-By Nancy Salvato
It was around 1400 B.C., when Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt into Palestine, the “promised land”. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the Jewish state came to an end and the Hebrew (Jewish) people were dispersed. In the 1890’s, Jews driven by Zionism to establish a modern Jewish nation-state and flocking back to their ancient biblical homeland in British controlled Palestine, eventually became embroiled in a modern day conflict between themselves and Palestinian Arabs.
During WWI, British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration; Britain would view establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, favorably. Thus, Palestine was carved into “Emirate of Transjordan” (later simply “Jordan”); the area east of the Jordan River, where Britain installed a Saudi Arabian Bedouin tribal chieftain, Abdullah ibn Hussein, to rule over Bedouin and Palestinian Arabs, and the western half; between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, where Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews wrestled for control.
Britain handed responsibility over the western half of Palestine to the United Nations; which partitioned it into two states, one for the Jews; which would consist of the Negev Desert, the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and parts of the northern Galilee, and the other for the Palestinian Arabs; which would consist primarily of the West Bank of Jordan, the Gaza District, Jaffa, and the Arab sectors of the Galilee. Jerusalem would stay under UN control. Led by David Ben-Gurion, Zionists accepted this partition plan while Palestinian Arabs and surrounding Arab states rejected the proposal.
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A Brief History of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict”