There is no doubt that the dispute between Israel and the Arab world, which manifests time and again in violent conflicts between the nation of Israel and nations such as Syria, Iran or terror organisations such as Hezbollah or Hamas, is probably the most knotty international dispute that the United Nations has ever had to deal with. And it may remain so.
Let us backtrack a bit for a proper perspective on this lingering tussle that has defied every possible diplomatic solution and will yet define future diplomatic engagements and relations in the Middle East, and eventually culminate in the end of the present Age as we know it.
First, who are the people described as Palestinians today and how did they emerge to lay claim to that piece of land, known in history as the land of Israel?
Before answering that question, it is important to establish the fact that the land in dispute today between Palestine and Israel was inhabited by the later from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, long before the 732 BC when the Assyrians besieged the land and carried the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel captive to Assyria, followed later by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar who took the Southern Kingdom to Babylon in 597 BC.
Granted that the conquest of the Canaanites by the Israelites after they left Egypt was not total, in that some original inhabitants could still be found in the land thereafter (2 Chronicles 26:6), they were ultimately obliterated (Zephaniah 2:5; Isaiah 14:29-32).
Even during the time of Christ in the 1st Century, there were no people called Palestinians in the land of Israel, a name that is actually a derivative of “Philistines” which refers to the stock that was wiped out by the Israelites before they eventually possessed that land (Amos 1:8; Ezekiel 25:16; Isaiah 14:28-32).
In fact, as at the time of Christ, the land of Gaza where the Philistines dwelt was inhabited by the Israelites (Judges 6:4). Therefore, the question of who the true owners of that piece of land is cannot be disputed; the land belongs to Israel.
Unfortunately, there will be no peace there, as Israel will continue to be troubled until the Lord returns to the earth. We are getting close to the fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah 12, 13, 14.
In fact, as a brief prophetic perspective, Israel’s suffering has just begun. The time is coming when America will not be able to defend Israel again because it will become too weak economically to project its power around the world again. That is when Israel will become vulnerable to attack by the enemy nations. In fact, Zechariah 14:2 says the people will be dispersed once again as a result of the violence that will be visited on them, and will almost experience total annihilation.
It is Christ Himself who will ultimately resolve that matter, at the point of His second coming.
From a historical perspective as well, there clearly are no easy answers to the age-long conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And that is because there are equally no clear answers to the question of whether the contested land stopped belonging to the Jews simply because they were dispersed from there centuries before they started coming back. Although this is not an exhaustive account, from what is known, the Jews had thrived some two to three thousand years ago as an independent kingdom under their powerful kings notably during the golden reigns of David and his heir, Solomon. Around the 1st or the 2nd Century A.D., the Roman empire carried out a mass persecution and killing of the Jews partly because the egalitarian precepts of Judaism were seen as direct threat to the strict class-based segregation of the Roman society. In order to prevent the spread of ideas that were capable of provoking civil revolts against the Roman ruling class, Jews and their ideas had to be destroyed. They dispersed first to surrounding Arab nations including Jordan and parts of North Africa, but mainly and eventually to Europe. However, it must be noted that some of them, a minority though, who lingered not too far away from their ancestral home did so with the hope of being able to one day return to their beloved Jerusalem. Their numbers were nothing compared to the growing Arab population that had migrated to the land in later years.
After the Romans, the territory fell under the control of the Muslim Ottoman Empire during which Jews continued to number as a minority religious group under majority Muslim Arabs not just all over the empire, but also in what is now Palestine itself.
Following the WWI defeat of the Ottomans, out of which the modern nation of Turkey emerged, Palestine fell under the mandate of the British.
Meanwhile, around the 1880s to the early 1914, persecution from Christian anti-Semitism especially within the Tsarist Russian empire and a rising tide of European nationalism made a large number of Europe-based Jews to flee to the United States. A small number of them, however, chose to turn in the direction of their abandoned ancestral land, and that was the beginning of a systematic return and settlement of diaspora Jewry in Palestine. They began to buy lands from Arab settlers, and established settlements. From initial cohabitation between the majority Arab occupiers and the sprinkling of remnant Jews in the territory, the Jewish population began to be swollen by the new wave of settlers from Europe.
