20Y Times Staff Reports

.20y Times staff reports

According to the Bible, God told Abraham to leave his home and go to Canaan, where God promised he would make Abraham a great nation and give the land to his offspring.

Historical research suggests that sometime after 2000 B.C., a tribe called the Hebrews migrated from Mesopotamia to Canaan, an area along the southeast coast of the Mediterranean Sea that approximates modern-day Israel.

The Bible says that Abraham settled in Hebron, south of Jerusalem. Abraham's wife, Sarah, could not bear children, so she offered him her handmaiden, Hagar. With her, Abraham conceived Ishmael. Fourteen years later, Abraham and Sarah did have a child together; they named him Isaac.

God tested Abraham's faith by commanding him to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering. Abraham was about to slaughter his son when God's angel stopped him. Muslims believe this son was Ishmael; Jews believe it was Isaac.

Both religions agree that Ishmael was cast out into the wilderness of Beersheba, in the Negev Desert. The Bible says God told Abraham that Ishmael would be blessed, that he would "multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation."

According to the Koran, Ishmael went to the place where Mecca was to rise. His descendants, flourishing in Arabia, became Muslims.

The descendants of Isaac, who remained in Canaan, were known as the Israelites. (Isaac's son Jacob was known as Israel.)

Famine struck Canaan and the Israelites moved to Egypt where, according to the Bible, they were enslaved for 400 years. In the 1200s B.C., Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.

According to the Bible, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and the tenets of Judaism. During the next 40 years the Jews wandered, eventually returning to Canaan, the land they believed God had promised them.

Around the same time, according to historical scholars, the Philistines migrated from areas around the Aegean Sea and they, too, settled in Canaan.

During the 1100s and 1000s, the Philistines and the Israelites fought. Historical texts say the Philistines had iron for their armor, the Israelites did not. In the biblical story of David and Goliath, the young Israelite David, armed with a slingshot, felled the Philistine giant Goliath, who carried a shield and sword.

It was David who created the kingdom of Israel around 1000 B.C. He captured Jerusalem and made it the capital. His son, Solomon, built the First Temple there, near the spot on Mount Moriah where Jews believe Abraham was sent to sacrifice his son to God. Within the temple was the Holy of Holies, which housed the ark of the covenant -- the chest containing the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

Over the centuries, Jerusalem saw a series of conquerors: the Assyrians, the Babylonians (who destroyed Solomon's temple), the Persians (who allowed the Jews to build a second temple), the Greeks and the Romans, who took Jerusalem in 63 B.C.

In 70 A.D., the Romans burned the Second Temple and sacked the city. By 135 A.D., they prohibited Jews from living in Jerusalem. Romans began calling the area Palaestina, for Philistia, the land of the Philistines.

Palestine also was sacred to Christians. Jesus' life, teachings, death and resurrection are built upon Jewish history, tradition and writings; sites sacred to Jews also are significant for Christians.

According to the New Testament and Roman records, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem in what is now the West Bank. The site of his crucifixion, burial and resurrection in Jerusalem are today covered by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, not far from the site of King Solomon's temple.

The Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 A.D. Palestine became a center of Christian pilgrimage; many Jews left the region.

Around 610 A.D., according to Islamic belief, an Arab merchant in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, heard God speak to him through the angel Gabriel. He was to become known as the prophet Mohammed.

According to Islam, Mohammed was transported one night from Mecca to the site of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem on a winged, white beast, al-Buraq. Mohammed prayed and the prophets of Judaism and Christianity prayed behind him. The angel Gabriel offered Mohammed a choice of drink, wine or milk. He chose milk and was told he had chosen wisely.

Mohammed ascended to heaven, where he received the revelation of the tenets of Islam and the commandment to pray five times a day, then he returned to earth. Driven from Mecca for his preaching, he settled in Medina in 622 A.D. He died 10 years later.

In the century after, Muslim Arabs moved north from Arabia to conquer most of the Middle East -- including Palestine -- north Africa and parts of Europe and Asia, an empire larger than Rome's. The spread of Islam was even more extensive: It moved swiftly to the borders of India, and in subsequent centuries huge populations took root in India, China and southeast Asia.

Islamic civilizations developed distinctive art and architecture and enhanced mathematic systems, including algebra, Arabic numerals and the concept of zero.

Palestine is sacred to Muslims worldwide because Jerusalem is believed to be the site of Mohammed's ascent to heaven, from the same spot the Jews had built their First Temple. There Muslims built the Dome of the Rock shrine.

From 636 until 1098, various Muslim dynasties ruled Palestine. Jews and Christians were generally tolerated as "People of the Book."

Zionism, Nazism, too many British promises

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church became the most powerful force in what is now Europe. The Crusades began in 1096, a series of military expeditions ostensibly to free the Holy Land from the Muslims. Along with religious motives, came the desire for loot and land. Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 and held it until the great sultan, Salah ad-Din, recaptured it in 1187.

The Crusades helped drive a wave of intense hatred toward Jews in Europe. They lost the right to own land and practice certain trades; they were forced to live in ghettoes, and many were massacred.

By the end of the 1800s, most Jews in western and central Europe had some legal rights restored. That was not the case in eastern Europe and Russia, where restrictions remained tight and many were killed in a series of massacres called pogroms.

Between 1881 and 1914, more than 2-million Jews left Russia and eastern Europe for the United States. Others went to western Europe, Argentina, South Africa and Palestine.

The pogroms and the long history of Jewish persecution also had a far-reaching effect. They spurred the modern Zionist movement.

