ALL FOR A PIECE OF LAND

November 26, 2023 Opinion

The brutal and devastating war in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas is all about land and the territory that can be had from it. It was never about religion but the very soil upon which the Jews and the Palestinians insist and claim as their own.

For those who have never set foot in Palestine much less the Middle East it would be ideal to learn more, if only to be informed, about one of the most troubled parts of the world and to which many so called experts have already alluded to as one of the flashpoints that may usher in another world war. A peek at the internet will show that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians had its genesis during the latter part of the 19th century thru so called Zionists, a nationalist movement that enabled the Jewish people in Palestine to establish their own homeland.

Eventually Zionism transformed into an ideology that supported the development and protect the State of Israel. Much earlier, sometime in 1918 when World War I ended, the British took control of Palestine, a piece of land covering an area of about 10,600 square miles (Israel, West Bank and Gaza combined), which issued, thru the League of Nations, a British mandate that gave administrative control over the region and included the provision of establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, taking effect in 1923.

(https:// www.history.com/topics/ middle-east/palestine) Thereafter in 1947 the United Nations came up with a proposed plan to divide Palestine into two parts with one part comprising an independent Jewish state and the other part an independent Arab state with the city of Jerusalem, claimed by both Jews and Palestinian Arabs, as an international territory accorded special status.
Subsequently in 1948, after Britain withdrew from Palestine, Israel declared itself as an independent state which led to the Arab-Israeli War.

That conflict involved five Arab nations (Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon) and after the war ended in July of 1949 Israel controlled more than two thirds of Palestine with Jordan taking control of the West Bank and Egypt taking control of the Gaza strip where much of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas is now happening. In 1967 the so called six-day war occurred between Israel and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria which saw the former occupy more land in Palestine,
this time taking control of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights.

With Israel now controlling and occupying large swathes of Palestine and the concerned Arab nations opposing the occupation it was inevitable that tensions would escalate and in 1987 the first
Intifada, a Palestinian uprising occurred against Israel for its occupation of West Bank and Gaza and which resulted in hundreds of people being killed.

The Intifada where Palestinian militia groups revolted against Israel for its continued control and occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip is actually what the world is now again witnessing this time spearheaded by Hamas which made a surprise attack against Israel on that fateful day of October 7, 2023 that resulted in the death of more than a thousand Israelis and the taking hostage of an estimated 240 other people.

Of course the eventual retribution by Israel that followed will forever be ingrained in the eyes and minds of the world for its brutality and resulting destruction as well as the deaths of thousands of
Palestinians. So the Israel-Hamas war that is now raging is actually all about land and who gets to
control and occupy it. This is what has been happening for centuries in the past when nations went to war against other nations purposely to take other lands and claim it for their own.

In fact this is what is also happening right now in another part of the world when Russia invaded Ukraine on the former’s claim that it was recovering territories originally belonging to it. For now we can only watch in horror as wars are being waged by nations resulting in humungous numbers of lives lost and all for the opportunity of grabbing a piece of land to thereafter claim it as their own.