The Palestine Impasse

the complex problems of international affairs, none evokes more passionate emotions and bitter partisanship than that of the future of Palestine. This tiny notch of covers a mere 10,000 square miles, chiefly desert, stretching along the Mediterranean Sea only some 125 miles the distance, say, from Toronto to Belleville. But this minuscule region is a major mine-field because of its explosive ingredients, strategic, political, social, economic, and religious (it is the Holy Land of the three monotheistic world-religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). There are three cardinal factors in the Palestinian problem: Jewish Zionist nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and British mandatory control (which may be widened into an international trusteeship). The high explosive ingredient of the Palestine imbroglio is the movement of political Zionism to establish a Jewish State there, to be effected by an unrestricted immigration policy which will turn the Jews now in the minority into the dominant majority. The Zionists, using an argument from history, contend that Palestine is really Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), where during a millennium the Hebrews as a nation developed their great original culture, and made their creative contribution to the world's spiritual treasury in the form of Judaism and the Jewish way of life. Since the Diaspora (Dispersion) by the Romans, 70-135 A.D., the Jews have been cribb'd, cabin'd. and confined in other countries, scourged by anti-Semitic persecution. Being a homeless, hopeless, alien, uprooted race, the Jewish people must have a homeland and state of their own in Palestine, where their genius would attain unrivalled heights of achievement. This Zionist philosophy was galvanically formulated by Dr. Theodor Herzl in his book The Jewish State (1898). The Arabs, however, challenge this Zionist argument and assert that Palestine in the light of history belongs to the Arab inhabitants, both Moslem and Christian, rather than the Jews

Ancient history · Archaeology · Homeland · Islam · Jewish state · Judaism · Land of Israel · Nationalism · Palestine · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Zionism · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy · Religious studies