Israel vs Palestine

“To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.” What Confucius meant by this is that holding grudges can only have negative results, and what better modern conflict better exemplifies this than the struggle between Israel and Palestine? In the twentieth century Middle East, a conflict sparked between Israel and Palestine that would last to this day due to disputes over land acquisition and ownership, a struggle for mutual national sovereignty, and religious tension between Jews and Muslims.

Above all else, the conflict between Israel and Palestine began as a land dispute. Due to the widespread persecution and racism towards the Jewish people throughout Europe and Russia commonplace for the late nineteenth century, Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzel wrote and published The Jewish State in 1896. Within this work, he wrote of this racism and the lack of government intervention.

“Wherever [Jews] live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter ... Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys ... become daily more numerous.” (Herzl 423)

He therefore proposed that the only conceivable solution to the rampant anti-semitism was to create a recognized, independent Jewish state. Through this new political force of Zionism came the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a letter written by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a British government official and Zionist, calling for their official support of a permanent homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. This ultimately did sway Britain to side with the Jewish peoples’ agenda for land, if only to q...

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...to relinquish any of the land it still considered their rightful property and could not compromise this in peace talks. It was ultimately because of this failure in diplomacy that Britain withdrew from Palestine and ended Jewish immigration for a time in 1939.

Holocaust.

With 1948, tension between Israel and the Arab nations of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq came to a boiling point with the start of the Arab-Israeli War, resulting in a mass exodus of 700,00 Jewish people from Arab nations. Finally, an agreement to end the war was reached, though.

Works Cited

Herzl, Theodor. "Theodor Herzl From The Jewish State: The Jewish Question." Trans. Array Religion and Politic: Israel, Palestine, and the West 1896. Print.

"The Zionist and Arab Cases to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry." Trans. Array Religion and Politic: Israel, Palestine, and the West 1896. Print.