Zionists believed non-Jewish societies would never accept Jews; the only way to escape persecution was to create their own independent state. In 1897, the First World Zionist Congress, meeting in Basel, Switzerland, proclaimed a campaign to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Palestine was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire, inhabited mostly by Muslim Arabs and a minority of Christians and Jews. The Zionists bought land in Palestine and established farming communities. The first all-Jewish city, Tel Aviv, was founded in 1909.

During World War I, the British and French challenged the Ottoman Turks -- allied with the Germans -- for control of the region. Looking for help from all quarters, the British made contradictory promises to Arabs in the Middle East and to Jewish Zionists in Europe.

Hoping to encourage an Arab revolt against the Turks, the British promised support for eventual Arab independence. Meantime, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised the British Zionist Federation that the government would work for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

World War I ended and the victorious Western powers divided the Ottoman Empire. The League of Nations assigned the British to administer the area to be called the Palestine Mandate, directing that it should include a homeland for the Jews. In 1918, more than 600,000 people lived in Palestine. About 90,000 were Jews; more than 500,000 were Arabs (about 10 percent Christian, the rest Muslim).

In 1921, Britain split the land. The part east of the Jordan River, which they called Transjordan, they gave to the Arabian prince, Abdullah, whose father Sharif Hussein had been a leader of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans. It would become modern-day Jordan. The land west of the river remained under British administration as Palestine.

In Europe, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933. The Nazis deprived Jews of citizenship, siezed their businesses and destroyed synagogues.

Many Jews fled, some to Palestine. Most nations had adopted restrictive immigration policies; in the United States, the Depression led workers to fear that Jewish refugees would take their jobs.

In Palestine, friction grew between Arab and Jew, living side by side on what each considered their rightful homeland. Increased Jewish immigration led to Arab uprisings.

In 1939, the British published an official government report called a white paper that effectively promised Arabs a halt to Jewish immigration to Palestine after five years, to be followed by self-government with an Arab majority.

The British tried to enforce the ban on immigration. They denied entry into Palestine of the Struma, a cargo barge carrying 769 Romanian and Russian Jews. Stranded without an engine in Istanbul, the Struma was towed into the Black Sea on Feb. 23, 1942. At first light, a Russian submarine sank it with a single torpedo. Only one person survived.

Underground Jewish militias tried to force the British to allow unrestricted immigration to Palestine. In 1944, Yitzhak Shamir's group, the Stern Gang, assassinated British administrator Lord Moyne. In 1946, Menachem Begin's group, Irgun, blew up British headquarters in Jerusalem's King David Hotel; 91 people were killed.

By this time, the toll of the holocaust had become clear. Firing squads had shot more than 1-million Jews, about 4-million more were killed in concentration camps, and others died from disease and starvation. Two of every three European Jews lost their lives, about 6-million in all.

Survivors flocked to Palestine, supported by the sympathy (and guilty feelings) of the West, which for too long had ignored the reports of genocide.

On Oct. 4, 1946, U.S. President Harry Truman called for "substantial immigration" and supported the Zionist plan for a "viable Jewish state." The British felt the statement prejudiced negotiations between the Arabs and Jews.

By 1947, despite official British policy to stem the flow, the Jewish population in Palestine had grown to about 650,000; the Arab population was about 1.6-million. The British turned the question of Palestine over to the United Nations.

On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. passed a resolution to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and make Jerusalem an international zone within the Arab sector.

The Zionists accepted. The Arabs did not.

Arab militias blockaded Jewish Jerusalem.

On April 9, 1948, the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang underground forces attacked the nearby Arab village of Deir Yassin, despite its peace treaty with the Jewish military. More than 100 civilians were killed. For Palestinian Arabs, Deir Yassin became a rallying point against Israel and Zionism.

On May 14, 1948, Israel proclaimed itself an independent state. Less than 24 hours later, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria attacked. The war lasted until the summer of 1949.

The Jewish state emerged with not only what the U.N. had offered, but with about half the land the U.N. had intended for the Arab state. Jordan and Egypt occupied the remaining portion of what would have been Arab Palestine, but Palestinians directed their ire toward Israel.

Some 520,000 to 1-million Palestinians left their homes between December 1947 and January 1949. Many fled, many were driven out by the Israelis. Most became refugees in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.

The Palestinians called it al Nakba -- the Disaster. Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, called it "a miraculous clearing of the land."

Nasser and Arafat, the PLO is born

In 1956, Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser declared that Egypt would control the Suez Canal, which was jointly owned by the French and the British. France, Britain and Israel wanted to send in troops. The United States wanted to negotiate a settlement.

On Oct. 29, 1956, Israeli troops crossed the Sinai, apparently on the way to the Suez Canal. That gave Britain and France the pretext to send in troops. The U.N. -- especially the United States -- pressured all three nations to withdraw, and they did.

In the mid 1960s, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement announced itself by dynamiting Israeli water pipelines, wells and pumps. Arafat believed Palestinians had to develop politically, distinct from Arab states.

Since the 1948 war, Arab leaders had demanded that Israel heed a U.N. resolution calling on it to accept changes to its borders and allow Palestinian refugees to return. In January 1964, a new dimension was added.

At a summit convened by Nasser, Arab leaders established the Palestine Liberation Organization as a formal entity within the Arab League; they called for "the liberation of Palestine."

The 1967 war and U.N. 242

By the mid 1960s, Arafat's Fatah group was conducting raids into Israel and the Israelis were counter-striking. Arab states banded together, with Egypt and Syria signing a mutual defense pact. The next year, Jordan joined the pact.

On May 22, 1967, Nasser announced that he intended to blockade the Strait of Tiran, which Egypt controlled but which was a prime shipping lane for Israel. Israel considered it an act of war.