Explained: The Birth Of State Of Israel, History Of Jewish Nationhood And Centrality Of Jerusalem To Jews And Arabs

The State of Israel, however, prevailed against the combined forces of the Arab states of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Transjordan (present-day Jordan).

The Arab-Israel War of 1948 was the first of the many wars that Israel has had to fight, but conflict about Israeli nationhood did not start in 1948. The Jews had long been subjected to conflict, whether it was the decades-long conflict in Palestine —used then purely as a geographic term for the landmass on which the Jewish state was envisioned— or tackling anti-Semitic persecution and pogroms in Europe for centuries.?

The Zionism?movement, which called for the establishment of a Jewish state, began in the late 19th century. The calls for Jewish nationhood followed waves of migrations to Palestine. The migrations called aliyahs in Jewish culture?have been central to the Jewish wanderings over the centuries. The prevailing anti-Semitism in Europe and then the rise of Nazism in Germany further fuelled these migrations.?

As hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived at the Promised Land of Palestine, the land of their ancestors from where they had been expelled long ago, resentment grew among a section of the native Arabs who saw these migrations as an extension of the European colonialism project. Thus grew the Jew-Arab conflict that continues to plague the region even today in the absence of any lasting solution.?

The Israeli nationhood movement

Theodor Herzl was the founder of the Zionism movement for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. In 1896, he published 'The Jewish State' booklet that called for the creation of the Jewish state with the support of nations of the world. The continued persecution of Jews in Europe and elsewhere over the centuries prompted Herzl to start the movement.?

Herzl founded the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and organised the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. The meeting was instrumental in breathing life into the Jewish nationhood movement as it turned a popular notion into a political movement.

Herzl famously said, "At Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, l would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it."

Over the years, Jews were associated with false tropes, such as being killers of Christians?and spreaders of diseases. They were thus persecuted and often expelled, leading to long years of wanderings, which culminated in the call for a return to their ancestral homeland in the 19th century.?

"For the Christians of Medieval Europe, Jews were the killers of Christ; virulent myths about child kidnapping and blood libel were propagated, triggering violent anti-Jewish riots that led to massacres and expulsion from communities that Jews had for a time been able to consider home. By the end of the Middle Ages, Jews had lived in and been expelled from Carthage, England, France, Spain, Germany, Bavaria, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, the Netherlands, Warsaw, Portugal, Prussia, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Prague, sometimes on multiple occasions, and later from Ukraine, Poland, and Russia," write Cary Nelson, Rachel S. Harris, and Kenneth W. Stein in 'Concise History Of Israel'.

The authors further write, "In 1096, more than 5,000 Jews were murdered in Germany. In 1290, King Edward I issued an edict expelling all Jews from England, following 200 years of persecution, including the massacring of 100 Jews in York (1190), when they were burned to death after taking shelter in a tower. Five thousand Jews were killed in France in 1321 after they were accused of prompting lepers to poison wells. Thousands were killed in riots in Germany in 1389. Over 10,000 Jews were massacred in Spain in 1391. Following the wishes of Father Tomas de Torquemada, head of the Spanish Inquisition, 200,000 Jews were expelled from Spain on July 30, 1492, under an edict issued by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and tens of thousands died in the effort to reach safety while fleeing from Spain."

The five modern aliyahs

During the 19th-20th centuries, there were five waves of Jewish migrations to Palestine, called aliyahs in Jewish culture.?

These migrations were a result of an escape from first the anti-Semitic persecution and later the generation of a consciousness for a Jewish nationhood.

1. 1881-1903: Around 35,000 Jews migrated to the southwestern region of Syria, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire that also included Palestine. The Jews primarily came from Russia and Yemen.?

2. 1904-14: Around 40,000 Jews migrated to the same region mainly from Russia, which witnessed eruption of violence against Jews at the time. Such migrations from socialist societies led to the foundation egalitarian, socialist Jewish communities called kibbutz. It was during this time that the first Jewish organisations and settlements began to take shape in the wake of Arab hostility for their arrival.?

In 1909, Ahuzat Bayit, a new suburb of Jaffa, grew to become the city of Tel Aviv. Organisations for the security of Jews emerged and newspapers and dictionaries in ancient Jewish language Hebrew were also published.?

3. 1919-23: Around 40,000 Jews from Eastern Europe migrated to Palestine in the wake of the World War 1. It was during this time that the idea of a Jewish state took firm shape as the British, which took control of the Palestine after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, agreed to it.?

In 1920, Hagnah was also founded, the armed wing of the Jewish community in Palestine that would be the de facto military of the Jews until the formation of the State of Israel.?

