This essay is part one of a foolish endeavor. I will attempt to give a somewhat comprehensive history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. As I began writing this, it grew in scope, so I have broken it into two parts. Part one is a brief history of the Jewish Diaspora, Islam and the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslim people, and the essential events that frame our conflict from 586 B.C. to 1948 A.D. Part two will cover 1948-2023—covering the modern history of the region and conflict. I hope a greater understanding of the region's history will enable you to comprehend the arguments at play from both groups. Part two and the weekly news update should be released by Saturday. My apologies for the delay—I was watching the Rangers win the World Series when I should have been writing.
Early History
As an Old Testament Professor, I must begin with a date I make my students memorize in the first unit of our Intro to the Old Testament class. That is, 586 B.C., in 586 B.C., the Babylonian empire destroyed Jerusalem and forced marched the Judahites (Jews) out of the Land of Israel and into Mesopotamia. This is the beginning of the Jewish diaspora.1 Around seventy years later, the Babylonian Empire fell to the Persian Empire. Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and Judea and rebuild the Temple and its walls. Crucially, not all Jews returned to Judea when Cyrus permitted them to; many stayed in communities in Mesopotamia (Modern-day Iraq and Syria). These communities endured for thousands of years until the advent of the modern state of Israel (more on that below).
The next great upheaval for the Jewish people was in A.D. 70 when the Roman Empire destroyed the Judean army, destroyed the Second Temple, and took thousands of slaves from Judea into Europe and North Africa.2 Despite the destruction of Jerusalem, many Jews remained in the Land of Israel, although many began to settle in Galilee, the Northern part of the Land. While Rome soundly beat the Judean army, it did not stamp out the Jewish desire for self-rule and religious fidelity. From 132-136 A.D., a second Jewish revolt occurred, known as the Bar-Kokhaba Revolt. The Jewish people erroneously believed that Bar-Kokhaba was the Messiah who would free the Jews from Roman slavery; they were led into another military disaster, one that enraged the Romans so much that Emperor Hadrian banned the Jewish people from living in Jerusalem and renamed the region Palestina (Philistine) as an insult to the Jews.
So, in the second century, the Jewish people were forced out of Jerusalem and Judea. Some stayed in the surrounding areas, while many others took refuge in the Jewish communities spread out in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. There is evidence that some communities of Jews moved back to Jerusalem during the Christian period of the Roman Empire (Byzantine), but they were banned from it several times.
Islamic Period (634 A.D-1917 A.D.)
We now come to the period of Islamic conquest and expansion. Before we can understand Israel’s significance to the Arab people, we need to cover a bit about Islam in general.
Muhammad was born around 570 A.D. in Mecca, a city in the Arabian Peninsula. He belonged to the Quraysh tribe, which was involved in merchant trade. At 40, Muhammad claimed to receive revelations while meditating in a cave on Mount Hira near Mecca. These purported revelations continued for 23 years and, around two centuries later, were compiled into the Quran.
Muhammad preached monotheism against the paganism of Arabic culture. He attracted followers but faced hostility from Meccan leaders threatened by his movement. This culminated in one of the defining moments in Islamic history, the Hijra. In 622 A.D., facing persecution, Muhammad and his followers descended from Mecca to Yathrib (later known as Medina) in an event known as the Hijra. This marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
In Medina, Muhammad established an Islamic state, creating a constitution and building a community (ummah) that followed Islamic teachings. All the while building alliances and growing in military might. Eventually, they stormed back to Mecca, wiping out the armies of the polytheists, and seized control of Mecca in 630 A.D.
The early Muslim community engaged in several battles with Meccan forces. After a series of conflicts and negotiations, Muhammad and his followers took control of Mecca in 630 A.D., with most Meccan tribes converting to Islam. Communities of Christians and Jews were permitted to live as second-class citizens, while any pagan tribes were put to death.
