Between 1933 and 1945 in Nazi Germany, on average, over 1,300 Jews were murdered every day. The Holocaust resulted in the deaths of over six million Jews, from which the Jewish population still has not recovered from. In 1937 during the middle of the Holocaust, the Peel Commission created by the British Government recommended a state be created where Jewish people could live free and without fear of persecution.
Before Israel was created, the land existed as part of the Levant, home to Arabs, Jews, and Christians. The British Mandate of 1922, stemming from the Balfour Declaration, split the British controlled land of Palestine into two territories: the majority of the land, the Israeli state, and the smaller portion, Palestine.
In 1947, 630,000 Jews were living alongside 1.2 million Palestinians in a land called British Palestine. Arab states and the Palestinian people were not in favor of the state for various reasons, including a loss of sovereignty, displacement, and land ownership. During the creation of the Israeli state, a recorded 750,000 Palestinians, according to the UN and CFR, were displaced. In addition, over half of the Palestinian population fled the land or were expelled, moving to other surrounding Arab states. 78% of British Palestine was taken over by Israel, while the remaining 22% was divided into what is now the Western Bank and the Gaza Strip. In addition to the people that were displaced, 15,000 Palestinians were killed in an event that is now called Nakba, an Arabic term that directly translates to “catastrophe” and is used when talking about the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Within days of its creation, a coalition of Arab Countries, the Arab Liberation Army, attacked Israel in an attempt to remove the state before it was even on the maps. The result of this was the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in the deaths of 6,373 Israelis and over 10,000 Arabs.
From this conflict stemmed the term Zionism, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a movement for (originally) the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.” One of several attacks from Israel’s neighbors, the Six-Day War in 1967, in response to an attack from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, captured the land of Gaza. On September 22nd, 2005, they withdrew from all the way to the 1967 Green Line, which is the de facto border of the State of Israel.
A year later, on January 25th, 2006, Hamas, a terrorist group with the mission of making the state of Israel extinct, won the majority of seats in a Palestinian legislative election. Since October 7th, the war has claimed over 37,000 Palestinian lives, making the conflict something that should be seen as a humanitarian crisis.
This article also appears in our June 2024 edition.