4. 1924-29: Around 82,000 Jews arrived as a result of rising anti-semitism in Poland and Hungary. This was also in the run-up to the rise of Nazism in Germany and the institutionalised persecution of Jews under Hitler.?

5. 1929-39: As Hitler took over Germany and Nazism relegated Jews to an unwanted class of people, around 250,000 Jews arrived in Palestine.?

The shaping of Arab-Jew conflict

The Arab-Israel conflict —or the Arab-Jew conflict— is the one over a piece of land and who gets to control how much of it. This land was called Palestine in 19-20th centuries. First, it was under the Ottoman Empire and, after its defeat in World War-I, it was under British rule.?

In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration in which it declared its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Arabs resisted it which led to violence.?

1923, the League of Nations, the failed predecessor of the United Nations (UN), issued the British Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate gave the United Kingdom (UK) the responsibility for the creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine, as per Time Magazine.?

In 1936, the British Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states after several rounds of violence between the two communities in the region, according to a history of the region published by the University of Central Arkansas publication.?

In 1947, however, the British referred the issue of Palestine's partition to the UN. The UN came up with two proposals, as per The Britannica Encyclopaedia. The first proposal envisioned two separate states joined economically —the majority proposal— and the second proposal envisioned a single binational state made up of autonomous Jewish and Palestinian areas, which was the minority proposal.

"The Jewish community approved of the first of these proposals, while the Arabs opposed them both," notes Britannica.

The first proposal envisioned that Jerusalem, the historic centre of three Abrahamic religions, would be governed by an international arrangement and would not be with either the Arabs or Jews. The proposal was passed in November 1947. The Arabs rejected this.?

This set the stage for the major confrontation between the Jews and the Arabs.?

The centrality of Jerusalem and Arab-Israel War

The Jerusalem is central to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The Temple Mount is a region in Jerusalem where Muslims' Al Aqsa Mosque —their third holiest site— is located right next to the Jewish holiest site of the Western Wall, which is the only remains of their holy temples destroyed thousands of years ago by the Romans. At little distance is also the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a site sacred to Christians where Christ is believed to have been crucified.?

Even as the vast majority of the world's Jews wandered outside of Jerusalem and their historic homeland, Jerusalem remained central to their belief. In their book 'O Jerusalem', Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins call the Jewish state without Jerusalem a "staggering blow to Jewish hopes". They write, "Recreating a Jewish state in Palestine without Jerusalem as its capital was anathema to the Jewish people, the resurrection of a body without its soul."

Lapierre and Collins go on to describe that, even as the Jews lived outside of Jerusalem and historic Palestine for over 2,000 years, the City of David remained at the core of their beliefs and sayings.?

They write, "The most important wall of the synagogues of the Diaspora faced east to Jerusalem. A patch of wall in every Orthodox household went unattended in Jerusalem's name. The Jewish bridegroom crushed a glass under his foot at his wedding to show his grief at the destruction of the Temple, and prayed that his marriage would provoke joy and dancing in the streets of Jerusalem. The traditional words of Jewish consolation, 'May the Almighty comfort you and all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem,' evoked the City. Even the word 'Zionism', defining the movement to reassemble the Jews in their ancient homeland, was inspired by a hilltop in Jerusalem, Mount Zion. Through the generations, men with neither the interest nor the intent nor even the remotest possibility – of ever gazing on Judea's hills had nonetheless solemnly pledged to each other at the end of their Passover feast, 'Next Year in Jerusalem'."

Even though the Jews resented a state without Jerusalem, they publicly accepted the UN proposal for a Jewish state with an international regime in Jerusalem. Privately, however, the Jewish leadership knew by then that a conflict was on the horizon.?

In May 1948, when the Jews declared the formation of the State of Israel, the six Arab states of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Transjordan (present-day Jordan) invaded Israel but lost. While they intended to capture territory, they lost it and Israel ended up gaining more land than the UN proposal allocated to them.

"The UN partition promised 56 per cent of British Palestine for the Jewish state; by the end of the war, Israel possessed 77 per cent — everything except the West Bank and the eastern quarter of Jerusalem (controlled by Jordan), as well as the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt). It left Israelis with a state, but not Palestinians," notes Vox.?

In the 1967 Israel-Arab War, Israel gained more territories, including Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Old City of Jerusalem, and Golan Heights. This is how present-day Israel came into shape. While Israel returned Sinai to Egypt in 1982 as they normalised relations, the rest of the regions stayed with Israel.?