 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ] Next Last |
Main article History of Israel
Many Jews have long considered Israel to be their spiritual home — as a Holy Land and a Promised Land. It is also the place where Christianity was born, and contains many sites of great spiritual significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A series of Jewish kingdoms and states existed intermittently in the region for over a millennium until the failure of the Great Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire ended up with widescale expulsion of Jews from their homeland (about 25% of the Jewish population, see Destruction of Jerusalem and in "Propyläen der Weltgeschichte", ed. Golo Mann). After crushing Bar Kokhba's revolt in 135, Emperor Hadrian renamed Provincia Judaea as Provincia Syria Palaestina, a Greek name derived from Philistine ( Hebrew פלשת Pəléšeṯ). [1] See also Names of the Levant.
The Muslim Caliphate conquered the land from the Eastern Roman Empire ( Byzantines) in the seventh century and attracted Arab settlers. The local language, Aramaic, gradually disappeared. Throughout the centuries the size of Jewish population in the land fluctuated. Before the birth of modern Zionism, by the early 19th century, more than 10,000 Jews lived in the area that is today's Israel. (Dan Bahat, Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in the Holy Land, 1976, pp. 61-63)
Following centuries of Diaspora, the nineteenth century saw the rise of Zionism, the Jewish Nationalist Movement, a desire to see the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine and significant immigration. Zionism remained a minority movement until the rise of Nazism in 1933 and the subsequent attempted extermination of the Jewish people in the Shoah, or Holocaust. In the late 1800's large numbers of Jews began moving to the Turkish and later British-controlled region (the British Mandate of Palestine). The Jewish population in the region increased from 11% of the population in 1922 to 30% by 1940[2].
In 1937, following the Great Arab Revolt, the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission, was rejected by both the Palestinian Arab leadership and the Twentieth Zionist Congress. As a result, in 1939, the British abandoned its approach towards partition and negotiations in favour of the unilaterally-imposed White Paper of 1939, a policy underwhich both Jews and Arabs were to share one government. The policy was viewed as a significant defeat for the Jewish side as it placed severe restrictions on Jewish immigration, and since the Arab population greatly exceeded the Jewish one, it was predicted that the proposed government would be dominated by the Arab side. As a result of the impending Second World War, the plan was never fully implemented.
In 1947, following increasing levels of violence, terrorism and unsuccessful efforts to reconcile the Jewish and Arab populations, the British government withdrew from the Palestine Mandate. Fulfillment of the 1947 UN Partition Plan would have divided the mandated territory into two states, Jewish and Arab, giving about half the land area to each state. Under this plan, Jerusalem was intended to be an international region to avoid conflict over its status. Immediately following the adoption of the Partition Plan by the United Nations General Assembly, the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected the plan to create the, as yet un-named, Jewish State and launched a guerilla war.
On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed. Hoping to annihilate the new Jewish state, the armies of five Arab nations intervened in the ongoing war between Jewish and Arab militias in the former Mandate of Palestine (see: Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948, 1948 Arab-Israeli War). Israel captured an additional 26% of the Mandate territory west of the Jordan river and annexed it to the new state. The West Bank (including East Jerusalem) was captured by Jordan, and annexed by it in 1950, but this annexation was recognized only by the United Kingdom and Pakistan. The Gaza Strip was captured by Egypt, and came under its control.
After the war, only 14-25% (depending on the estimate) of the Arab population remained in Israel, the rest having fled prior to and during the war. When Israel refused the reentry of most, and when subsequent offers of partial repatration were rejected, they became refugees; see Palestinian refugee and Palestinian Exodus for a discussion of the circumstances. Over the following decade, many Jews came to Israel from the surrounding Arab nations, as well as Iran and Europe, doubling Israel's population within one year of independence. Israel's Jewish population continued to grow at a very high rate for some years, fed by waves of Jewish immigration from around the world, most notably recently following the collapse of the USSR.
On May 23rd, 1967, Egypt cut off the Straits of Tiran (Israel's main shipping route to Asia and other major places of trade) to Israeli shipping, and also blockaded the port of Eilat. Egypt ordered United Nations peacekeeping forces to leave the Sinai, and in their place, Egyptian tanks and troops were concentrated on the border with Israel. In accordance with international law, Israel considered the blockade of its port an act of war, and launched an attack on Egypt, especially the Egyptian Air Force. Hostilities came to include Jordan (after Jordan reluctantly chose to dismiss Israeli appeals for neutrality and undertook shelling of Tel Aviv in adherence to its defense treaty with Egypt), Syria, and the Iraqi air force. This was the Six-Day War ( June 5 - 10, 1967), during which Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In 1978 Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt under the Camp David Accords, and in 1981 Israel annexed East Jerusalem. The status of the West Bank and Gaza, populated mostly by Palestinians with some Israeli population, is also undecided and has been the focus of several unsuccessful peace conferences (see Geography below for more).
The status of the Golan Heights is currently the subject of a territorial dispute between Israel and Syria. The Heights, originally part of the British Mandate of Palestine and ceded to the French Mandate of Syria in the early 1920s, were officially annexed by Israel in 1981, although United Nations Security Council Resolution 497 deemed Israel's annexation "null and void and without international legal effect."
In the years since 1948, Israel and the United Nations have often suffered an adversarial relationship. Resolution 194 (passed in December 1948) (note: General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding), granting a conditional " right of return" to Palestinian refugees; Resolution 242 ( November 1967), calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" (Six-Day war); and Resolution 446 ( March 1979), declaring settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be illegal. While most of the 65 security council and general assembly resolutions passed against Israeli actions, and the 41 security council resolutions vetoed by the United States, have had near universal support in the UN (often with the United States and Israel near alone among the dissenting), supporters of Israel claim that the resolutions often misconstrue International Law, that their supporters selectively apply them, and that the assemblies themselves are biased.
Israel is the only state that is barred from joining any of the five geographical groupings that would make it eligible for Security Council membership according to accepted practice. It has indefinite temporary membership of the "Western Europe and Others" group but agreed to not seek UNSC membership on that basis. More than half of the UN's emergency meetings have been to respond to the regional crisis.
See also:
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|