Friday, September 4, 2015

Who Owns the Holy Land?


Who Owns the Holy Land?

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Part 1
The Jewish Claim
From The Fourth R
Volume 15-1
January–February 2002
When the horrendous acts of terrorism befell the United States on September 11, I was not wholly surprised by that shocking event. My fear of what might happen as a consequence of the general unrest in the Middle East, and of the Palestinian intifada against Israel in particular, prompted me to publish an article earlier in the year, in which I wrote, 'the escalating violence between Israel and the Palestinians has the potential to ignite a much larger conflict. The Holy Land is sacred to the three monotheistic faiths and is the meeting place between the Christian West and the Islamic Middle East. Conflict there can all too easily set the West on a collision course with the Islamic world, of which the gulf war with Iraq was but a forerunner. One has only to spend a little time in some Islamic countries to find out how much the West in general, and the USA in particular, is distrusted and even hated by many in the Islamic world'.
Over the last thirty-five years I have visited all the Middle Eastern countries from Egypt to Iran, some of them many times. In my earlier academic career it was my responsibility, for sixteen years, to study and teach the history of the ancient Middle East over the four thousand years which preceded the Christian era. This background has shown me that the Holy Land has probably witnessed more violent conflict in the last four thousand years than any other spot in the whole world.
The modern period of destabilization of the Middle East began with the Napoleonic wars. Since that time the Western imperial powers, Britain, France, Germany and Russia, and more recently the United States, have vied with one another either to conquer or to control that area of the world. The victory of the Allied powers over Germany and Turkey in 1918 left most of the Middle East in the power of the West. Even Turkey, though remaining free, went through a Western-style revolution.
The following decades saw the resurgence of the Islamic world. This had actually begun in the nineteenth century with the pan-Islamic movement initiated by the charismatic figure known as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897). He advocated widespread social reforms, which would not only modernize the Islamic world but also lead to its re-unification. However, it was not until after World War I, with the collapse of the Turkish Empire followed by the abolition of the Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk, that the various Islamic countries were able to establish their political independence and reject Western suzerainty. This is the wider context in which to understand, not only the present conflict within the Holy Land, but also the growing confrontation between the Western nations and the Islamic world.

What is the Holy Land?

We start with the Israeli claim to the possession of the Holy Land. The Holy Land is a relatively small piece of territory. In ancient times it used to be called Canaan and was said to stretch from Dan to Beersheba. At Dan, the northern boundary, the chief source of the Jordan river pours out as a large spring from the foot of the snow-capped Mt. Hermon. Beersheba in the south was on the edge of the desert which stretched all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba, and joins the Sinai Peninsula.
Small though it is, the Holy Land possesses a remarkable diversity of climate because of the Great Rift Valley. This is a massive geological fault that runs all the way from Turkey to Lake Tanganyika, with its lowest point in the Jordan Valley, some 1,100 feet below sea level. For this reason tropical fruits grow down at Jericho in the Jordan Valley, while, only thirty miles away, Jerusalem and Bethlehem can be covered with snow at Christmas. Western farmers would hardly find the Holy Land a 'land flowing with milk and honey' (as it was claimed to be), yet that is how it seemed to people used to desert life.
This narrow fertile strip along the Mediterranean coast was historically of strategic importance since it was the natural bridge between the continents of Africa and Asia. Because of the great desert which stretches from Syria to Arabia, the only way to travel between the two great river civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia was through this land. This meant that not only the ancient trade route but the chief military route also ran through Canaan. Hence it has been the site of many battles and it is not surprising that its fortress hill of Megiddo gave rise to the name Armageddon, the mythical battle which will bring the world to an end.

The Canaanites

Since special rights of ownership are accorded these days to indigenous people; so we should first ask: Who were the indigenous people of the Holy Land? No one can say! Being the bridge between Africa and Asia this land was inhabited from very early times. But the earliest inhabitants of whom we have any historical knowledge were the Canaanites. They were a Semitic people, basically of the same stock as the Phoenicians, who occupied ancient Lebanon. The Canaanites and the Phoenicians constituted the Western branch of the Semitic family, the Northern being the Aramaeans, the Eastern the Assyrians and Babylonians, and the Southern the Arabs. The language known as Hebrew, originated as the language of the Canaanites.
These Western Semitic People left us a priceless heritage. They invented the alphabetic system of writing about 1400 bce. It was the most important product ever spread by the Phoenician traders, for it became the basis of the Greek, Roman, and Slavonic as well as the Arabic alphabets. The word Bible comes from the Greek word biblos , which meant 'letter' or 'book'. But Byblos is the name of the Phoenician town and port on the coast of Lebanon from which the Phoenician traders set out. What is more, the script in which the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were written is known as the Canaanite script.

How are Jews and Canaanites related?

If the Canaanites were the earliest known indigenous inhabitants of the Holy Land, how are they related to the Jewish people, who now lay claim to the Holy Land as theirs by right?
Let me sketch two quite different answers to this question — the biblical answer and the historical answer.

The biblical answer

The biblical answer runs like this, starting with the story of Abraham. All Jews claim to be his descendants; so the Holy Land is rightfully theirs since it was given by God to Abraham and his descendants. Abraham belonged to the northern section of the Semitic people — the Aramaeans. The Jews long preserved this memory in the liturgy of their harvest festival, which began with the words, 'A wandering Aramaean was my father'.1
The story of the Jewish people started when Abraham heard God say to him, 'Go from your country and your kindred to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great. By you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves'.2 So Abraham left Aramaea (which is today Northeastern Syria) and went forth to the land of Canaan. And when he reached Canaan God appeared to Abraham and said, 'To your descendants I will give this land'.3 Elsewhere in the Bible this promise is made even more explicit — 'To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates'.4 That meant everything between the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia and, today, would include both the Sinai Peninsula at one end and most of Syria at the other.
In this very secular age many people may regard this ancient biblical material to be quite irrelevant. We need to remember, however, that all devout and religious Jews, supported by many Christian fundamentalists, take these ancient divine promises very seriously. The Jewish claim to possess the Holy Land, therefore, rests initially on a divinely given right, though few would be brave enough today to lay claim to the whole of both Sinai and Syria.
Even in the Bible, however, the process by which the descendants of Abraham actually took possession of the land of Canaan is much more complicated and is related in two successive traditions. In the first of these5 we are told how Abraham and his descendants entered Canaan as semi-nomadic people who occupied the land not being used by the Canaanites. The Canaanites lived in walled cities and farmed the land in their immediate vicinity. For some centuries, therefore, the Abrahamic tribes shared the Holy Land with the Canaanites, mostly in peace but occasionally in conflict. There was even some intermarriage.
The second tradition starts with a time of famine, when the descendants of Abraham were forced to migrate to Egypt in search of food. By divine providence one of their number, Joseph, had already preceded them and risen to a position of prominence in Egypt from which he could welcome them and provide for them. According to this tradition the Hebrews, as they were now called, stayed in Egypt for some centuries until they were eventually reduced to slavery. They were delivered out of bondage and led back to the Promised Land by Moses.
The epic story of how this occurred dominated Jewish life thereafter. It stretches out over five whole books of the Bible — from Exodus to Joshua. This story constitutes a second tradition of how the ancestors of the Jewish people entered into possession of the Holy Land and there is a striking difference between the two. The first entry was by peaceful infiltration; the second was by military force. Moses led his people for forty years in the wilderness and lived only long enough to view the Promised Land from Mt. Nebo, which is in present day Jordan. It was left to Joshua to conquer the land from the Canaanites by force, starting with Jericho. As told in the book of Joshua, this was a quite bloody affair. Joshua and his army went from one Canaanite city to another and 'smote it with the edge of the sword and every person in it he utterly destroyed'. 6 According to the Bible the Israelite ancestors of the Jews not only conquered the Holy Land by force but they also completely exterminated the Canaanite population and then proceeded to parcel out the land to their own twelve tribes.

