{"id":3611,"date":"2023-11-30T08:58:48","date_gmt":"2023-11-30T13:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/?p=3611"},"modified":"2023-11-30T08:58:49","modified_gmt":"2023-11-30T13:58:49","slug":"the-history-of-palestine-and-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/the-history-of-palestine-and-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"The History Of Palestine and Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Ayah Hassan, Staff Writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By now all of us have probably heard about recent occurrences in Palestine and Israel. Since most of us are \u201cGen-Zers,\u201d we\u2019ve likely only heard about recent events displayed on social media or communicated by our peers. But to fully understand what’s happening, it\u2019s important to learn the history that got them where they are today. \u201cThe biggest misconception is that this all started on October 7th,\u201d Sami Elzaharna, a Palestinian-American Muslim scholar, relays. This issue dates back over 75 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Up until the late 1800s, although a majority of the population in Palestine was Muslim, people of all religions occupied the country and were free to do so. During the early 1900s, a movement called Zionism developed that culminated in a big meeting called the first Zionist Congress. In this meeting, Zionists from around the world, many coming from Eastern Europe and Russia, came together to discuss a plan to establish a home state for the Jewish people, as they were being persecuted in Europe. Benjamin E Sax, a Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, explains that \u201cthe people who called themselves Zionists during the first Zionist Congress saw [Zionism] as a national liberation movement. It should be included that most Jews were not Zionists in the beginning; they were not interested in a political movement. The precariousness of the situation in Europe obviously brought more people to Zionism. But Zionism just seemed problematic to a lot of religious Jews.\u201d It is important to note that although Zionism was a Jewish liberation movement \u201cnot all Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists,\u201d explains Elzaharna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 At the end of World War I, the Balfour Declaration was created by the foreign minister of Great Britain. The Declaration stated that \u201cHis Majesty\u2019s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While many Jews had come to Palestine since the 19th century, because of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust in Europe, people began entering Palestine in large masses. Britain also began raising taxes on farm land in Palestine, and creating new rules, making it extremely difficult for Palestinians to afford to maintain an adequate lifestyle. This angered the Palestinians, resulting in a failed revolution against the Zionists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the United Nations database, \u201cIn May of 1948, Great Britain terminated the Mandate over Palestine, and Israel declared independence<\/a> on the 15th of May. Territorial expansion using force resulted in the first large-scale exodus of Palestinian refugees (i.e. 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, leaving fewer than 150,000 Palestinians within Israeli controlled territory). The 15th of May became an official day to mark the Palestinian<\/em> Nakba<\/em> (catastrophe).\u201d The naming of this day itself reflects the divide between Israel and Palestine, as Israelis call it their independence day and Palestinians refer to it as a catastrophe. Elzaharna relates that after that point, the Palestinians \u201csettled in either refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, or other Arab countries, mainly Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After 1948, the only land under Palestinian control was the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which is 20% of the total land they previously occupied. By 1967, a six-day war had erupted between Israel and a coalition of Egypt, Syria and Jordan which led to Israel\u2019s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula (UN Database). Gaza\u2019s occupation continued until 2005.  Elzaharna recalls \u201cwhen I used to visit Gaza when I was a child, Israel had settlements. You would see the Israeli tanks, you would know where the Israeli towns are within the Gaza Strip. But in 2005 they left. And instead of having settlements inside the Gaza Strip, they blocked it off from the outside. When people say 17 years of blockade, that’s what they’re referring to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although there has been conflict for years between Palestine and Israel, \u201cwhat has happened in the recent weeks is unprecedented,\u201d states Elzaharna. According to AlJazeera News, the purported death toll as of November 29th in Israel stands at over 1,200 in Israel and more than 15,000 in Palestine, surpassing the death toll of that on the 15th of May, 1948; nearly half of them reportedly being children. \u201cIn the densely populated Gaza Strip, home to more than 2 million people, airstrikes have forced about 1.5 million people to flee their homes\ufeff, according to UN figures\u201d (CNN).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sax points out that what\u2019s happening in the region \u201cis not a religious conflict.  Religion plays a role in it, but religion isn\u2019t what motivates it, religion isn’t what caused it.\u201d Some feel like everything would be solved if we took religion out of the equation. \u201cIf religion went away, it actually wouldn\u2019t change much of the political conditions because these are the same political conditions you see all over the world, whether there\u2019s religion or no religion. When there\u2019s oppression and when there are some people with more rights than others, it\u2019s not religion that motivates. Religions gets used later to justify.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we may see as recent occurrences is actually decades worth of conflict.  As we hear about events unfolding through different sources, Sax notes that \u201cyou can\u2019t be a passive reader; each person has to develop a sense of critical inquiry.\u201d Sax ended by saying that \u201cthe one thing I would want to say is that there\u2019s so much emotion involved in this conflict because everyone imagines themselves in some capacity related to it. I think what happens is when you start to interpret someone\u2019s suffering for them, or to de-value it or explain it in a way or to justify it, it puts them on edge and it makes them feel \u2018othered\u2019; it makes them feel unsafe.\u201d Sax\u2019s hope is that \u201cwhen people are thinking and talking about the conflict, they have some humility. There is a lot of misinformation, there\u2019s more than one narrative and there\u2019s a lot that we can all learn about it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ayah Hassan, Staff Writer By now all of us have probably heard about recent occurrences in Palestine and Israel. Since most of us are \u201cGen-Zers,\u201d we\u2019ve likely only heard about recent events displayed on social media or communicated by our peers. But to fully understand what’s happening, it\u2019s important to learn the history that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":3612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[280,822,286,821,269,211,285],"class_list":["post-3611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","tag-feature","tag-israel","tag-journalism","tag-palestine","tag-rhhs","tag-river-hill","tag-river-hill-high-school"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/unnamed-2.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3613,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3611\/revisions\/3613"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}