An Orthodox Jew in front of the Western Wall and the mosque promenade in Jerusalem
Since the middle twentieth century By taking a starting point and developing a timeline that assesses the past, we can see what history tells us about the great controversial Israeli Palestinian of the present. But we also need to go back to the time when the European Christian and Ottoman Muslim empires collapsed at the beginning of the 20th century, when nation states emerged middle East and that north of Africa when 37 Muslim-majority countries and one Jewish-majority country were born.
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Throughout the past, the question for many has been and remains: Who are the original peoples of the region that made up the region? British mandate, the Jews or the Arabs? The answer will be directly related to the interpretation of the story. The different starting points and radically different positions of both parties continue to fuel the current terrible conflict.
The founding of Islamic countries was celebrated without controversy, while the Jewish state was repeatedly attacked. After Second World War The Nazi Holocaust became known, in which 65% of European Jews were murdered. The founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 gave new hope to the Jewish survivors of these crimes while fueling Arab rejection and anger. The two groups defined themselves as legitimate heirs to their land and both claimed it from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
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The Peel Commission in 1937 and the The United Nations proposed partition in 1947 that would divide the land between Jewish and Arab residents of Palestine.. The Peel Report highlighted Jewish land rights based on an ancient historical context. The Jewish political leadership accepted, the Arab political leadership rejected these and other options that emerged over time.
However, aside from the asymmetry in current realpolitik, it is difficult to determine which group was indigenous when the starting point is between 1947 and 1948, since both had lived on the same land for centuries, leading to the UN recognizing each's claims.
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Going further back in time, the term “Palestinian” was used in English and French between 1870 and 1872, referring equally to the Jewish and Arab inhabitants of this part of the country. Between 1886 and up to the start of World War I (1914), in response to increasing anti-Semitism and serious pogroms in Europe and North Africa, more than 70,000 Diaspora Jews returned and settled in their ancestral lands, while between 1931 and 1939 another 250,000 Jews came as refugees from the worrying threat of German National Socialism.
However, let's go back further, for example to the year 638 AD, the Arabs arrived in Palestine and conquered the original Jews living there. For the next thirteen centuries, Arabs and Jews lived together, traded, and even intermarried as different empires ruled over their shared lands.
When the Christian Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099 to retake it from the Muslims, they killed Palestinian Arabs and Jews without distinction between them. Before that, about 3,000 years ago, the Jews had already founded a kingdom of Israel in the north (Samaria) and a kingdom of Judah in the south, which covered practically the same area as modern-day Israel. They survived as independent states for the next 300 years. Thereafter, the country attracted a diverse range of invaders from ancient times: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, followed by Arabs, Seleucid Turks, Egyptians and others. Thus, the Jews became a global diaspora people as they were repeatedly driven from their homeland in the Middle East by these invaders.
At the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the Roman invaders defeated the rebellious Jews and changed the name of Judea to Syria-Palestine. As this name change suggests, Palestine was never a country, but rather a province far from the Roman Empire. Jews and Muslims – and Christians too – used to respect Abraham, the Jewish patriarch. They all agree that the monotheistic God they worship gave Abraham and his descendants the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. However, Muslims and Jews have never agreed about who their true descendants are.
The Jews base their descent on Isaac, the son of Abraham and his wife Sarah, and thus give priority to the matriarchal line of legitimacy. Muslims trace their lineage to Ishmael, Abraham's son with Hagar (Sarah's maid), thereby prioritizing the patriarchal line to claim their position of legitimacy.
Such controversies over genealogical legitimacy coupled with the fact that there has been no autonomous Jewish-Arab state in the country since the Romans defeated the Jews in 135 AD. C., paved the way for one of the greatest conflicts in history.
The United Kingdom was the last regional colonial power to work with the United Nations on a partition plan, dividing the country between its long-standing heirs (the Jews) and its long-standing neighbors (the Arabs), and it was there when the United Kingdom left the country between its long-time heirs (the Jews) and its long-time neighbors (the Arabs). The modern phase of what we know as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began.
There is no doubt that the current scenario of hostilities depends on how history is interpreted, as Muslims and Jews disagree on what, in this particular case, is not just a set of true and chronological facts from the past. In this controversy, history is a selection, an often politicized account of these events. What becomes clear is that when different starting points are chosen and such events are told differently, the conflict arises and deepens.
When politics becomes a zero-sum game and only one group wins and the other loses, it is not only because of the military power of one of the parties, but also because of the violent narrative and the misappropriation of extremely politicized history through distorted propaganda. It is this formula that has been excluding just and fair solutions for years. A win-win solution, rather than a winner-takes-all solution, offers the only fair path forward. The conflicting stories cited by Arabs and Jews suggest that a two-state solution is the only historically valid and culturally viable strategy to reach agreement. The problem is whether the Palestinian side really wants to build their state, which their political class does not want to do. They are known to achieve it either initially by rejection and later by choosing armed struggle as a violent expression of their will to achieve it .
The modern wars of the Arab states against Israel have aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state no less than six times, but they have not achieved it, and this ideal of construction based on war and the repeated method of violence is hardly the solution to it Palestinians can form their own. There is no doubt that the legitimacy of both groups' historical claims to Indigeneity in Palestine requires the abandonment of the zero-sum model that is the result of terrorism and war.
Today, a viable two-state solution seems very far away, but even if terrorism and violence block the historical reality of both groups, which – historically – have shared this territorial space (in relative peace) for centuries, history reminds us that they can do it again and that for this to happen, the international community must help both groups involved by eliminating terrorism and violence, beyond any vengeful rhetoric that mentions anomalies passed down to their generations over the last 75 years .