The historical answer

Was it really like that? I turn now from the biblical answer to the historical answer. The Bible is a little library of books of many genres. Its narratives can be mythical (or symbolic), legendary, fictional or historical. In the Bible we do have some genuine historiography but only from about 900 bce onwards. What precedes that is pseudo-history, a mixture of myth, legend and tribal oral tradition and even then it is told from the point of view of the final victors of Canaan. From this it is possible to reconstruct a general account of what took place in the Holy Land before the reign of King David.
The stories of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, shadowy figures though these now are, nevertheless point to a time when semi-nomadic tribes from Aramaea began to infiltrate into the land of the Canaanite city-states. The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were not related to one another as father, son and grandson, as the Bible now portrays them. The names refer to separate tribal migrations. The Abraham migration settled round Hebron. The Isaac migration settled near Beersheba. The Jacob tribe settled near Shechem, or modern Nablus.
There is good reason to conclude that some, but by no means all, of these Aramaean settlers did go down to Egypt, even though there is absolutely no archaeological evidence to confirm their presence there. The biblical figure of Joseph is entirely fictional. Some scholars have referred to the Joseph story7 as the first novel ever written. Its purpose was to join up the patriarchal traditions with the Mosaic tradition in order to form one continuous narrative. There probably was an historical Moses, for his name is Egyptian and not Hebrew. He probably did lead a migration back to Canaan but it was relatively small, say, about five thousand people. On entering the Holy Land they linked up with their fellow Hebrews and made a tribal treaty with them; memories of this amphictyony, as it technically called, are found in the covenant described in Joshua, chapter 24.
But these early tribes did not annihilate the Canaanites, as the book of Joshua implies, though there were some fierce local skirmishes. They lived in reasonable harmony with the Canaanites, occupying the pastoral stretches of land outside the Canaanite city-states. It was not until a common enemy arrived on the scene that the Israelites and the Canaanites eventually became integrated into one people.
The common enemy were the Philistines. These were not a Semitic people but a highly cultured people of Greek origin, who landed on the Mediterranean coast in the twelfth century bce. They introduced the use of iron for both weapons and farm implements; thus they took the Holy Land out of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. They established strong walled cities along the coast, some of whose names have survived to this day — Gaza, Ashdod, and Askelon.
As soon as they were well established, the Philistines began to move into the interior, and, because of their superior weapons, they were able to make the Israelites and the Canaanites subject to their rule. It was the need to re-establish their independence, which brought the Canaanites and the Israelites together in a common cause. Under the leadership of David, the young new Israelite king, the Philistines were finally forced back to their coastal cities. There their power and influence remained until Roman times. That is why the Romans called the Holy Land Palestina — the land of the Philistines.
Thereafter David established a strong and stable Kingdom, which at its height included much of modern Jordan and Syria. He also subjugated the remaining Canaanite cities, the most important of which was Jerusalem. From this time onwards the indigenous Canaanites and the incoming Israelites began to fuse into one people though it took some centuries. The Israelite tribal traditions dominated the culture of the people but the indigenous religious practices, celebrated at what were called the 'high-places', were not finally eradicated until the seventh century.
In some ways David had established a mini-empire and his rule was looked back upon as the Golden Age. It was his son Solomon, who squandered this inheritance; he imposed forced labour in order to carry out his lavish building programme, which included the first Temple. As a result the Kingdom of David split into two on the death of Solomon. The larger section rejected the dynasty of David, took to themselves the name of Israel, and established a new capital at Samaria in the north. The smaller group, which remained faithful to the Davidic dynasty and retained Jerusalem, called itself Judah; it is from this term that we derive the word Jew.

Foreign Occupation

From the end of the eighth century until the beginning of the Christian era the Holy Land became subject to a continual series of invasions by foreign powers. The northern Kingdom of Israel lost its independence to the Assyrians in 722 bce and never again recovered its own identity. The southern Kingdom of Judah was overrun by the Babylonians in 586 bce and its royal family, its aristocracy, its priests, and its educated classes were taken off into Exile in Babylonia. Thus began the long period of the dispersion of the Jews among the nations, a fact which has lasted until the present.
Although the Persians, after conquering Babylonia, allowed the Jews to return, not all Jews chose to do so. Those who did return rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple, but were never granted self-rule. From 586 bce right up until 1948 ce the Holy Land was ruled by others than Jews. The majority of Jews increasingly lived outside of the Holy Land in the Diaspora, as it is called.
After Persian rule came the Greeks and finally the Romans. There was one brief interlude to foreign rule of the Holy Land. In 164 bce the Jews revolted against their Greek overlords, who ruled from Damascus. It started when the Greek rulers tried to enforce Greek culture on the Jews, burning their holy writings and destroying their synagogues. The Jewish people had a temporary victory which enabled them, for a little over three years, to establish an independent state and even issue their own coinage.
The Greeks proved too powerful in the end and once again the Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land became a subject people. Yet after the revolt there developed a high-priestly family known as the Hasmoneans, who exerted considerable local influence in Jerusalem and its environs, provided they did not challenge their political overlords.
Greek rule of the Holy Land as a whole was exchanged for Roman rule with the arrival of Pompey in 63 bce. Not long after this Julius Caesar appointed, as procurator of the province of Palestine, a man from the area called Antipater, who was not a Jew but an Idumaean. The Idumaeans were the descendants of the ancient Edomites and they had been forced to adopt the Jewish religion during the time of the Hasmoneans. After Antipater died of poisoning, his son Herod established himself as King of Judea and ruled the Holy Land with an iron hand for nearly forty years, with the acquiescence of the Romans.
After Herod the Great the Romans divided the Holy Land into separate areas of local government, known as tetrarchies, and eventually appointed their own procurator over Judea. That explains the presence of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, while one of the Herods ruled Galilee.
There was much diversity among the Jewish people. Some Jews were thoroughly Hellenised and Romanised; they were reasonably satisfied with the state of affairs. At the other extreme were restive activists, longing for an opportunity to re-establish an independent state. This is reflected in the Gospel records about Jesus of Nazareth, as when he answered a leading question about taxes and said, 'Pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar and God what belongs to God!'
This restiveness reached a climax some forty years after the death of Jesus in the year 66 ce. According to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, there was much division among the Jews. It amounted almost to civil war in Jerusalem, between the activist Zealots at one extreme and more peace-loving Jews at the other. One is reminded of the current conflict in Afghanistan between the Taleban and the rest. The Zealots stormed the Temple Mount and took control. So the Roman Emperor Vespasian sent his son Titus with three legions to restore order. The Romans besieged Jerusalem, but it was not until 70 ce that they finally crushed all Jewish resistance and expelled the remaining inhabitants. They destroyed the city and Temple on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Ab, almost the exact anniversary of the destruction of the first Temple by the Babylonians in 586 bce. It has remained a Jewish day of mourning until the present. Nothing of Herod's Temple remains today except a part of the outer wall. This has become the famous Wailing Wall, to which devout Jews turn to mourn their past and to renew their hopes for the future. It is a powerful symbol for Jewry all round the world.

The Jews of the Diaspora

For most of the next two thousand years only a tiny number of Jews lived in the Holy Land; the vast majority of the Jewish people have lived outside of the Holy Land. Yet they have always retained the hope that some day they would return. Their annual celebration of the Passover ritual has always ended with the words, 'Next year, Jerusalem'.
The Jews of the Diaspora have been frequently discriminated against, much more in the Christian world than in the Islamic world. Although the term 'anti-Semitism' was coined as recently as 1879 to refer to this discrimination, the roots of Christian anti-Semitism are now acknowledged to go back to the first century and are even present in John's Gospel. By the fourth century Christians had come to regard Jews as the crucifiers of Christ and, for that reason, judged them to be condemned by God to perpetual migration.
In much of Europe during the Middle Ages, Jews were denied citizenship, barred from holding government posts, excluded from membership in the professions and denied ownership of agricultural land. From the Middle Ages came the practice of segregating the Jewish populations into ghettos and this lasted until the early nineteenth century. Forced often to become the rag and bone collectors, this industry led them later to become the great traders of clothing and footwear. Some became prominent in banking and money-lending.
The Jews' economic and cultural successes tended to arouse economic resentment among the populace and this prompted the forced expulsion of Jews from several countries, England (1290), France (fourteenth century), Germany (1350s), Portugal (1496), Provence (1512), and the Papal States (1569). The Spanish Inquisition forced the expulsion of that country's large and old-established Jewish population in 1492. Only Jews who had converted to Christianity were allowed to remain. As a result of these mass expulsions the centres of Jewish life shifted from Western Europe and Germany to Poland and Russia.
The Enlightenment and the French Revolution brought a new religious freedom to Jews in France and Western Europe. But in Russia, widespread anti-Jewish riots, or pogroms, broke out in 1881. Jews were stripped of their rural landholdings and several million Jews migrated to the United States in the next four decades. The most brutal anti-Semitism of all time was that of the Nazis inspired by Adolf Hitler (1933–1945). This took the form of deliberate genocide. An estimated 5,700,000 Jews were exterminated in such death camps as Auschwitz. The memory of this more than anything else motivated the modern Zionist movement, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel. Though anti-Semitism still exists, this modern tragedy led to world-wide sympathy with the Jewish people.

Summary

Let me now summarize. The Jewish people claim possession of the Holy Land on these grounds:
  • The land was promised and given to them by God.
  • Their distant ancestors conquered the land by force.
  • To this we may add from historical research (as Jews usually do not) that they have the blood of the indigenous Canaanites running in their veins.
  • They lived continuously in the land for over a millennium, until they were expelled from it by force, first by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and later by the Romans.
  • They have long been a people without a land of their own.
  • In modern times the anti-Semitic persecution to which they have been continually subjected through the centuries, particularly by Christians, and reaching the state of genocide under the Nazis, has meant they must have a land of their own to provide for them a safe refuge from their enemies.
So after nearly two thousand years the Jews have returned to the Holy Land to claim what they believe is rightfully theirs. They have a very strong claim to the Holy Land.
Unfortunately for them, however, the Holy Land has long been inhabited by others. To them we turn in the next article.
Lloyd Geering is Foundation Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and the author of several books including Christian Faith at the Crossroads and Tomorrow's God. His new book,Christianity without God, appeared in 2002.
Notes
1. Deuteronomy 26:5. 2. Genesis 12:1–4. 3. Genesis 12: 7. 4. Genesis 15: 18. 5. Genesis 12–36. 6. Joshua 10: 39 7. See Genesis 37–50.
Further Reading

Ashrawi, H. This Side of Peace. New York; Simon and Schuster, 1965.
Bergen, K., D. Neuhaus, and G. Rubeis (eds). Justice and Intifada: Palestinians and Israelis Speak Out. New York: Friendship Press, 1991.
Bickerton, I. J., and C. L. Klausner. A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, 1998.
Chacour, E. and M. E. Jensen. We Belong to the Land. London: Marshall Pickering, 1992.
Masalha, N. Land without a People. London: Faber, 1997.
Morton, H. V. In the Steps of the Master. London: Methuen, 1984.
Perowne, S. The Later Herods. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958.
Perowne, S. The Life and Times of Herod the Great. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956.
Said, E. W. The Politics of Dispossession. London: Vintage, 1995.
Said, E. W. The Question of Palestine. London: Vintage, 1992.
Tuchman, B. Bible and Sword. London: Phoenix, 2001

Who Owns the Holy Land?

