Miguel
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Historical Perspective: Who Has the Right To Call Israel Home?
By JASON FIELDS
Associated Press Writer
The origins of the fight for Israel reach back before written history. According to the Bible, Jews fled slavery in Egypt to the land of Canaan (modern day Israel) around 1300 BC. After years of warfare, the Canaanites were defeated and Jerusalem established under King David (approx. 1000 BC).
Internal squabbling led to a division of the kingdom, which then fell under the domination of the Assyrians, then Persians, Greeks and Romans.
In 70 AD, Romans razed Jerusalem, including its Temple, which was the center of religious life for Jews. This followed Jewish attempts to throw off Rome's yolk. Thousands were taken as slaves, while others fled Roman occupation. This dispersal of Jews throughout the Roman world and beyond became known as the Diaspora. Very few Jews were left within the territory of Israel, which was held (after Rome's collapse) by the Byzantines, Arabs, Christian crusaders and finally the Islamic Ottoman Empire.
Emperor Titus' Arch, which depicts the razing the Temple
AP/File/Andrew Medichini
In the 19th Century, a group of European Jews began to look for a single homeland for all Jews to escape the persecution they suffered throughout Europe and in the Arab world. The leaders of the movement, known as Zionism, considered Uganda, but eventually decided to return to the area known to their religion as Israel.
The Ottomans allowed some immigration by Jews into the area, then known as Palestine, and the movement continued after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the British in World War I. Of course, there were already a large number of people who had been living in Palestine at the time of the first waves of Zionist immigrants. They didn't share the dream of an independent Jewish state.
After the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews attempted to flee Europe for Palestine. The British tried to block many of those seeking "the Promised Land," in an effort to maintain a balance between the interests of Jewish settlers and Arabs in Palestine. In 1948, the United Nations mandated the creation of Israel as a Jewish state with the backing the United States and the Soviet Union. The Arab nations surrounding Israel were violently opposed to the new state in their midst.
War began on the day of U.N. mandated independence, May 14, 1948. The Jews in Israel managed to stave off armies from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Palestinian unrest was also born.
Three more wars have been fought between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Israel has persevered. The United States has remained a firm backer of Israel, while during the Cold War, the Soviet Union sided with the Arabs. Since the collapse of Communism, Russia has allowed Jews to emigrate to Israel and relations have warmed.
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Romans 9:11-24
Our Eschatology may vary even our Ecclesiology may be disputed among us but our Soteriology most assume a singularity and exclusivity which in biblical term is known as Quote; "The Narrow Way" and Quote!
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