after the Babylonian conquest in 585 B.C. as pertaining to the Roman destruction and exile.
The unique combination of Judaism with the racial identity of being Jewish and the shift which occurred in Jewish cultural, religious and political life after Jerusalem's destruction kept alive the hope of a return to their homeland in Palestine, which is at the core of their religious identity and existence, even as it led groups of Jewish people scattered all over the Roman Empire to remain together and avoid cultural disintegration by intermarriage and by remaining in separate communities which did not assimilate into the local culture. This separation, and distance kept from native populations is a contributing factor in the anti-Semitism that has been aimed at the Jewish diaspora everywhere it exists. And the resulting persecution they experienced led to maintaining their ethnic and religious identity because they kept their distance from their persecutors, and that kept the hope of a "messianic return" to the ancient homeland alive for almost 2,000 years.
"Messianic Hopes" of a Jewish Return to Palestine Are Unsuccessful for Almost 2000 Years
After the Roman general Titus sacked and destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and sent the population scattering to different parts of the Roman Empire, all Jewish cultural and religious life had to make a complete shift, as communities of Jews who left Jerusalem and Palestine built their own separate communities among the pagan population of the Roman Empire. Many of them were taken as slaves and wound up in Rome, but the majority of Jews fleeing from Jerusalem and Judea wound up in Asia Minor and Greece, and over time, gradually went north into Eastern Europe.
Jerusalem, rebuilt under Roman rule, was a pagan city, the Jewish population kept out of the province of Judea. When the Roman empire split, and the eastern part became the Byzantine Empire, Jerusalem was transformed into a Christian city, with churches built to commemorate specific ministry events of the life of Jesus Christ. Jews were still forbidden access, however, except for once a year to mourn the destruction of the Temple. The Byzantine rulers were Christian, but granted citizenship to Jewish people in the empire in an attempt to convert and assimilate them into the culture. There were outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence when that didn't happen.
It was a prelude to future events such as the Spanish Inquisition for the Jews, many of whom took the side of the Sassanid Persian conquerors of Jerusalem in 616 to try and re-establish a sovereign Jewish state. That never happened, but there was tremendous animosity created among the Christian population because of the Jewish support for the conquest, in which 90,000 of Jerusalem's Christian inhabitants died.
There was never a possibility for the re-establishment of a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital after that. Various Muslim-controlled empires sweeping through the region made that impossible, and when Christians briefly conquered Jerusalem during the crusades, and established Christian rule, they were just as insistent on keeping the Jewish population out, and just as brutal in their treatment of Jewish subjects under their rule. The region around Jerusalem and in Palestine, mostly under Islamic rule, politically volatile and unstable, was not safe for the Jewish population, much of which migrated further north, into Eastern Europe.
World War I provided the Zionist movement, mainly European Jews who, after centuries of enduring persecution and second-class citizen status in Eastern Europe, where the largest groups of Jewish communities were located, the opportunity to consider the possibility of Jewish resettlement into Palestine, and the establishment of a Jewish state there. The Balfour Declaration was Britain's official recognition of the Jews as a separate people and gave backing to the Zionists, the European Jews who were pushing for establishment of a Jewish political state in Palestine.
Issues Surrounding Modern Resettlement of a Large Jewish Population in Palestine and the Establishment of a Political State of Israel are the Root Causes of Israeli-Arab Conflict
The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1 led to British control of the whole area known as the Middle East. Their main interest, economic gain for their empire, superseded the political, religious, cultural and political interests of the people who lived in the area and the "protectorates" that they created were mainly for their own benefit and ability to control the region.
The idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, and opening up that part of this area to Jewish immigration which would largely come from Eastern Europe, is the source of beginnings of the current state of conflict that has eventually led to the development of Islamic-based terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, to multiple skirmishes and outright wars, and to the displacement of several million Arabs who once lived in the area of Palestine now occupied by the Jewish state of Israel.
Between 1918 and 1939, n spite of the Balfour Declaration, there were tight restrictions on the number of Jews allowed to emigrate to Palestine. There was also a lot of tension as some of the Zionists ignored the restrictions and encouraged and supported Jewish immigration by helping people sneak into the region. Anti-Semitism was a fact of life in Eastern Europe and many Jews were willing to risk the dangers of life in Palestine to escape the dangers of life in Poland and the Soviet Union. The British, who needed Arab support and cooperation when World War 2 broke out, clamped down on the illegal and legal immigration of Jews into Palestine.
But of course, the sweeping of the Holocaust across Eastern Europe, and the wiping out of over six million European Jews, most of them in Poland and Ukraine, only intensified the pressure to create a Jewish political state in Palestine, with or without the support of the Western Allies, and when that happened in 1948, that's when trouble broke out. It was one thing to see Jewish people moving in, claiming land and building communities in limited numbers, in empty areas separated from the Arabic population. It was something entirely different to see hundreds of thousands of Jews arriving regularly, and establishing Jewish political control over the Arabic, Muslim population of Palestine.
