Mideast Piece: The Two States

When last we left our intrepid blogger, we were discussing the history of the Israel/Palestine problem. Let's start with a little more history. The word Palestine came from the Roman Empire. Judea was a Roman Province with a Rome supported King and Roman garrison's. In the middle of the first century A.D. (C.E. in Jewish parlance), there was an uprising against the empire. By the year 70, any remnants of this uprising had effectively been squelched and the Second Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. Begin search for the lost Ark here.

The Romans were so angry about the uprising that they decided to rename the land after one of the Judean people's long vanquished enemies, the Philistines. The Jews who had not engaged directly in battle and succumbed to defeat scattered to the winds in a second Diaspora. Towards the end of the 19th century, eastern European Jews decided to return to what they considered their ancestral homeland and establish a Jewish state there.

Over the next several decades many Jews emigrated to what was then called "Palestine-TransJordan." During this time, a World War broke out. The English reached out to the Arab Community because the Ottoman Empire had sided with the other guys. You may have heard of the chief English Emissary, T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia). After the war and the subsequent establishment of the League of Nations, lesser nations (by European standards) were divied up and the League was tasked to modernize and democratize these countries.

This is how the distinct nations of Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia came about, and why Saddam thought he had a right to re-unify them. Palestine-TransJordan was another of these British protectorates. In the 1930's a "white paper" circulated in which Great Britain committed to creating a Jewish state in this protectorate. The Holocaust enabled the British to use their "control" of the territories to create the Jewish state.

This has been a pretty big pill to swallow- I'll continue later. . .