A Brief History of Palestine

• The area we now call Israel or Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century until the British assumed control after the Ottoman’s defeat in World War I.
• After World War I the British supported “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
• In the years leading up to World War II many European jews moved to Palestine to escape pogroms in Russia and Nazi Germany.
• Because many Palestinians failed to register their property with the Ottoman Empire they were forcefully displaced by the jewish immigrants.
• After World War II the United Nations approved a plan to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The neighboring Arab countries opposed the UN plan.
• The Arab countries attacked the newly created Jewish state in 1948. The Arabs lost the war and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced and were settled in refugee camps in the Arab-controlled West Bank and Gaza.
• The Arab countries attacked again in 1973, were again defeated and Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza.
• A failure of leadership by both Israeli and Arab governments has prevented a solution to the problem of millions of displaced Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
• Iran and the fundamentalist muslim militias it funds will only be satisfied by the destruction of Israel.
• Israel is afraid that a Palestinian state on its borders would become a staging ground for Iran to launch an attack.
• The Israeli-Palestinian wars will continue until Iran’s influence in the region is curtailed and more rational Arab states are able to make peace with Israel.
• There is a popular belief among American christian fundamentalists that the modern state of Israel is the Israel of the Bible. This makes it difficult for the United States to act impartially in the region.