Muhammad died in 632 A.D. However, before he died, he was purported to have a key vision to our story. The “Isra and Miraj” According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was transported from the Great Mosque in Mecca to the "farthest mosque" (Arabic Al-Aqsa) by a creature called Buraq in the company of the archangel Gabriel. The location of the Al-Aqsa was later claimed to be in Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built around 685 A.D. on the Temple Mount, where the Second Temple was destroyed some 600 years earlier. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad is said to have led other prophets in prayer at this site. For Muslims today, the Al-Aqsa is considered the third holiest site in Islam, behind Mecca and Medina.
After Muhammad's death, his successors, the Rashidun Caliphs, engaged in a project of rapid military expansion, bringing the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of the Byzantine and Persian empires under Islamic rule. The Islamic empires that followed—Umayyad and Abbasid—further expanded the territory controlled by Muslims and facilitated the spread of Islamic culture and the Arabic language.
Key to our story is 634 A.D., under the command of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. The Arab forces seized control of the Land of Israel, taking it from the Byzantine Empire. Jerusalem was of particular importance to the Muslim invaders. After a prolonged siege, the city surrendered to the Arab forces in 637 A.D. The terms of surrender were negotiated by Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem and the Muslim general Umar ibn al-Khattab, resulting in the Pact of Umar, which guaranteed the safety of the city's Christian and Jewish inhabitants and the protection of their holy places.
The Arab Muslim rulers established their administration over the conquered territories, integrating them into the rapidly expanding Islamic empire. The new rulers treated Christians and Jews as second-class, imposing a submission fee known as the jizya. Still, they permitted Christians and Jews to practice their religions and live in relative peace.
Several Islamic Empires rose and fell during the 1300 years between 634 A.D. and 1917 A.D. Throughout these years, both Jews and Muslims were reported as living in the region. European Christians even established a brief Kingdom in the area during the Crusades. But, for our story, we will jump forward to the late 19th century and the decline of the Ottoman Turks, the last Muslim empire to rule all of the Land of Israel. The Turks ruled the Land of Israel from 1517 A.D. until the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One in 1917 A.D. During this period, the Land of Israel fell broadly into disrepair. Numerous British Explorers commented in their journals on the relative depopulation and lack of productivity in the Land. Bedouin shepherds grazed their flocks, and there were small villages of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. But, outside of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron, the Land was not densely populated.3
Zionism and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire (1880 A.D.-1917 A.D.)
It is here that we enter the modern streams of history which shape the situation we are presently in. Critical to understanding the forces that shaped the 19th century is understanding the rise of nationalism as a political movement. For centuries, Europe had been ruled by a network of aristocrats and monarchs whose territories crossed language, culture, and ethnicity. The Austrio-Hungarian Empire ruled by the Habsburgs from 1292-1917 included about twenty different ethnicities speaking at least seventeen different languages. Faced with the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, war, and famine, these Empires proved incapable of good governance in a rapidly modernizing world. A new model of governance began to gain significant currency among many in Europe. That a nation should consist of a people who share a language and culture. Rather than be ruled by the Austrio-Hungarian Habsburgs, Italian speakers wished to join with other Italian speakers and govern on the basis of a shared language and culture. A similar concept took root amongst the German people, leading to the idea of Germany.
In and among these European groups were Jewish people who had lived in the margins of European society for two millennia—enduring periods of great persecution and evil as well as periods of relative prosperity and peace. One man, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), was born into this sea of ideas that a people who shared a culture and a homeland should govern a nation. After witnessing the intense and pervasive antisemitism in France in the Dryfuss Affair4, Herzl was committed to the idea that the Jewish people should be governed by a Jewish state in a Jewish homeland. His ideas captivated many Jews across Europe who organized and began advocating for support from the European governments to establish a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland called Palestine.5
Some, by choice, went beyond soliciting the governments of Europe—deciding to travel to Israel, purchase Land from the Ottoman Empire, and establish agricultural communities cultivating the Land cultivated by their ancestors that had fallen into disrepair over the intervening centuries. Others, in response to a series of Eastern European pogroms, were forced to migrate to the Holy Land. It is estimated that around twenty thousand Eastern European Jews migrated to Israel between 1882-1904; this was known as the First Allyah6. Further instability in the Russian Empire led to more pogroms, leading to a second Allyah (1904-1914). At this point, migration to the Holy Land halted with the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1917).
