Judaism and Islam are two of the world's oldest, and largest monotheistic religions. These religions share a variety of customs, beliefs, and practices. At the same time, there are enough differences that make these two clash. Even those similarities between the two have been the source of conflict for thousands of years. Although there are many conflicts going on in this particular moment in the middle east, I have chosen the ongoing conflict involving Israel and Palestine, primarily due to the recent death of Yasser Arafat. Primarily, I believe that unless there is a resolution of this conflict, there will never be peace in this portion of the world, and there will always exist a threat to world stability and peace.
The history of the Palestinians and the Israelis date back many centuries. Judea was the home of the Jewish ancestry. Judea was conquered by the Romans and renamed Palestine. Palestine was later conquered and inhabited by the Arabs for over a thousand years. The Zionist movement arose to restore the Jews to Israel ignoring the existing Arab population.
Towards the end of World War 1, the British government decided to endorse the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine. The decision was made public in a letter from Lord Arthur Balfour addressed to a lead British Zionist, Lord Rothschild. The contents of Balfour's letter which became formally known as the "Balfour Declaration." The Balfour Declaration was drafted with the assistance of United States Presisent Woodrow Wilson, who was a strong supporter of Zionism. Britain saw the need to protect the sea route to India, where most of Britain's economy relied upon. Supporting Zionism was known to be the easiest way of securing lasting British influence of the east region of the Suez Canal.
The Arabs resented the Jews coming in and taking over their land. Under the lead of Grand Mufti Haj Amin El-Husseini, the Arabs rioted repeatedly for days until later revolting. This incident created...
I read your essay, and I find it quite good. But I disagree with you on some small point. The first is that you stress that this is a war of religion, and it isn't actually, well I mean now people are turning it religious while it's not actually but some extremist are profiting of this to promote their extremist ideas. First of all, Palestinians are muslims as well as christians, there were jews too but these jews joined the state of Israel (in 1900 there was 600,000 Palestinians, of whom 80,000 are jews and 80,000 are christians), nowadays, christians represent 20% of the Palestinian population. Second of all, zionism is a movement that has nothing to do with judaism as a religion, it has got to do with jews as an ethnicity, the major evidence to that is that orthodox jews were all anti-zionist, and the fact is zionist had a very hard time attracting jews, and actually a lot of jews preferred to go to new york instead of going to israel in the early 1900s. The zionist movement was a secular socialist movement (all the origial zionist came from the labor party and some of them were actually atheist), it originated by herzel to find a solution to the rising anti-semitism found in Europe and in USA to a lesser extent. Believe or not, supporters of zionism, outside the jewish sphere, are the anti-semitistic faction such as the nazi, which encouraged german jews to join the zionist organization. and the chrisian zionist is a "sect" found in the USA of extremist protestants that believe that jewish should return to their homeland so that christian missionaries convert them to christianism in israel, and that is actually happening now, which urged the israeli government to change its law of return that gives every person of jewish descent or every jews the right to the israeli nationality. And even to this date ultra-orthodox jews are against the state of Israel, because the Torah says that jews were evicted from their promised land because they sinned and it's only God when he'll come to earth (the messiah) that will get them back their and it's absolutely forbidden to get it by force.
Other point I don't agree with you is the start of the 6 day war, it is true that Arabs used to stay we're going to throw Israel into the sea, and this bla bla stuff about destroying Israel, but this is pure talking, they're expressing their anger over the so-called "catastrophe" with which they describe the 48, but Arabs have proven that they don't mean action, and in fact, if you look at the history, in 48 Arab states didn't actually want to fight Israel, they commited so little man with so little firepower that it was impossible to win the war, and then in 56 Israel attacked Egypt when Egypt blocakded the Suez canal, which many countries at that time (including USA USSR, but obviously not France or UK because they had interests in striking Egypt too) said that Israel didn't have the right to attack Egypt on this basis under international law. And then in 67, it's true Israel was provoked with Egyptian troops maasing along the border and Egypt calling the UN peackeeping troops which were present in Sinai to withdraw, but the USSR which was a big ally of Egypt at that time pressed Egypt not to attack and he succeded. So when Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan and Syria (yes it was Israel who began the attack crippling all the airpower of its neighbors) Egypt had absolutely no plan to invade Israel.
And lastly I agree with you that the only solution to the problem is by being optimistic and apply international law represented by UN resolutions, and obviously terrorism should be halted by both sides. Actually it's a shame that the world sees only the palestinian terrorism (hamas, islamic jihad) but none see the Israeli terrorism. And actually the actor behind the failure of the application of the Oslo agreement was Israel and not the palestinians. So I think we should combat hamas and strenghten the PLO, and in the same time combat the Israeli terrorism and strenghten the peace-seekers such as Rabin or Peres, and not leaders such as Netaniahu who is absolutely against peace.