Home/Resources/The Fourth R/Who Owns the Holy Land?









Part 2
The Palestinian Claim
From The Fourth R
Volume 15-2
March–April 2002
Who are the Palestinians? When Golda Meir was Prime Minister of Israel she once said, 'There is no such thing as a Palestinian people . . . it is not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist'. That is one way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; define one's opponents out of existence. There was a period of years in the state of Israel when one rarely heard the word 'Palestinian'; Israelis preferred to speak of Arabs or Muslims. Even the name of the 'Palestinian Museum', when it came into Israeli hands after 1967, was changed to the John D. Rockefeller Museum.
There is a half-truth in what Golda Meir said. There never has been a Palestinian nation. Until the early part of the twentieth century the word Palestinian simply referred to the inhabitants of the land called Palestine, whether they were Arab, Muslim, Jew, Samaritan, Christian or Druze. And even they did not use the term widely. Only since 1948 has the term come increasingly into use to refer to all the non-Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel. And now that includes all of their descendants also.
It is quite false, however, to infer from Golda Meir's statement that the Holy Land was unoccupied when the Jews returned to establish Israel. Yet that inference was nevertheless commonly drawn, as instanced by the much-used slogan, 'A land without a people for a people without a land'.
The Holy Land has never been a 'land without a people'. Even back in 1920 the Holy Land was more densely populated than New Zealand is today. So who are the people who have long inhabited it and whose descendants are now called the Palestinians? To answer this we must go back to the first century and take up the story of the Holy Land from the time the Romans expelled the Jews from Jerusalem. The Jews were not excluded from the Holy Land as a whole. Indeed there has never been a time when there have not been at least small numbers of Jews living in that country.

The Romans

After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce a legion was stationed on the site to prevent the Jews from returning. Then Rome began to stamp its own character upon the land by colonizing it with Romans. First, the governor's residence at Caesarea became a Roman colony. Then a new pagan city, Neapolis (now known as Nablus), was founded at the ancient Canaanite site of Shechem.
In 132 ce the emperor Hadrian began to build a Roman colony on the site of Jerusalem. This provoked much Jewish resentment and provoked a further Jewish revolt, led by Simon Bar Kokhba. His title means 'Son of the Star' and he was hailed by some as a Messiah or military deliverer. He recaptured Jerusalem and held out for three years until Julius Severus was recalled from Britain. Severus ruthlessly quelled the revolt and, according to some accounts, destroyed almost 1,000 villages, killing more than half a million people. In Judaea proper the Jews seem to have been virtually exterminated, but they survived in Galilee.
The province of Judaea was renamed Syria Palestina and was later simply called Palestina. But no Jew was thenceforth allowed to set foot in Jerusalem or the surrounding district.
Hadrian proceeded to convert Jerusalem into a Graeco-Roman city — with a circus, an amphitheatre, baths, and a theatre, and with streets conforming to the Roman grid pattern. He also erected temples dedicated both to Jupiter and to himself on the very site of the destroyed Jewish Temple. Since his clan name was Aelia, he called Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. To repopulate the city, he brought in Graeco-Syrians from the surrounding areas. The urbanization and Hellenization of Palestine was continued by the emperor Septimius Severus (who reigned 193–211), except in Galilee, where the Jewish presence remained strong.
Evidence of Hadrian's Jerusalem has been remarkably demonstrated by modern archaeology. In an ancient church in the village of Madaba in Jordan there is a wonderful Mosaic floor from the sixth century which portrays a map of the Holy Land. Jerusalem is depicted as having a long double colonnade of pillars running from North to south. This always puzzled modern historians who assumed it must have been the figment of the ancient artist's imagination. Since 1967 archaeologists have found this very colonnade under the surface of the Old City. It is called 'The Cardo', has been re-opened and is now the site of some very high-class shops.
The repopulation of the Holy Land by non-Jewish residents in the second century meant that it followed the fortunes of the Roman Empire thereafter. When the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion round about 312 ce, Christian interest began to focus on Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth. The emperor himself built a magnificent church on the site of the Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred of Christian holy places. His mother, Helena, built two others — at the cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem and the site of the Ascension in Jerusalem. The church of the Nativity at Bethlehem became the residence for the scholar Jerome, who was given the task by Pope Damasus of translating the whole of the Bible into Latin, from the original Hebrew and Greek. Thus out of fourth century Palestine came the Vulgate, which remained the standard version of the Bible in the Western world for more than a thousand years.
Palestine began to attract floods of pilgrims from all parts of the Roman Empire. It also became a great centre of the early monastic life; men flocked from all quarters to become hermits in the Judaean wilderness, which was soon dotted with monasteries. It began a new era of prosperity for Palestine. When Constantine added part of Arabia, the enlarged Palestine was divided into three provinces: Prima, with its capital at Caesarea; Secunda, with its capital at Scythopolis (Bet Shean); and Salutaris, with its capital at Petra.

The Byzantines

After the Fall of Rome in 410 the seat of Roman rule not only shifted Eastward to Constantinople, built on the old Byzantium, but the Roman Empire became increasingly Christian. The Holy Land became an important religious centre of the Byzantine Empire, and the majority of its inhabitants by this time were Christian. The bishop of Caesarea was metropolitan of the province. Then the bishop of Jerusalem began to claim a special prerogative by virtue of where he came from. At the time of the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451, Juvenal, the then bishop of Jerusalem, was recognized as a patriarch.
Palestine, like Syria and Egypt, was troubled by the theological controversies then dividing the church throughout the empire. The Monophysite Controversy was one in which Christians debated whether the person of Jesus Christ comprised two natures — one human and one divine — or only one nature. When Juvenal the Bishop of Jerusalem returned from the Council of Chalcedon, which defined the orthodox position which he had agreed to, the monks of Palestine rose up and elected another bishop, and military force was required to subdue them. After that, Palestine became a stronghold of orthodoxy, whereas the Christians of Egypt adopted monophysitism, eventually becoming the Coptic Church.

The Arabs

In the seventh century disaster struck the Holy Land. First came the Persian invasion in 611. Jerusalem was captured in 614, many churches throughout the land were destroyed and the Persians carried off what had had been claimed to be the True Cross. In 628 the Byzantine forces recaptured Palestine and even restored the True Cross to Jerusalem. Only ten years later, in 638, Jerusalem fell to the Muslim Arabs.
Thus for the four hundred years after the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem, the Holy Land was first Romanized and then Christianized. The arrival of the new religion of Islam brought a dramatic change which was to shape the Holy Land for the next fourteen hundred years.
The new religion of Islam founded by Muhammad spread with lightning speed. Within the short space of forty years it dominated the whole of the Middle East from Egypt to India. This new movement was destined not only to change the character of the Holy Land but to play an important role in human history from then right up until the present.
It is quite misleading to judge Islam by the actions of today's Muslim terrorists. The original success of Muhammad rests on the fact that he successfully brought the warring tribes of Arabia into a unified people.
Islam is, by its very title, the religion of peace, seeking to bring all nations and peoples into one world-wide brotherhood by a common allegiance to one simple and basic truth — submission to the one and only true God, whose divine will is revealed in the Qur'an.
Islam is closely related to both Judaism and Christianity and claims to be the fulfilment of them both. Muslims assert that Abraham was the very first Muslim, that Jesus was a true prophet in succession to all the Israelite prophets, and that Muhammad was the last of the succession. All Muslims believe in the virgin birth of Jesus; indeed the Qur'an has a lot more to say about the Virgin Mary than the New Testament does.
Moreover, Muhammad taught the Arab people to regard themselves as the descendants of Abraham through his son Ishmael, just as Jews have long seen themselves as the descendants of Abraham through his son Isaac. Thus Islam is actually closer to Judaism than it is to Christianity. A Jewish scholar has put it this way. 'Islam is Judaism transplanted among the Arab people, whereas Christianity is Judaism transformed for the Gentile people'.
It is because of these close connections with Christianity that Islam made deep inroads into Byzantine Christianity. Many Christians converted to Islam, as numbers do even to this day, because Islam is very simple to understand and to practice. It has high ideals for social life and asserts that all people of all nations and of all classes are equal.
This new faith swept out of Arabia like a whirlwind, led by Omar (634–644), the second Caliph or successor to Muhammad, but soon met with resistance. The Byzantine emperor mustered a large army and dispatched it against the Muslims. But he lost the decisive battle which took place in 636 on the Yarmuk river, and by the year 640 the whole of the Holy Land, including Jerusalem and Caesarea, was in Muslim hands. Omar now ruled the whole of Syria and Palestine from his seat of government in Damascus.
Omar lost no time in demonstrating the intense interest which Islam has in the Holy Land. Jerusalem is still the third most holy Muslim spot in the world, next to Mecca and Medina, but at the very beginning of Islam it held the number one slot. Muhammad, following Jewish practice, taught his followers to turn towards Jerusalem when they prayed. Only as late as 623, did Muhammad himself change the qibla (or direction) to Mecca, in disappointment that the Jewish people had not accepted him as the last of their prophets. So when Omar visited the Temple mount in Jerusalem, and found it sadly neglected, he joined his followers in clearing it with his own hands in order to turn it into a sacred place of prayer.
Some fifty years later, in 691, the caliph 'Abd al-Malik erected the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount on the very site where once stood the Temple of Solomon. In late Jewish tradition this site became associated with Abraham and the story of how he almost sacrificed Isaac his son. This Abrahamic tradition influenced Muhammad also. It gave rise to the popular Islamic tradition that it was from this spot that Gabriel took Muhammad on his famous night-journey into heaven, to view for himself all that had been revealed to him in the Qur'an. The Dome of the Rock is the oldest Muslim monument still extant. It is not a mosque but a monument commemorating past holy events. Nearby, and also on the Temple Mount, is the al-Aqsa mosque, built by 'Abd al-Malik's son, al-Walid I (completed ca. 705 ce).
This is how Palestine became incorporated into the Islamic world and how Jerusalem became for Muslims a holy city. During the next 150 years the whole area of the Middle East embraced the Arabic language and became shaped by Islamic culture. The Ummayyad caliph 'Umar II imposed humiliating restrictions on his non-Muslim subjects, particularly the Christians. That is why many Christians in the Holy Land converted to Islam. These conversions to Islam, together with a steady tribal inflow from the desert, changed the religious character of Palestine's inhabitants. The mainly Christian population gradually became predominantly Muslim. Some Christian communities, however, remained steadfast in their allegiance and have survived to the present. During the early years of the Muslim control of the city, a small permanent Jewish population returned to Jerusalem after a 500-year absence.
A significant change came from 750 onwards. The rule of the Ummayyad dynasty from Damascus was replaced by the rule of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad. The next four centuries were to witness the development and flowering of an Islamic civilization which stretched from Spain to India. But the very size of it meant that it could not be wholly ruled from one centre — Baghdad. A new Shi'ite dynasty, known as the Fatimids, rose to power in North Africa, seized Egypt, Palestine and Syria and even threatened Baghdad itself. Once, again, as so often in the past, Palestine became a battlefield and suffered much hardship. The behaviour of the Fatimid ruler was at times erratic and extremely harsh, particularly toward his non-Muslim subjects. He reactivated earlier discriminatory laws imposed upon Christians and Jews and added new ones. In 1009 he even ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Then a new invader came on the scene from the East — the Seljuk Turks. In 1071 the Seljuks captured Jerusalem, and for a while, in spite of great political instability, the Holy Land prospered as pilgrimages to it by Jews, Christians, and Muslims increased. The Fatimids recaptured the city in 1098 only to relinquish it a year later to a new enemy, this time from the West. These were the crusaders from Western Europe, who came at the call of the Pope to rescue the Christian holy sites from the infidel.