It must be noted that at this point, there was little to no objection to Jewish migration from the Arab population living in the land of Israel at the time. The Ottoman Empire accepted payment from the Jewish communities, and the Arabs of the region did not raise objections to the Jewish migration; this would change with the Balfour Declaration and the British control of the region that began at the close of the First World War.
The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate (1917-1947)
Upon the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, The British Empire took over the governance and control of the entire region: both modern-day Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank. In 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a statment on behalf of the British Government supporting the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The declaration did not specify the boundaries of Palestine and included provisions to protect the rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine and the status of Jewish people elsewhere.
This declaration spurred on the Third Aliyah, where about forty thousand Jews migrated to the area, anticipating the establishment of a Jewish state. It is reasonable to hone in on this point as the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With the most powerful nation in the world seemingly behind the establishment of a Jewish state, the Arabs in the region violently pushed back. In March 1920 and April 1920, anti-Jewish riots occurred in Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements in Upper Galilee, respectively. Attacks continued in May 1921, with violence in Jaffa and large-scale assaults on other Jewish settlements. These events resulted in numerous casualties and sparked a small firestorm in the British Parlement.
For the next twenty years, tensions rose between Jews and Arabs in the region, and an Oregon Trail of sorts began. Both Arabs and Jews moved into the area, and violent clashes broke out from time to time. Britain, whose primary concern was the procuration of oil, began to reconsider their earlier promises made to the Jewish people. There was no oil in Israel or Jordan; for that matter, there were large quantities in other holdings, such as Saudi Arabia. For the British Empire to secure access to this most critical resource, they needed to appease the Arab leaders in the region. This began by imposing restrictions on Jewish immigration in the later 1920s and became a near absolute ban by 1939 when many Jews were desperately trying to escape the Nazi war machine and their attempt to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. The British maintained this ban even after the extent of the Holocaust was discovered in 1945. The British denied 100,000 displaced Jews from across Europe who wished to join their brothers and sisters in the land of Israel. Being rather sick of the entire conflict, the British control of the region ended in 1948, leading to the next chapter in our story.
Sadly, I leave you on a cliffhanger. Next time, we will see the birth of the Jewish state, two Israeli-Arab wars, the Birth of the Palestinian identity, a few “Peace Processes,” the Arab terrorism that followed the “Peace “Processes, the Birth of Hamas, the withdrawal from Gaza, the Abraham Accords, and the menace of Iran. Oh, and the news of this week. So, I got my writing cut out for me; thanks for reading, and if you found this helpful, please share it!
The Jewish Diaspora refers to the dispersion of Jews outside of their ancestral homeland of Judea (also known as the Land of Israel or Palestine) and the communities built by them across the world.
Several Jewish communities had already been established in North Africa during the Hellenistic Period, according to the writings of Josephus and Philo of Alexandria.
Population estimates for “The Levant,” a geographic region including modern-day Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, range between 250,000 and 600,000 people. Today, there are about 24 million people in the same area: 11 million Jordanians, 4 million Palestinians, and 9 million Israeli citizens (20% of them Arab).
The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal in France (1894-1906) where Jewish Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason, revealing deep-seated antisemitism. His exoneration came after intense public debate, spurred by Émile Zola's open letter "J'accuse…!"
There was a brief time where other locations were considered, such as Uganda, but these never got off the ground, nor were they supported by many.
The Aliyahs refer to waves of Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. The term "Aliyah" is derived from the Hebrew word for "ascent" or "going up," reflecting the spiritual and physical journey to the ancestral homeland.
Thank you for writing and posting this Zach. It is very important for us all to understand the history. It is wonderful to be able to get this information from someone I trust admire and respect. Carlin