The outbreak of the World War II and the attendant Holocaust by the Nazis changed the dynamics totally. The major players in the international system felt that they owed Israel some form of compensation for their own failure to offer sanctuary to the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, and believed they must get them a state of their own. Uganda was among the considered options but was rejected by the Zionists.
The area now being referred to as Palestine was and still is considered by the Jews as their God-given inheritance, and there may be some justification for that. Some historical accounts claim that the idea of any people identifying themselves as “Palestinians” is a recent and rather fluid invention. According to this reasoning, the people are Arabs who moved into that space from surrounding Arab nations. They only call themselves “Palestinians” in order to drive home the point of their connection to that piece of real estate and prove that Jews do not own the space. In other words, in reality, there are no “Palestinians” who are Arabs; there are only Arabs who originally belonged to some of the surrounding Arab nations but encroached on a territory, and now call themselves a distinct name – Palestinians, as if they had always existed as a distinct people. An account even attributes the naming of that land officially as Palestine to the British, although the Romans were said to have revived it after they conquered the land.
The original occupiers of that territory were therefore the Jews. However, they left or were made to leave at some point in their history. Although that account is being countered by Arab historical narratives, it has been constantly alleged that for a long time in centuries past, a large swathe of the territory was like an uninhabited, barren desert land until it was encroached upon by Arab settlers.
Anyway, by the time the Jewish nation was established in 1948, perpetual conflicts had become the defining feature of the political arrangement in the area. There have been a number of wars between the Israelis and their Arab neighbours over the years, during which the tiny Jewish nation seemed to have emerged more strengthened. Indeed, the basis of the 1948 arrangement was actually a two-state proposal which the Jews accepted, but was rejected by the Arabs. Their rejection appeared predicated on the idea that two competing states could not be created out of what they considered their sole territory. They launched the first Arab war against the Israelis on that basis that very year. It is ironical that it is the same two-state solution that more Arab nations and the “Palestinians” (except the radical groups) have now embraced, is what Israel’s current right-wing leaders are now opposed to.
The relevant question is whether it was fit and proper for the Jews to come back to lay claim to a piece of territory they had left for centuries. Well, there are no easy answers to these matters as earlier observed. But the first thing to note is that although they largely drifted away to other parts of the world, not every Jew disappeared from that area. Over the several years, there were lingering and sprinkling of Jewish people in that area even though they were a meagre minority to the ascendant Arabs. And those in the diaspora always nursed the hope of returning to the land of their spiritual ancestry.
The other thing is that they can legitimately claim that they once had a kingdom which is akin to a national territory and therefore wanted it back from any interlopers, especially since they were dispersed against their will.
The flipside of that, however, is: how simple is that? Not very. Here, you now have a generation of Arabs who are probably great, great, and greater grand descendants of those who originally occupied what was once an undeniably Jewish territory, and who do not now know from which Arab countries their forebears came from. Where does anyone expect them to go? Even though they are probably around or less than 5 million in total (West Bank and Gaza combined), not a single one of the surrounding Arab nations would even accept to assimilate them. For a while, Egypt completely shut its borders with Gaza effectively preventing those fleeing Israel’s bombings following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War from crossing. Jordan too does not allow the West Bank “Palestinians” from spilling into its own population. Syria will not either. If Iran that had been blowing hot and arming them is serious about their well-being, why has it not transported these “floating” people into its territory and assimilate them?
Even if there are any countries willing to take them, how easy or convenient is it for any people who have been invested culturally and emotionally in a space to just want to be uprooted to an entirely different location?
The international community seems fixated on a two-state solution principle at the moment. But how workable can it be in the long run? The scenario is that of a Palestinian state separated by probably a stretch of barbwires from the state of Israel! That is literally having the ferocious and deadly hostilities of Hamas, the Hezbollah, and really Iran (all sworn to the total annihilation of Israel) right inside the Jewish territory itself! That is, as we say, keeping a burning fire right inside your thatched roof! Who does that?
There is absolutely no answer as to how peace can ever come into that region, except one of the sides physically disappears. One doubts if it is actually any part of the divine design to bring peace about in that area of the globe. In our God’s unfolding agenda, the entire world itself is on an irreversible trajectory of utter destruction. The Middle East crisis is apparently a vital part of that jigsaw of imminent universal immolation.