The Crusaders

The crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 and on Christmas Day 1100 they established the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Thereafter they expanded their sphere of influence with no effective check occurring until the sultan Saladin arrived to wage a relentless war against them. In 1187 he dealt the crusaders a crushing blow at the decisive battle of Hattin. Most of Palestine was once again Muslim.
Though the period of the Crusades was less than 200 years, it nevertheless left a permanent mark on the Holy Land. There are still Crusader castles dotted round the countryside, some of them, such as Kerak in Jordan and Krak des Chevaliers in Syria are in remarkably good condition. The crusaders built a chain of castles to protect the Holy Land from eastern invasion and they intended their buildings to last.
The crusaders found themselves as the meat in the sandwich between two opposing forces more powerful than themselves. The Turkish-speaking Mamluks had seized power in Egypt and the Mongols suddenly arrived from the East. To make matters worse, there were incessant quarrels among the crusaders themselves. In 1260 the Mamluks defeated the Mongols in a battle waged in Palestine and thereafter harassed the crusaders until the last of them were driven out of Acre in 1291.
That brought another chapter in the history of Palestine to an end. Yet crusader influence remained. The blood of the crusaders still flows in the Christian communities round Bethlehem and Nazareth. H.V. Morton, the very popular travel writer between the two world wars, wrote a best-seller on Palestine in 1934, called In the Steps of the Master. When he visited Bethlehem he said,
Here the Crusaders are still alive. Although they call themselves Christian Arabs, their faces are Flemish and French and perhaps English. The dress of the Bethlehem woman, which is unique, is also a memory of the Crusades. The married women wear a high headdress covered with a flowing veil. It is the headdress worn by princesses in European fairy tales (p. 120).
As we noted in the first article, Palestine was the natural bridge between Africa and Asia. So it was rarely free for very long from invasions, chiefly from the East. After the Crusaders left, Palestine prospered for a while under the Egyptian Mamluks, especially in Jerusalem.
Then came a second wave of Mongols. It made the name of Tamerlane a symbol of destruction and plunder. Although Palestine was largely spared the pillage of his hordes, it could not escape its disastrous repercussions as the Mamluks moved through in a vain attempt to defend Damascus against the invader. Moreover Tamerlane had so weakened Iran that the way was now open for the next wave of Turks from the East — the Ottomans.

The Turks

In 1516, the Ottoman sultan routed the Mamluk armies and Palestine began its four centuries under Ottoman domination. This was the period in which Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566) built the main walls which exist today round the Old City of Jerusalem. It was he who had the Dome of the Rock faced with the glorious blue and turquoise tiles that make it such an attractive sight.

A Melting Pot

This sketch of the history of the Holy Land over the last 1800 years makes it clear just who the Palestinians are. The Palestinians do not have a common ethnic origin or a common religion. What joins them together is simply the fact that they and their ancestors have lived in the land of Palestine from as far back as any of them can record. In their veins run the blood of the ancient Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders and Turks.
It is somewhat ironic to find that if we go back three thousand years we find a very similar phenomenon. As shown in the first article, the people of ancient Israel, far from being of one ethnic stock, resulted chiefly from the fusion of the indigenous Canaanites and the incoming Aramaean tribes, with a sprinkling of other ethnic groups as well. There were pockets left from the retreating Hittite Empire, as the story of Uriah the Hittite so clearly illustrates. And did not Solomon boast of his many foreign wives? In the case both of the ancient Israelites and of the present day Palestinians, it was land possession which gave them their unity.
It must be fully conceded that the Palestinians are a very mixed group of people. Although the Palestinians all speak Arabic that is simply because that has been the language of the whole area from Egypt to Iraq from about the eighth century. Each group of Palestinians traces its ancestry over differing lengths of time. The majority of Palestinians, of course, are Muslim and date their occupation of the land from the Islamic conquest onwards.
But going even much further back are the Samaritans. They claim to be the descendants of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, which established their capital at Samaria. When the Jews returned from the Babylonian Exile there was a century or so in which the returning Jews developed an association with them, just as they did with the Jewish peasantry round Jerusalem, who had never gone into exile. This is shown by the fact that the Samaritan Bible consists simply of the Pentateuch or Five books of Moses, which was at that time the sum-total of the Jewish Holy Scripture. The Samaritans also have synagogues and celebrate the Passover.
But in the fourth century bce a schism developed between the Jews and Samaritans. That is why we read in the New Testament (John 4:9) that 'the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans'. It is this fact that adds poignancy to the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. It is quite strange that this group have been able to retain their identity all through the Roman, Byzantine, Crusader and Muslim periods right down to the present even though they now number only about five hundred. This is partly because they live in semi-isolation, marrying only within their own community. They are mainly to be found at Nablus but also reside just south of Tel Aviv.
A much larger minority group of Palestinians are the Christians. They are chiefly around Bethlehem, Nazareth and in the northern villages. Altogether they may make up about ten per cent of the Palestinian population. Christians of every variety are now there. Some, as we have seen, have the blood of the crusaders in their veins. But the oldest of them trace their ancestry back to the Byzantine period when the whole of Palestine was Christian.
Another interesting minority of Palestinians are the Druzes. These belong to an offshoot of mainline Islam, which formed in the eleventh century. There are about 200,000 altogether and although they are confined to a relatively small geographical area, they now find they are separated from one another by being forced to be citizens of four different countries — Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel. This is simply because the present national boundaries were placed there by western powers after two world wars.
What joins all these disparate groups together is the fact that they are descendants of people who have long inhabited the Holy Land and they now find that they have been dispossessed of the land which they took to be rightfully theirs.

Palestinian Dispersion

When the Jews were at last able to return from their Dispersion to establish the new state of Israel, it should have been something to rejoice in. The sad and painful irony is this: the overcoming of one dispersion was at the expense of causing another — that of the Palestinians. Many wealthy Palestinian merchants from Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem fled to Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, while the middle class tended to move to all-Arab towns such as Nablus and Nazareth. The majority of peasants ended up in refugee camps. More than 350 Arab villages just disappeared, along with all Arab life in Jaffa and along the coast. Before 1947 there were about 1,300,000 non-Jewish Palestinians in Palestine. 150,000 remained in the state of Israel. The West Bank swelled from 400,000 to 700,000. About 190,000 fled to the Gaza Strip. About 300,000 left Palestine altogether, 100,000 going to Lebanon, 100,000 to Jordan, 80,000 to Syria, 8,000 to Egypt, and 4,000 to Iraq.
Since the June war in 1967 the plight of the Palestinians has grown much worse. Natural increase has raised their number to about 3 million. Some remain in forced exile abroad. Some are in refugee camps in Jordan in quite intolerable conditions. Some live within Israel but often complain of being treated as second-class citizens. The majority live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under conditions of occupation by a foreign power. The Palestinians now feel they have been completely dispossessed in the land to which they thought they had a natural right by birth and ancestry.
How did this situation arise? How is it that two peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — are now in competition for possession of the same piece of territory, each believing its rights are both legitimate and strong? Who, if anybody, must bear chief responsibility for this almost insoluble conflict? That is what we shall explore in the next article.[one_half]

Work Cited

Morton, H. V. In the Steps of the Master. London: Rich & Cowan Ltd., 1934.
Lloyd Geering is Foundation Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and the author of several books including Christian Faith at the Crossroads and Tomorrow's God. His new book,Christianity without God, appeared in 2002.