The British lost control of their ability to implement a planned establishment of what we now refer to as a "two state solution." Military conquests by the military forces built and trained largely by the Zionists, out of their partisan World War 2 experience, established the boundaries of the political state of Israel by conquest and by treaty, which brought several million Arabic Palestinians under their political control. It wasn't the "two state solution" that had been originally envisioned. The choice for the Arabic population of Palestine, whose ancestors had lived there for centuries, was to live under control of the Jewish state, or leave a homeland their ancestors had lived on for 16 centuries and become refugees in one of the neighboring countries.
There hasn't been a peaceful resolution to this problem. Displacing several million people from the only homes and lands they had ever known as their own, and where their ancestors had lived for 13 centuries, isn't an easy problem to resolve. Since its establishment, Israel hasn't permitted autonomous areas to exist within its borders for the Palestinian population, which would be the way a "two state solution" would work out, and they have conquered and taken the land that was initially proposed for this purpose. And while some Arabic Palestinians did choose to remain, and become citizens of the Jewish state, the majority became refugees in neighboring countries, including Jordan, which controlled the West Bank, and what was known as the United Arab Republic, made up of Syria and Egypt, which controlled Gaza. The Gaza strip was established in a treaty in 1950, which is why there are some two million Arabic Palestinians living there now.
Most of the people now living in Gaza are the second and third generation descendants of the displaced Arabic Palestinian population that once lived further north and east, in what is now Israel. The economic depravity and poverty that develops as a result of losing the place and the resources that came with it off of which one once earned a living is what creates the kind of atmosphere among the community sharing this circumstance that sometimes, out of a sense of futility and desperation, produces the kind of violence we saw on October 7th. Groups like Hamas, which develop among communities like this, have support because they claim that their aim is to get that lost land and life back for these people.
How Does This Get Resolved?
Americans, really, have very little idea of what it would take to resolve the problem, and because of the influence of right wing conservative Christian perspectives, see the failure to resolve it as the fault of the Arabs, because we are influenced by our dislike for Islam and Muslim people. Most have no idea that prior to 1948, no independent, autonomous Jewish state had existed in Palestine since 587 B.C. and no Jewish province under subject rule of an empire had existed there since 70 A.D.
Israel's establishment as an independent state in 1948 stems from its recognition, largely by the "Western Allies," the British Empire combined with the United States and support of the United Nations following World War 2. The legitimacy includes the fact that the former political powers in the region allied themselves with the Axis, and that "protectorate" status of the population of the region shifted from Islamic control to British control. Self-determination of these subject people was demanded as the British Empire dissolved at the end of World War 2, and the agreements with the Zionists and which allowed for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine were recognized by the United Nations, along with the independence of other states in the region, including Iraq and Syria. That established Israel's right to exist.
Personally, I have not observed the kind of application of things that we value, and that we also take for granted, as Americans, in any way that would lead to a resolution of the issues that have created the conflicts we see in the Middle East, like the Israeli-Gaza war that is the most recent eruption of almost continuous violence. What needs to happen now is a cease fire to end the violence, the sanctity of human life being the greatest consideration at this point, and then, a period which allows for some reflection and thought about where to go next.
What Happens After a Cease Fire
The population of the Gaza strip is mostly made up of displaced refugees. Setting it up as a sovereign state without providing the basic resources it needed to survive was a guarantee of failure, and of the fact that the place would become an incubator of Anti-Israeli hatred. Displaced people leave behind all of their assets and resources on which they depended to create jobs and build an economy. That's the first problem Gaza faces, building an economy. Who is willing to replace the resources left behind when the people were displaced, and invest in the development of a sustainable economy that will be the biggest key to preventing Hamas taking root and getting hold of the population? Or should I say, who should be responsible for doing so? It seems that those who were most responsible for creating the situation should be obligated to do this.
And what would a two-state solution actually look like? The West Bank still has a majority Arabic-Palestinian population. Do we have two states in three locations, with Gaza and the West Bank, separated by Israeli territory, or is there a possible way to make it so that its citizens do not have to cross through Israel to transit the state?
All of that must be negotiated with the Palestinian population represented, not by Hamas, but by those within that community that have a realistic perspective of the politics of the situation and desire to see it come about, recognizing Israel's right to exist, as Israel recognizes their right to their own sovereignty and to have lost economic and political opportunity restored, as best as it can be, as well as providing for the rebuilding of the infrastructure that has been destroyed. Threats from Syria, and Iran, must also be neutralized, not by military might, but by satisfactory resolution of the issues. And the solution to the problem has to be effective to the point where it neutralizes Hamas and Hezbollah, leaving them without the support of those in the Arabic Palestinian community who now see them as their only hope.
It should not surprise us, as Americans, that we have little influence and have not earned the trust of the Arabic Palestinians. Our involvement in the situation has basically led to an outcome not unlike the fate to which we condemned the native population of North America, during our westward expansion. We have very little understanding of the politics and culture of the region. We've done nothing to earn the trust of the people. A two state solution requires two states being made equal and that starts by treating the people who are involved as equals. It requires Israel being made secure. And it requires the Arabic Palestinians, in their own sovereign state, to be secure.
The best perspective any American has ever brought to the table with regard to Middle Eastern issues, including what is necessary for a two-state solution, fair and equitable to everyone involved, to work and to result in real peace, came from President Jimmy Carter. He was obviously viewed as a peacemaker, and he was close enough to getting everyone to agree to sit down and talk that the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, in Iran, felt the need to sabotage his re-election.
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