by Mark Hopkins

Created on: May 25, 2008

Hamas terror and the face of evil; hmm!, not exactly an objective starting point for any analysis of the mess which prevails in the area of the Holy Land today.

Let's go back nearly 2000 years. After a series of revolts, the Romans who controlled the area then, defeated and killed many Jews and exiled the remainder from their homeland. Non-Jews, some of whom had an equally ancient association with the area, remained. Jewish refugees sought sanctuary wherever they could.

Over the next 1800 years or so there was no Jewish homeland. Ruled by the Romans, the Byzantines, various Islamic Caliphs, the Ottoman Turks and then the British, the Holy Land remained pretty much a Jewish-free zone. Only with the decline of Ottoman power and the rise of the Zionist movement led by European Jews such as Theodor Herzl, did a trickle of Jewish settlers start to move into Palestine around 1900. They moved into a land ruled by Moslems, the Ottoman Turks and peopled predominantly by Moslems, though with a significant Christian element. Their dream was to re-establish a Jewish State. From the start they envisaged something separate from what had existed there for centuries. It would be racially, culturally and religiously distinct. The dream was not of sharing or blending in. They came as an alien people with alien customs, beliefs and attitudes.

After Britain issued its Balfour Declaration in 1917, throwing its weight behind a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, the trickle of Jews into the area increased. Through the 1920s and 1930s Britain tried and failed to cope with the disaster it had set in motion. It was not possible to set up a distinctively 'Jewish' homeland without damaging the rights of the people already resident there; people whose ancestry was as rooted in Palestine as was
the Jews'. After the end of the Second World War and the exposure of the full horror of the Holocaust a sympathetic world forgot about justice for the Palestinians in its rush to do 'justice' to the survivors of the Nazi camps.

The creation of Israel in 1948 was a triumph for the Jews but an injustice to the Palestinians. The wars of 1948 and 1967 only made matters worse. More land came under Israeli control. Many more Palestinians were dispossessed of their land and fled to live as disgruntled refugees in neighboring Arab lands. They dreamed of regaining their land and property. Palestinians granted Israeli citizenship lived very much as second class citizens in a Jewish state. Those who remained in occupied

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