Who Owns the Holy Land?

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Part 3
The British Responsibility
From The Fourth R
Volume 15-3
May–June 2002
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Middle East underwent widespread changes as the European nations were creating their world empires. Between 1798–1801 Napoleon attempted to carve out a Middle Eastern Empire. After conquering Malta and Egypt he turned to Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. Napoleon was repulsed from Acre because the British came to the aid of the Sultan, and after the Battle of the Nile, the way was open for the British to bring the Middle East into its sphere of influence.
From then right up until 1948 the British took an increasing interest in the Holy Land, but that interest displayed an uneasy mixture of both religion and politics. The political interest of Britain was to open up and guard a more direct route to India, and this it advanced with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1875. The religious interest of Britain in the Holy Land arose out of the Evangelical revival, then still gathering momentum in English religious life. This gave rise to all sorts of missionary organisations, such as the Church Missionary Society (1799), and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804).

Preparation for the Second Coming

Of particular interest was the founding, in 1808, of 'The London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews'. It was commonly referred to as 'The Jews' Society'. By 1841 nearly all the English bishops endorsed it. By 1850 it employed 78 missionaries, all working to convert Jews to Christianity.
The Jew's Society encouraged the return of Jews to the Holy Land and had an ulterior motive for doing so. On their interpretation of the Bible this was to be the divinely planned forerunner of the Second Coming of Christ. (Footnote: Many conservative Christians today have, for the same reason, strongly supported the return of the Jews to the modern state of Israel. Christian fundamentalists in America, particularly from the Bible belt, have been giving both financial and moral support to Israel for just that reason.)
The President of the Jew's Society was the well-known philanthropist, the Earl of Shaftesbury, an evangelical Anglican, who, to use his own words, believed that 'The Bible is God's word written from the very first syllable down to the very last'. Shaftesbury not only supported the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, he wanted to make sure that there was a sufficient welcoming body already there when they arrived in order to convert them all to be good Anglicans!
The crowning achievement of the Jews' Society, largely promoted by Shaftesbury, was the creation of an Anglican Bishopric in Jerusalem. They foresaw the ancient kingdom of Israel becoming a diocese of the Church of England. The creation of a bishopric without a diocese was not only unusual but it required a special act of Parliament. Very appropriately, a converted Jew was consecrated as the first Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem and he set off bravely on his mission. A few years later a traveller observed that he had a total congregation of eight converted Jews and two tourists. This early venture was misconceived and quite unsuccessful; yet it was the forerunner of the present Anglican Cathedral and Hospice in Jerusalem, known as St. George's.
The return of the Jews to the Holy Land did not take place as the Jews' Society expected. That was to occur a century later — this time chiefly by Jewish effort. But even that was initiated by Britain through a strange set of circumstances, with which Shaftesbury was indirectly connected.

Proposal for a Jewish Settlement

Another British philanthropist was also interested in the return of the Jews to Palestine but for very different reasons. This was Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), a practising orthodox Jew and an acquaintance of Shaftesbury who later proposed him for a peerage. Between 1827 and 1875 Montefiore made seven journeys to Palestine. He was instrumental in rescuing Jews in Damascus, who had been falsely accused of a ritual murder. He obtained from the Sultan what he called a 'Magna Carta for Jews in Turkish lands'. On his return home he was knighted by Queen Victoria for his exploits. At a subsequent dinner with Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, out of concern for his persecuted fellow-Jews in Poland and Russia, he proposed a scheme for Jewish settlement in Palestine. At the same time Shaftesbury, too, had a word in the ear of Lord Palmerston who was his step-father-in-law.
In 1840 Palmerston wrote a letter to the Sultan in Istanbul suggesting that he encourage the Jews to return and settle in Palestine, since they would bring much wealth into the Sultan's domain and be a check on the evil designs of Mohammad Ali of Egypt, whom the British and the Turks regarded as their common enemy. The Sultan evidently took this suggestion seriously and is even reported to have offered to sell to the Jews the Muslim Dome of the Rock so that they could rebuild their Temple on the historical site!
The idea of a Palestinian home for the Jews was spreading in Britain; it is reflected in the last novel of George Eliot, the leading English novelist of the day. In Daniel Deronda (1876) she portrayed as her leading character a man who eventually discovered he was of Jewish birth and who decided to devote himself to the cause of establishing a home for the Jewish people.

Zionism

While these ideas were surfacing in Britain, the seeds of Zionism were being sown in Eastern Europe. In response to the increasing number of Russian pogroms, a group called 'Lovers of Zion' was formed to promote the re-settlement of Jewish farmers and artisans in Palestine. The earliest of these Zionist agricultural settlements in Palestine took place in 1882.
Then came an event which speeded up the cause. In 1894, a French Jewish army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of giving secrets to the Germans. His trial so impressed Hungarian Jewish lawyer and journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) that in 1896 he issued a pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). He advocated the establishment of an autonomous Jewish state to deal positively with continuing anti-Semitic persecution. 'The Jewish state is essential to the world.' he said, 'Let sovereignty be granted to us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.'
In 1897 Herzl organised the first Zionist Congress at Basle. Herzl has been likened to Moses, a man leading his people to the Promised Land but never able to see the fruits of his labours himself. Actually Herzl burned himself out within a few years. He went to England to see Joseph Chamberlain, head of the Colonial office and regarded as the most powerful man in Britain. Joseph Chamberlain was not really interested in the Jews but he was keen to extend the British Empire. They discussed a possible home for the Jews, including even Sinai and East Africa.
Herzl did not find his mission all plain sailing. Many of his fellow-Jews were strongly opposed to political Zionism. The Reform section of Jewry, then strong in Western Europe, completely rejected it. The Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, attended the conference at Basle but later became critical of political Zionism. Although he ended his days in Israel he became unpopular with many Israelis because of his insistence on open dialogue with the Palestinians with a view to creating a shared state.
Most interesting of all was the response of a young Hasidic Jew from the Ukraine called Asher Ginzberg (1856–1927). He joined the 'Lovers of Zion' movement at the age of 22 and became known thereafter by his pen name, Ahad Ha'am ('one of the people'). In 1889 he published his first essay, 'Lo ze ha-derekh' ('This Is Not the Way'), where he outlined a spiritual basis for Zionism. He called for a renaissance of Hebrew-language culture, which came to be known as 'cultural Zionism'. He did support the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, but mainly as a centre for the Jewish life of the Diaspora. He believed that the goal of re-creating Jewish nationhood required spiritual rebirth rather than political pressure. So in 1897 he severely criticised the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl, believing that a Jewish state should be the end result of a Jewish spiritual renaissance rather than the beginning. It was due to his efforts that the Hebrew University was founded in Jerusalem in 1927, some twenty years before the State of Israel.

Calls for a Jewish State

The way for an eventual Jewish State was opened up by World War I, when Palestine once again became the scene of fierce battles. Jerusalem was captured by Allied forces under General Allenby in December 1917 and the whole was occupied by the British by October 1918.
While this was taking place the Allies were already making decisions concerning the future of Palestine without much regard to the wishes of its normal inhabitants. By May 1916 Britain, France, and Russia had agreed that Palestine should be internationalised. To make matters worse, Britain made two independent promises which were in conflict. It is this which lies at the root of the present hostility between Jews and Palestinians.
In an exchange of letters with the Emir of Mecca in 1915–1916 the British made a commitment to grant independence to the Arabs (including those in Palestine) in return for their support against the Ottomans. But in November 1917 Earl Balfour, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, wrote to the Jewish financier, Lord Rothschild. His letter expressed sympathy for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, on the understanding that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' Unfortunately Balfour had little knowledge of the nature and number of the 'existing non-Jewish communities' and thought Palestine was virtually unpopulated.
This letter is now known as the Balfour Declaration. It was not prompted by any great stirring of conscience over the bitter fate of the Jewish people; rather, it was intended to encourage American Jews to influence the U.S. government to support British post-war policies.
The Balfour Declaration was made public by the Zionist leaders in London. It actually fell short of the Zionists' expectations; they had asked for the reconstitution of Palestine as the Jewish national home, but the Declaration specifically stipulated that nothing was to be done to infringe the rights of the existing inhabitants.

