Peace in the Middle East - I

A History Lesson, Part I

I had a few people ask me about the current fighting in Gaza. They had good questions – the answers of which I'm not sure I have, but perhaps a little history lesson will help sort through the mess.

Some say the struggle is about religion? Religion plays a part, but not all Arabs are Muslims and many Jews no longer practice Judaism as a religion, nor are they even looking for the Messiah – they are secular Jews. It's difficult to say it's about religion.

Is it racial? Yes, indeed. There is a lot of racial and tribal tension in that region.

Is it about land – a relatively small piece of real estate bordered by Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea? Palestinians and Jews both claim the land as theirs. Israel claims they were there first. The Palestinians say it's a matter of who has controlled the land most recently and for the longest time. History can be cited to support and defeat both claims.

Whether it's religious, racial, about land, oil, or any combination of those, the Middle Eastern conflict between Arabs and Jews will be a tough nut to crack. If I were to pick one of the three, I would say the current conflict in the Middle East is about land, which has been contested for thousands of years.

Each side points to different time periods to stake their claim, but they ignore all other times. Both sides agree the land's history begins with early civilizations thousands of years ago. The first known inhabitants were the Canaanites, a collection of Semitic people who developed complex societies administered through city-states. The Canaanites, according to biblical and historical records, worshipped fertility gods and used sex and mystical wizardry in their religious rites. The Old Testament condemns those practices as "detestable to the Lord."

The Bible says the children of Israel, acting on the promise of God, took possession of the land from the Canaanites. For the next 500 years, Israel flourished and expanded under the leadership first of judges and later kings such as Saul, David and Solomon. David made Jerusalem Israel's capital around 1000 B.C., and Solomon built the first temple there around 960 B.C.

By 720 B.C., however, Israel had been crushed by the Assyrians, and 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel were lost in the ensuing dispersion. The remnant of Jewish people held on to parts of the land for several more centuries, suffering under the rule of Babylonians, Greeks, Hasmoneans and Romans. Israel held together in some form through the time of Christ until 70 A.D., when Roman troops destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jewish people far and wide in what is known as the Diaspora. For the next 900 years, control of the Holy Land went back and forth between various occupying forces, including the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Christian Crusaders, the Mamluks and the Ottoman Empire.

Muslims were the third major religious entity to lay claim to the land, arriving as a distinct faith group in the seventh century A.D. Their founding prophet, Mohammad, was born in A.D. 570 and wrote the Koran in A.D. 610. By 691, Muslims had built the Dome of the Rock on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. This is the third-most-holy site in Islam because according to Islamic tradition it is the site from which Mohammed ascended into heaven.

Jews and Muslims claim a common heritage through the patriarch Abraham, with Jews tracing their lineage and faith through Abraham's son, Isaac, and Muslims tracing theirs through Abraham's son, Ishmael. Jewish Scripture records Ishmael as the child of Abraham and his wife's servant, Hagar. Islam, however, considers Hagar Abraham's second wife.

Jews and Muslims co-existed in the land, although Muslims had the upper hand through most of the latter half of the first millennium after Christ. They coexisted largely because of outside domination and because the Jewish people had not yet begun returning to the land in large numbers.

Four hundred years of rule by the Ottoman Empire ended in 1917 with a British conquest, and the British prime minister pledging support for a "Jewish national home in Palestine." That never fully materialized, however, until after World War II and the Holocaust. European and American sentiment for a Jewish state led to concrete action. And that, imposed by the United Nations in 1948, set the stage for conflict that has raged between Arabs and Israelis until the present.

With consent from the British, the victors of World War II carved out a new Israeli state, hoping to create a place of refuge for persecuted Jews worldwide. To do this, however, they made hundreds of thousands of Palestinians homeless and not all too happy.