Israel is an unlikely state. It was formed by the return of the Jewish people into an inhospitable land after centuries of the Jewish Diaspora. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Palestine from the sixteenth century. After World War I, the League of Nations made the area a protected mandate under British control. Improvidently, the British had made conflicting commitments about the future of Palestine. In return for help against the Ottomans in World War I, the British promised statehood to the Arabs. In return for Jewish support, the British in the Balfour Declaration promised at national Jewish homeland. After World War II, the weary British gave up and tossed the problem into the lap of the United Nations. Attempting to forge a compromise, the United Nations in 1947 divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas, essentially present-day Israel and Jordan. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence and the formal creation of the Israeli state. The surrounding Arab nations attacked, but were rebuffed in the Israeli War for Independence.
That was more than 50 years ago and the problems have lingered largely because of a persistent refugee problem. There are conflicting estimates as to the number of Arabs who fled Israel after the country declared independence. The numbers are less than 1 million, but certainly more than 500,000. A roughly corresponding number of Jews in Arab nations fled to Israel and Israel's Jewish population swelled as European and other Jews from the West migrated to Israel.
The popular mythology of the Palestinian Arabs is that Arabs fled because they feared persecution by the Israelis. Israelis claim that Arab leaders urged fellow Arabs to leave to make it easier to exterminate the Jewish state. Whether or not the Palestinians should have believed the promises made by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, that Arabs in Israel would be granted full citizenship if they remained in Israel, the fact is they did not and fled Israel.
Jewish refugees that fled to Israel from other nations were welcomed as brothers and sisters and assimilated into the fledging state. Indeed, they have become the backbone of modern Israel. By contrast, surrounding Arab nations did not accommodate Palestinian Arab refugees. They were, instead, deliberatedly concentrated into refugee camps where their anger was allowed to fester.
In yet another attempt to seize the land of Israel, the Arabs initiated a new war in 1967. The war lasted six days, after which the Israel controlled the West Bank of the Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Through years of negotiation, Israel has gradually relinquished land back to the Arabs in the hopes of purchasing peace with land. Of course, the tragic irony is that if there had been no 1967 War, if the Arabs had accepted their half of the Palestine mandate, Israel never would have controlled the land occupied after the Six-Day War (or Jerusalem) and the Arab Palestinians would be negotiating with Jordan for the creation of a separate Palestinian state.
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