Arab Conflict with Zionism

Up until World War I Muslim, Christian and Jew lived in complete harmony in the Holy Land. Within the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem each had their own quarter, and each had their own holy places and respected those of the others. Even the Russian migrants had been accepted in the 1880's without any protest. The decision made by the Western conquerors undermined that harmony.
In February 1919 a Palestinian Arab conference, which united both Muslim and Christian associations, passed a resolution rejecting the Balfour Declaration.
At the peace conference in 1920, the Allies divided up the territories formerly ruled by the Turks. Syria and Lebanon were mandated to France, and Palestine was mandated to Britain. The Balfour Declaration was endorsed by the Allied powers, though Britain was still expected to secure international sanction for their occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs spoke of 1920 as an an-nakba, or 'year of catastrophe'.
Arab disappointment led in 1920 to anti-Zionist riots in the Old City of Jerusalem, resulting in many casualties among both Jews and Arabs. The British replaced the military administration with a civilian administration, appointing as the first high commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel, a Zionist. The new administration proceeded with the implementation of the Balfour Declaration, announcing in August a quota of 16,500 Jewish immigrants for the first year.
The Palestinians became even more alarmed when land purchased by the Jewish National Fund led to the eviction of Arab peasants. In 1921, anti-Zionist riots, in which many Jews and Arabs were killed and wounded, broke out in Jaffa. An Arab delegation of notables visited London, demanding that the Balfour Declaration be repudiated and proposing the creation of a national government with a parliament democratically elected by the country's Muslims, Christians, and Jews. If that had been done the future of the Holy Land would have been very different.
The British government rejected it but, alarmed by the extent of Arab opposition, issued a White Paper declaring that Britain did 'not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but only that such a Home should be founded in Palestine'. It further decreed that immigration should not exceed the economic capacity of the country to absorb it.
In 1922 the League of Nations, in approving the British mandate, incorporated the Balfour Declaration into its preamble and stressed the historical connection of the Jews with Palestine. Palestine thus became a distinct political entity for the first time in centuries and yet it created problems for Palestinian Arabs and Zionists alike. It was much less than the Zionists wanted and it was much more than the Palestinians were willing to concede.
The British rule of Palestine was very efficient; it developed public works, laid water pipelines, expanded ports, extended railway lines, and supplied electricity. But it failed to solve the growing tension between Jew and Palestinian. Indeed, Britain itself was strangely ambivalent. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation remained in London, close to the ear of the British government, which tended to side with the Zionists. British local authorities in Palestine, however, being more aware of local conditions, sympathised with the Palestinian Arabs.
Aware of this uncertainty, the Jewish community in Palestine, led by David Ben-Gurion, set up in self-defence its own military organisation called the Haganah. An even more militant group of Jews formed a unit called the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which did not hesitate to use force against the Arabs. Violence broke out from time to time, particularly in 1929, when a dispute concerning religious practices at the Western Wall flared up. There were violent clashes in Jerusalem, Zefat, and Hebron, where the killed and wounded on both sides ran into the hundreds.
Britain set up a royal commission to study the situation. It was finally acknowledged that Britain's specific obligations to the Zionists under the Balfour Declaration clashed with its general obligations to the Arabs. As a result, the White Paper of 1930 gave some priority to Britain's obligations to the Arabs and called for a halt to Jewish immigration. But when the Palestinian Jews and London Zionists protested, the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, nullified the White Paper. This convinced the Arabs that recommendations in their favour made in Palestine could too easily be annulled by Zionists in London.
The Nazi rise to power in Germany in 1933, followed by its widespread persecution of Jews, made the establishment of a Jewish national home a necessity. It gave a great impetus to Jewish immigration to Palestine, which jumped to 30,000 in 1933, 42,000 in 1934, and 61,000 in 1935. By 1936 the Jewish population of Palestine had reached almost 400,000, or 30 percent of the total. This new wave of immigration provoked major acts of Arab violence against both Jews and the British.
The violent Arab Revolt of 1936–39 began with a general strike in Jaffa and Nablus. The British were taken aback by the intensity of the revolt and shipped more than 20,000 troops into Palestine. By 1939 the Zionists themselves had armed more than 15,000 Jews in their own militia. According to some estimates, more than 5,000 Arabs were killed, 15,000 wounded, and 5,600 imprisoned. The traditional Arab leaders were either killed, or deported, leaving the rest dispirited. The Zionists, on the other hand, were united behind Ben-Gurion, and co-operated with British forces in their attacks against Arabs.
A further British Royal Commission, presided over by Lord Robert Peel, declared the mandate to be unworkable since Britain's obligations to both Arabs and Jews were mutually irreconcilable. The White Paper recommended that Palestine be partitioned and that an independent Jewish national home should be established; it was opposed by both the Zionists and the Arabs. The Zionists were enraged because they were being allotted only a part of Palestine, even though it was immensely larger than their present land-holdings. The Arabs not only objected to the loss of their land but were horrified to hear there would be an enforced transfer of Arab population to Transjordan.

British Conflict with Zionism

Britain had long lost the trust of the Arabs. When World War II intervened, Britain came into conflict with Zionism also. The Zionists sought an immediate increase of Jewish immigration to Palestine, while the British sought to prevent it, regarding it as illegal and a threat to the stability of a region.
Ben-Gurion declared on behalf of the Jewish Agency: 'We shall fight with Great Britain in this war as if there was no White Paper and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war'. British attempts to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine in the face of the terrible tragedy befalling European Jewry led to the disastrous sinking of two ships carrying Jewish refugees, the Patria (November 1940) and the Struma (February 1942). In retaliation, the Irgun, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, and a small terrorist splinter group, known as the Stern Gang, embarked on widespread terrorist attacks on the British, culminating in the assassination of Lord Moyne, British minister of state in Cairo, in November 1944.
The neighbouring Arab countries then began to take a more active interest in Palestine. In October 1944 Arab heads of state met in Egypt, and set out the Arab position in the Alexandria Protocol. They made it clear that, although they regretted the bitter fate suffered by European Jewry as a result of European dictatorships, the Jewish problem could not be solved by inflicting injustice on Palestinian Arabs. The Arab League, formed in March 1945, re-asserted the Arab character of Palestine, and declared a boycott of Zionist goods. The pattern of the post-war struggle for Palestine was now beginning to emerge.
The Holocaust had confirmed for the Jews that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was absolutely essential. Having lost the support of Britain, Zionists turned to the United States. Already in May 1942, at a Zionist conference in New York City, Ben-Gurion gained American support for the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth, with unrestricted immigration and its own army to protect it. An increasing number of pro-Zionist statements came from United States politicians. In August 1945 President Harry Truman requested the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to facilitate the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors into Palestine.
Truman's request marked an important dividing line. From this time onwards USA increasingly took over the role previously played by Britain in determining the destiny of Palestine. The two powers had very different agendas. The primary goal of British policy was to secure British strategic interests in the Middle East, and for this the co-operation of the Arab states was considered essential. Truman, on the other hand, presided over a country which had the largest concentration of Jews to be found anywhere in the world. He was determined to listen to them and ensure that all Jews displaced by the war were permitted to enter Palestine.
Jewish immigration to Palestine was the major issue between 1945 and 1948. The Jews were determined to remove all restrictions to Jewish immigration and to establish a Jewish state; the Arabs were just as determined that no more Jews should arrive and that Palestine should become an independent Arab state. Zionist pressure against British authority in Palestine was intensified, first by unauthorised immigration of refugees on a grand scale and, secondly, through acts of terrorism by Jewish underground forces. It reached a culmination in July 1946, when the Stern Gang blew up a part of the King David Hotel containing British government and military offices, with the loss of 91 lives.

UN Recommends Partition

World War II had left Britain victorious but exhausted. The British had no will to remain any longer in the Middle East and they referred the Palestine question to the United Nations. The UN recommended the partition of the country into an Arab state and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem and its environs to be declared an international city. At that stage Arabs still outnumbered Jews by two to one, for there were 1,269,000 Arabs and 678,000 Jews then in Palestine.
In 1947 the UN plan for partitioning Palestine was adopted by a two-thirds majority but all the Islamic Asian countries voted against it. The competence of the General Assembly to partition a country against the wishes of the majority of its inhabitants was then referred to the International Court of Justice, but the appeal was narrowly defeated.
The Zionists welcomed the partition proposal, both because it recognised a Jewish state and also because it allotted 55 percent of Palestine to Israel. The Arabs fiercely opposed it, both in principle, and because a substantial minority of the population of the Jewish state would be Arab. Britain was unwilling to implement a policy that was not acceptable to both sides. So it set May 15, 1948, as the date for ending the mandate.
By January 1948 volunteers were arriving from the Arab countries to help the Palestinian Arabs, but they were soon overwhelmed by the Zionist forces. Confusion and disorder broke out. Many atrocities were committed on both sides. By May 13 the Zionist forces had secured full control of the Jewish share of Palestine and had already captured important positions in the areas allotted to the Arabs.

