The Road to Jerusalem

For all you history buffs.

116 years ago, in 1894, the Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl looked on in Paris as French captain Alfred Dreyfus, a fellow Jew, was convicted of treason.  As it turns out, Dreyfus had been framed, and a good deal of the European public knew it—including Herzl, who had been assigned to report on the affair.  The real culprit, as it turns out, was a French army major, not Dreyfus: high-ranking military officials, for whatever reason, had framed Dreyfus with the knowledge that public anti-semitism would lead few to question his guilt.  For twelve years, it worked: he was not exonerated until 1906.

Herzl himself. Nice beard!

For Herzl, Dreyfus’ wrongful conviction (he had been suspected of spying for the Germans) was further proof that even in the “enlightened” era of 19th-century France, the most secular country in the world at the time, rampant anti-semitism still plagued European society.

In 1896 Herzl published Der Judenstaat, “The Jew-State”, a now famous pamphlet which argued that, given the apparently inherent anti-semitism of European society, Jewish survival required the establishment of an independent Jewish state.  While Herzl suggested numerous possiblities for a location of this state—Argentina and Kenya among them—his Jewish supporters soon seized upon historic Palestine, their ancestral home, as the only option.  One year after Der Judenstaat‘s publication, Herzl and his followers founded the World Zionist Organization, whose mission was to work towards making Der Judenstaat a reality.

For the next 50 years the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine skyrocketed.  Nearly 250,000 Jews from all across Europe (and parts of the Middle East) moved to the region.  By the end of World War II, Jews accounted for 1/3 of the total population of the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean–the Arab population, however, still retained a 2/3 majority.  Their settlement and security was facilitated by the World Zionist Organization.

In 1917, in the middle of World War I, the burgeoning Zionist movement achieved one of its major goals when the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration, which states:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

With British support guaranteed, the Zionist movement had the support of the major world power of the time.  After World War I, the British took control of Palestine (and much of the rest of the Middle East), and the Zionist movement was even closer to success.

The rise of Hitler in 1933 brought Europe’s long history of anti-semitism to a head.  Jewish (entirely justified) fears of persecution brought 250,000 Jewish immigrants to Israel.  While Hitler’s anti-semitic policies were well known to Allied countries, it was not until the end of the war that Hitler’s true vision for the Jewish people became apparent.

"Work makes you free."

Europe looked upon the ashes of the Holocaust with shock and horror.  An overwhelming sense of Christian guilt over the Holocaust—it was, in fact, the logical conclusion to 2,000 years of Christian anti-semitism—gripped the Western world.  This aided the Zionist cause immensely.

With its resource severely depleted by World War II, Great Britain found itself unable to govern Palestine, especially given its volatile population of both Jews and Arabs, who were eager to shrug off British control and establish their power over the region.  In 1947 the United Nations approved the UN Partition Plan, which divided the region into two independent states, one Jewish, one Arab, with Jerusalem being administered separately by the UN.  The local Jewish population accepted the plan, but the Arabs—most of whom saw the Jews as illegal colonizers, rejected it.  Civil War broke out, and as Jewish forces gained the upper hand 250,000 local Arabs fled the region.

On May 14, 1948, the Jewish Agency declared their independence from the British Mandate and declared the land the State of Israel.  The next day armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded, launching the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War. During this period more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly expelled form their homes by Israeli forces.  When a ceasefire was established a year later, the Green Line was established.  Jordan controlled the West Bank, a chunk of land on, incidentally, the west bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip, a very small slice of land in the very southwest corner of modern Israel.  In one year, more than 80% of the remaining Arab population of Palestine became refugees.  60 years later, next to none of them have returned to their homes.

In 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Syrian, Egyptian, and Jordanian forces, who had gathered their troops on the Israeli border.  Israeli forces invaded the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai peninsula, and the southern corner of Syria known as the Golan Heights.  It illegally occupies all of these regions to this day: though Egypt and Jordan have since made peace with Israel, you still cannot get into Syria (or Lebanon) with an Israeli stamp on your passport.  When I cross the Israeli border in July, I’ll have to ask them to stamp a separate piece of paper.

Since that time all Palestinians currently fall under one of three categories: Arab Israelis who, though they are citizens of the State of Israel, are under daily suspicion and discrimination and have only limited access to certain roads and resources; natives of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who, though they have kept their homes, are being slowly suffocated by an ever-growing system of apartheid (a word which even some Israelis are beginning to use); and refugees, who were expelled from their homes in 1948 and live either in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and southern Lebanon or abroad in anywhere from Chile to Saudi Arabia.