What was really the historical cause of the war between Israel and Palestine?

Photo by Fernández Salas | Unsplash

The conflict started over 2000 years ago when the Romans invaded the Middle East and started enforcing their style of law on the people. It roots back to the days when Jesus was killed as the New Testament states that the Jews were chanting for the crucifixion of Jesus and the Romans were interested in keeping control but also of snuffing out some of the religious problems they were having as Jews advocated one God, and it caused a great deal of problems for the Roman religious system.

After the death of Jesus, the Romans were in conflict with the Jewish people for another 150 years when they finally broke the resistance and disbanded the Jews, casting them out from the territory. It was this dispersion of people that would serve as a bit an anomaly in the typical conquered people’s history, as usually the people get absorbed into the other people that conquer because of the lack of power and support to continue as they had been.

In the case of the Jewish people, they managed to hold onto their belief system and their sense of identity because for them, they were God’s chosen people that if they continued to obey his laws they would continue to be the chosen people and this gave them something which would be strong enough to withstand the fact that they had no country of their own. So, in small pockets they would continue to survive, which brought with it some differences for the community.

In almost every other religion is the declaration to blindly follow and not to discuss or debate, where within the Jewish ideology firmly entrenched was the ability to discuss ideas and have debate. This ended up causing a big discrepancy which led to religious persecution - ‘they called for Christ to be killed, but also one of an elitism due to their focus on ideas and debate.

Inevitably they ended up with some of the greatest intellectuals, which caused them to be seen with jealousy and resentment as they tended to be very successful and good with their wealth. The people depended on Jews for their services and at the same time resented them and hated them for their success, which created even deeper roots of malaise towards them.

These idea people were not afraid of new ideas and if you look at the beginning of Communism there was a great deal of influence from the Jewish perspective around Socialism, which due to Communism became associated as something to be afraid of. When the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917 the religious discrimination the Jews experienced were further bolstered into political discrimination due to those connections but also because of the call for the creation of a Jewish state. The British backed the idea of a Jewish State as was in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which was a significant step towards the creation of Israel.

Hitler so willfully grabbed onto as a means of tapping into an ancient hatred for his own gains and purposes. The Jewish people were villainized and nearly ground into oblivion with the Nazi's during World War II and after World War II with the United Nations approval a small country was carved out of Palestine for the Jewish people and the very next day the Arab Muslims had declared war on Israel.

Since then, there have been considerable tension and conflicts which led to Israel gaining a lot of land that they originally did not have. The area that is under contention is land that they had taken over in the wars after 1948. The original plan in 1947 had a two state model in mind with Israel and the Arabs dividing Palestine but then after the Armistice of 1949 Israel had taken over a huge chunk of land and so there was no new Arab state created as the remainder of what was left of the original Arab countries that fought the 1948 war was Jordan and Egypt which were the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Over, 700K Palestinian Arabs were expelled.

In 1967 there was as 6-day war where Israel declared that they were making a preemptive defensive move to take over more territory which took Egypt and Jordan by surprise. Israel took over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is where we have the contention and fighting today. In 1973 there was an agreement reached which had Israel return parts of the land to Jordan and Egypt and Israel is in military occupation of these areas which has drawn international condemnation for violating the human rights of Palestinians.