State of Israel Proclaimed

On May 14, the Union Jack was lowered in Jerusalem, and the British high commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, sailed from Haifa at 11.30 p.m. that night. But already at 4 p.m. that day, Ben Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel. Within 24 hours the United States recognised Israel as a legitimate state and the Soviet Union quickly followed suit.
On the following day, troops of the Transjord-anian army, the Arab Legion, and their counterparts from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq entered the country and occupied all the areas which were not yet controlled by the Jews. The new State of Israel came to birth amid ethnic conflict and spent the first six months of its existence at war with its neighbours, in what is now called the War of Independence.
What happened thereafter will be discussed in the final article. Here we have been showing the British responsibility for the present instability in the Holy Land. It is in the thirty-year period of the British rule of Palestine, 1918–1948, that we find the sources not only of the continuing conflict between Israeli and Palestinian but also for the growing confrontation between the Western world and the Islamic world.
The Western Powers have dominated world affairs for so long that they have rendered themselves blind to the way they are perceived in the Islamic world. Until World War II it was Britain that was the dominant power. Then that role was taken over by the USA. The power of the West has been secretly admired, and even coveted, but it has also fuelled resentment, distrust and hatred.
It is altogether too superficial to believe that world security will be restored by the elimination of Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network. We in the West need to understand what lies behind such shocking acts of terrorism. They are only the symptoms of something much more deep-seated. Indeed, we do well to listen to what Bin Laden himself said, 'There can be no peace between the Islamic world and the Western world until the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is healed'. The British failed to do that. Can the United States now do better?
Lloyd Geering is Foundation Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and the author of several books including Christian Faith at the Crossroads and Tomorrow's God. His new book,Christianity without God, appeared in 2002.

Who Owns the Holy Land?

Home/Resources/The Fourth R/Who Owns the Holy Land?



Part 4
Who Solves the Conflict?
From The Fourth R
Volume 15-4
July–August 2002
In 1998 Israel celebrated fifty years of statehood. Jewish aspirations had come a long way since 1897 when Herzl called the first Zionist Conference. There were great celebrations throughout Israel but they were tempered by a strong cautionary undertone indicating that conditions were far from happy. The Palestinians in the occupied territories declared it 'a year of catastrophe' and Israelis were acutely aware of their insecurity.
The State of Israel came to birth in 1948 in the midst of armed conflict. When the War of Independence broke out, the United Nations appointed Count Folke Bernadotte to mediate between Israel and the Arab states. After arranging two very brief cease-fires, he was assassinated by Jewish terrorists. No truce was observed faithfully by either side until July 1949, when the UN mediator secured separate armistice agreements between Israel and each of Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria.

Uncertain Armistice

For the next twenty years Israel lived in the state of an uncertain armistice with its Arab neighbors. The UN supplied a peace-keeping force to watch over the danger spots at the no-man's land separating Israel from Arab territory. This narrowed down to only a few yards at the point where the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem met the new Jewish city of West Jerusalem.
Israel then had sovereignty over about four-fifths of Palestine, which was significantly more than had been intended in the original partition plan. Egypt controlled the Gaza strip, largely populated by Palestinian refugees. The West Bank, including the Old City of Jerusalem, was taken over by Transjordan, which had become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Palestine, as such, had disappeared.
The new state of Israel received world-wide moral support. The grim discovery of the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II led to widespread sympathy with the Jewish people. Soon after 1948 Israel was recognised by more than fifty governments and it had joined the United Nations.
But Israel remained a little island amid a sea of large, hostile Arab nations. After 1948 the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, quite openly declared it was their aim to destroy the state of Israel, drive the Jewish immigrants into the Mediterranean sea, and regain the land unlawfully taken from them.

The Plight of the Palestinians

The Palestinian Arab-speaking community, now widely dispersed and quite demoralized, just ceased to exist as a social entity. About one-eighth of it remained in Israel as Israeli citizens. Although Israel had agreed, under UN pressure, to 'uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex', this was far from what took place. Palestinian land was confiscated and the owners were forced to abandon agriculture and become unskilled wage labourers. Some three hundred villages were razed to the ground. Archival evidence (only recently released) has shown that David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), the first Prime Minister of Israel, was particularly anti-Arab and believed all Arabs should migrate to the Arab countries. Over the first few years many thousands of Palestinians were forcibly transported to the borders.
For West Bank Palestinians it was different. About two-thirds of all Palestinians became Jordanian citizens. However, tensions soon developed between the original Jordanian citizens and the better-educated, more skilled Palestinian newcomers.
For the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip it was worst of all. The Gaza Strip, which is only twenty-five miles long and four to five miles wide, became one of the most densely populated areas of the world. During 1948–1967 it was little more than a reservation for refugees, under Egyptian control, which was brutal and repressive. Poverty, unemployment and social misery became characteristic of life in the region.
In 1949 the UN established a total of fifty-three refugee camps in Jordan, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Syria, in order to shelter the 650,000 Palestinian refugees. Initially the refugees lived in tents, often several families to a tent. It was ten years before these were replaced by small houses of concrete blocks with iron roofs. Conditions were extremely harsh because of the extreme temperatures in winter and summer. Many camps are still there after fifty years and most people living in them have known no other life.

The Armistice Breaks

The uneasy armistice between Israel and its Arab neighbors was too fragile to last indefinitely. It broke in 1956 when President Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. This so directly challenged Franco-British interests, that France hatched a secret plot with Britain and Israel. Israel was encouraged to attack Egypt and then France and Britain would intervene on the pretext of keeping the peace. The plot went badly astray; the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign and Nasser was left stronger than ever.
In early 1967 the Syrian bombardments of Israeli villages from the Golan Heights began to intensify. When Israel shot down six Syrian MiG planes in reprisal, it quickly found itself at war with Syria, Egypt and Jordan. Israel so quickly overcame the combined forces of all three Arab states with its air force, that it was all over in six days, leaving Israel in complete command of the Old City of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.
Israel's victory gave rise to a further displacement of Palestinians, with more than 250,000 people fleeing to the East Bank of Jordan. But about 600,000 Palestinians remained in the West Bank and 300,000 in Gaza. That is how Israel, with 3,000,000 Jews found itself in possession of the whole of the Holy Land at last, but there were now 1,200,000 Palestinians, living under Israeli rule.
Further sporadic fighting led once again into a full-scale war in 1973. On October 6, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Israel was attacked by Egypt across the Suez Canal and by Syria on the Golan Heights. Although the Israeli army this time suffered heavy casualties, it nevertheless pushed its way further into Syrian territory and even established a bridgehead west of the Suez Canal.
Within a space of twenty-five years Israel had advanced by stages from a precarious foothold to the occupation of the whole of the former Palestine. In 1980, it unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem, including the Old City, to form one permanently united Jerusalem. Six months later Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights, thus making this Syrian land a permanent possession of Israel. Since then, Israel has increased its presence in the so-called occupied territories by establishing more than one hundred fifty new Jewish settlements. This process became known as the 'creeping transfer' of Jews to the West Bank.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Jewish philosopher in Israel, before he died a few years ago at the age of ninety-one, warned that the continued occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank would eventually spell the end of the State of Israel. He greatly angered his fellow-Israelis by referring to them as 'Judeo-Nazis' and said, 'Who will want to be known as a Jew in 100 years, unless we stop doing to another people what was done to us?'

Palestinian Liberation Movements

So what was happening to this other people? Golda Meir had said there was no such people as the Palestinians. It is quite ironic that the dispersion of the inhabitants of Palestine, caused by the creation of the state of Israel, has had the long term effect of welding the Palestinians into a people, a people who now refuse to be set aside and ignored. This happened very slowly. At first they were quite demoralized, being scattered into three main groups: those who, in 1948, had remained to be citizens of Israel, those in the occupied territories, and those who lived in other lands, in what they thought was temporary exile.
Out of this dispersion situation there began to emerge something like a Palestinian consciousness, from which a new nation was struggling to be born. First the Palestinians formed a secret organization known as Fatah (The Palestine National Liberation Movement). They began the training of guerrilla units to carry out raids on Israel. In 1964 an Arab summit meeting in Cairo established a public movement known as the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). This soon claimed to be the sole representative of all Palestinian people. Among the principles of its charter were the right of all Palestinians to an independent state, the total liberation of Palestine, the return of the refugees to their homeland, and, as a necessary precursor, the destruction of the State of Israel.
In 1969 Yasir 'Arafat, the leader of Fatah, became chairman of the PLO and has remained the titular head of the Palestinian people ever since. As the aim of the PLO has been the total liberation of Palestine, they recognized that this could be achieved only through armed struggle. To this end guerrilla warfare (later turning into terrorism) became a key component in the Palestinian struggle against Israel.

The Roots of Terrorism

Since September 11 the whole world has suddenly become acutely aware of terrorism and this now global phenomenon has rightly come under universal condemnation. But there has been too little understanding of what gives rise to terrorism, whether in Ireland, Palestine or New York. At the root of the more serious acts of terrorism are three main ingredients:
  • There is a long-term grievance in which people believe they have moral right on their side.
  • These people find themselves to be relatively powerless in the face of an overpowering enemy.
  • They find that the world at large, including even the UN, either ignores their grievance or is unable to do anything effective about it.
Under such conditions patience becomes ex-hasted. Terrorism and sabotage are seen as the only measures which will ever achieve any change. This does nothing at all to justify terrorism morally, but it does help us to understand it psychologically. The only long-term method of dealing with terrorism, therefore, is to go to the root cause — the original grievance.
The long-term grievance of the Palestinians is that, in the West Bank and Gaza, for over thirty-five years they have been forced to live in a state of subjection to their Israeli conquerors in what is their own land, and the world has done nothing for them. Possessing very few arms they were quite powerless against the well-equipped army and air force of Israel, which is backed by the United States, the most powerful nation on earth.
The more moderate Palestinians claimed that, while they hoped to dismantle the Jewish state of Israel and purge Palestine of Zionism, they also sought to establish a non-sectarian state in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims could live in equality. But most Israelis have viewed the PLO simply as a terrorist organisation, committed to destroying not only the Zionist state but also Israeli Jews. The very long period in which Jews have suffered anti-semitic persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, only serves to confirm their belief that the Palestinians are simply one more anti-semitic enemy, which they must resist absolutely.
The guerrilla tactics employed by the PLO soon got them into trouble with their own fellow-Arabs in Jordan. In September 1970 it erupted into a brief but bloody civil war, which became known as 'Black September'. In 1971 the Jordanian army crushed the Palestinian military and forced them to go to Lebanon. From there, Palestinian guerrillas carried out attacks on Israel. Israel countered with raids into southern Lebanon.

Israeli-Egyptian Peace

The first real step towards peace came from Egypt. In 1977 President Sadat made an historic and courageous visit to Jerusalem to present his peace plan before the Knesset (or Israeli Parliament). This enabled the U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt in 1979. Under the Camp David Accords Israel and Egypt signed a treaty that formally ended the state of war that had existed between them for thirty years. Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, and Egypt recognized Israel's right to exist. President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin of Israel were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. While Sadat's popularity rose in the West, it fell dramatically in the Arab world. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League. Then Sadat was assassinated by Muslim extremists while reviewing a military parade in October 1981.

Israeli-Palestinian Tensions Increase

The 1980's were fully taken up with increased tension between Israelis and Palestinians in Lebanon. Israeli jets bombed Beirut and southern Lebanon, where the PLO had a number of strongholds. This led to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a drawn-out civil war in Lebanon, and the brutal massacre of some 18,000 Palestinians.
It is little wonder that hardening Palestinian feeling led to the first intifada (or uprising) in the occupied territories in December 1987. A whole generation of Palestinian youth had grown up under Israeli occupation, for some seventy percent of Palestinians were under twenty-five years of age. Their political status was uncertain, their civil rights minimal, and their economic status low. The growth of Palestinian population by natural increase now constitutes a demographic time-bomb. The total number of Palestinians throughout the world is currently estimated to be about four and a half million.
The intifada took the form of a mass popular protest with most shops closing. Israel responded with university closings, arrests, and deportations. Large-scale riots and demonstrations broke out in the Gaza Strip. This first intifada lasted until 1993 and during that time over 1,400 Palestinians were killed, and some 16,000 imprisoned. It caused a new and more militant group to emerge, known as Hamas; this is an underground armed wing of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which rejects any accommodation with Israel.

Renewed Efforts for Peace

In 1989 the PLO proclaimed the 'State of Palestine', and its governing body, the Palestine National Council, regarded itself as a kind of government-in-exile of the new quasi-state, with Yasir 'Arafat as president. Although this declaration was largely rhetoric with no substance to it, within a short time twenty-five nations, including the Soviet Union, but excluding the United States and Israel, had extended recognition to the government-in-exile.
Of much more importance was the PLO's acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist. It officially condemned terrorism as a deliberate policy, abandoned its long-standing goal of destroying Israel and accepted the goal of separate Israeli and Palestinian states. This was a tremendous step forward for which they have received little credit from Israel, partly because there is so little trust between the two sides and partly because Israel does not want a Palestinian state, believing an independent Palestinian state would constitute too much of a danger.
A change of Israeli government in 1992 led to the signing in Washington, by both PLO and Israel, of the historic 'Declaration of Principles'. Prominent among the Palestinian negotiators was Hanan Ashrawi, daughter of one of the founders of the PLO. She grew up in an Anglican family and earned a doctorate in English literature in USA. She became a Professor at the Palestinian University of Ramallah, and frequently appears on television programs. She convincingly articulates the new spirit of Palestinian pragmatism and is much more able than Yasir 'Arafat; but, being a woman in Arab society, she has not been universally accepted as the natural leader that she is.
The new Principles included mutual recognition and a plan by which some functions of government would be progressively handed over to a Palestinian Council in various West Bank towns and Gaza. Here the Palestinian Authority (PA) has assumed local control of education and culture, social welfare, health, tourism, and taxation. Internal security for these areas rests with the Palestinian police. For this significant advance, Peres, Rabin and 'Arafat were jointly awarded the Noble Prize for Peace in 1994. But in 1995 Rabin paid for it with his life, being assassinated by a Jewish zealot. There have been fanatics and terrorists on both sides.
The peace process initiated by Shimon Peres was known by the slogan 'Land for Peace', since security from further acts of terrorism was all that the Palestinians had to offer in return for land possession. The process received a setback when, in 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, the newly elected right-wing Prime Minister of Israel, made clear what he intended for Palestinian independence. There was to be no Palestinian state and the present borders of Israel were not to be pulled back. Indeed the maps now appearing in Israel no longer show the West Bank as 'occupied' territory but as 'disputed' land within Israel.
The quest for peace began to look decidedly more promising when Ehud Barak became Prime Minister in a landslide victory in 1999. Barak was elected on a platform that promised a clear peace with Israel's neighbors, primarily the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon. He met Yasir 'Arafat in Oslo on November 2, this marking the fourth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. An ambitious but rather tight programme was intended to bring the peace process to a speedy conclusion.
By May 2000 Barak had withdrawn all Israeli troops from Southern Lebanon. He planned to make peace with Syria by handing back most of the Golan. Barak was prepared to offer Palestinians autonomy over more of the occupied territories than any leader before him, and also to dismantle most of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Barak had promised his people they would have a referendum and he believed he could carry a solid majority of the Israeli public with him if, by his negotiations, he could offer Israel a permanent peace.
Then things began to go badly wrong. Israel be-came deeply divided about the Golan and the dismantling of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Barak's popularity declined rapidly in the opinion polls. Finally, 'Arafat disappointed him and many others by refusing to sign the agreement; he knew he could never get the Palestinian Authority to accept such a reduction of its aims. Barak, who had staked his prime ministership on the deal, was already losing so much Israeli support that he could never have won the promised referendum. The peace process then ground to a halt.

The Peace Process in Reverse

Not surprisingly a second intifada was declared. This was triggered off by Ariel Sharon. Already well-known to both Jew and Arab as an impulsive, uncontrollable and dogmatic man, he made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Sharon leads the Likud Party, whose Manifesto asserts that the State of Israel has an eternal and indisputable claim to sovereignty over all the land West of the Jordan. It opposes the granting of any concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for peace. Shortly afterwards Sharon was elected Prime Minister; the peace process went into reverse.
More recently a series of terrorist acts by suicide bombers has intensified the tension. Sharon's heavy-handed response of invading Palestinian towns and wreaking destruction has been counter-productive. First, it simply increases the supply of suicide bombers, who in their desperation believe, however irrationally, they have nothing to lose. Secondly, it is now causing Jewish voices from abroad to express strong criticism of Sharon. Thirdly, it is causing Israeli reserve army officers to revolt. David Zonshein, a decorated officer and grandson of Holocaust survivors, said, 'As a Jew I cannot do the kind of things expected of me on reserve duty. I will never again bust into a Palestinian home and interrogate and humiliate a father in front of his children'. Fourthly, it is so unifying the Arab nations that they have even brought Saddam Hussein in from the cold.

Resolving the Conflict?

The gap between Israeli and Palestinian expectations is so great, it is difficult to see how any compromise can ever be reached. The Israelis want to retain military control over the whole of the Holy Land, refuse to see Jerusalem again divided, do not welcome an independent Palestinian state, are opposed to the return of Palestinian refugees and do not wish to dismantle the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinians want a completely independent Palestinian state, want East Jerusalem returned as their capital, want all Jewish settlements in the occupied territories disbanded and want free entry for the return of Palestinian refugees and exiles.
Who can resolve this conflict? Extremists on both sides make it impossible to reach a compromise. The British tried and failed. The UN then took over and should even now be the chief mediator, but its role has been increasingly usurped by USA. The USA cannot effectively mediate while it continues to be seen by the Palestinians as Israel's big and powerful brother, particularly as both Israel and USA have persistently ignored UN directives. Yet failure to heal the conflict in the Holy Land has the potential to escalate into a wider and even more serious international conflict.
Samuel Huntington, director of the Harvard Institute of Strategic Studies, warned of this in 1996 when he said that the patronising superiority of the West is bringing us into a clash of civilisations. He referred to what he called the major fault lines in the earth's 'civilisation plates', two of which are the Islamic world and the western world.
In the nineteenth century it was the European empires which dominated the globe, none more so than the British. The twentieth century ended with the United States dominating the globe. In both cases the Islamic world developed resentment against the chauvinistic arrogance of the West.
This resentment gave rise to several reactionary movements, the most common of which is simply referred to today as Muslim fundamentalists. In their eyes the only adequate response to a dominating global superpower, such as USA, is a global jihad.
As we move into the twenty-first century, within a process of rapid globalization, the Western world has to learn the hard lesson that though domination by force may quell violence, it does not bring peace. That point was made more than two and a half thousand years ago by a prophetic voice which came out of Jerusalem. Jeremiah the prophet proclaimed, 'They are saying peace, peace, when there is no peace'. It is not for nothing that the Holy Land is regarded as the religious centre of the world by nearly half of humankind. Jerusalem remains to this day a powerful symbol. In many ways it is a microcosm of the world at large, and of the international tensions within it. In particular, there runs through this city the major fault line between two of the earth's 'civilisation plates', Islam and the 'Christian' West. When we have found a way of establishing peace in the Holy Land we shall have some chance of creating a stable global peace.
Lloyd Geering is Foundation Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and the author of several books including Christian Faith at the Crossroads and Tomorrow's God. His new book,Christianity without God, appeared in 2002.
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