Israel

Israel — page 5 — CHAPTER 2 History In about 1500 BCE several early Hebrew tribes settled on the land now known as Israel Some 500 years later a king named David united the tribes and formed the kingdom of Israel David’s 10 son Solomon helped to make Israel rich and powerful by setting up trade links with other lands He used some of the wealth to build a great limestone temple in Jerusalem When he died in 928 BCE quarrels broke out between the north and south of the country and it split into two kingdoms Israel in the north and Judah in the south In 722 BCE Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians who were one of the great empires of the Middle East at the time Invaders Later Judah was conquered by a series of powerful invaders including the Babylonians 586 BCE the Persians 538 BCE the Greeks 333 BCE the Romans 63 BCE and the Byzantines 330 CE The Babylonians exiled the Judeans known as Jews but in 538 BCE the Persians allowed them to return home The Jews rebuilt Jerusalem including the great temple In 70 CE after the Jews rebelled against Roman rule the Romans burned the Jews frequently faced persecution in the places where they settled This engraving shows the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 Only those Jews who were willing to convert to Christianity could remain

Israel — page 6 — HISTORY A view of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem including the Western Wall of Solomon’s Temple on the right and the golden Dome of the Rock temple to the ground After this the Jews began to leave Judea as the Romans called their land and move elsewhere This was the start of a mass scattering of Jews around the world known as the Diaspora By the eighth century CE Jewish communities had been established as far east as China and as far west as Spain CASE STUDY JERUSALEM Jerusalem is holy to three religions To Jews it was the site of Solomon’s Temple but all that remains of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans is its Western Wall It is holy to Christians because many events in Jesus’s life occurred there Jerusalem is also the third holiest city of Islam after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad rose to heaven from Jerusalem to receive God’s word Jerusalem’s walled Old City is divided into quarters Muslim Jewish Christian and Armenian demonstrating its importance to different cultures and religions Sacred place Under the Byzantines Judea was renamed Palestine and it became an important center of Christianity because it was the place where Jesus of Nazareth the founder of Christianity lived and died In 638 Palestine was conquered by Muslim Arabs Muhammad the founder of Islam was said to have ascended to heaven from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and so Palestine also became a sacred center of Islam The land remained almost continuously under Muslim control until the fall of the Ottoman Empire a Turkish Muslim empire in 1918 Throughout their history the Jews had suffered persecution in the lands they settled During the 1890s there was a rise in anti-Semitism hatred of Jews in parts of Eastern Europe and Russia Many Jews believed the only way to protect themselves was to create a separate Jewish state The Zionist movement was established with the aim of founding a Jewish state in Palestine 11

Israel — page 7 — ISRAEL In the Six-Day War Israeli forces captured East Jerusalem from Jordan The Paratrooper Brigade captured Temple Mount a particularly sacred place for Jewish people which includes the Western Wall Here Israeli paratroopers stand at the Western Wall shortly after its capture when over 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II In 1947 Britain wanted to end its mandate and the United Nations UN planned to split Palestine into two states one for Jews and one for Arabs In May 1948 the British departed from Palestine and Jewish leaders declared the founding of the state of Israel War broke out as five Arab states invaded determined to destroy Israel at birth But after 15 months the Jews had won control of 75 percent of Palestine Transjordan modern Jordan took over the West Bank and Egypt took the Gaza Strip About 726,000 Palestinians fled Israel and settled in the West Bank Gaza and neighboring Arab states Just 150,000 remained in Israel Continuing conflict In 1964 the Palestine Liberation Organization PLO was founded with the aim of replacing Israel with a Palestinian Arab state In June 1967 fearing imminent invasion Israel launched attacks on Egypt Syria and Jordan In just six days Israel In 1920 two years after capturing Palestine from the collapsing Ottoman Empire Britain established a mandate rule over the country The British government had promised the Palestinians independence and had also vowed to create a Jewish national home in Palestine Neither Arabs nor Jews wanted to be ruled by Britain both wanted an independent homeland Discord between the two peoples became intense The state of Israel The movement to create a Jewish state attracted worldwide sympathy following the Holocaust 12

Israel — page 8 — CASE STUDY THE SIX-DAY WAR In 1967 Egypt Jordan and Syria gathered troops close to the Israeli borders sent UN peacekeepers away and blocked Israel’s access to the Red Sea Israel retaliated with strikes that lasted for six days Over that time Israeli troops captured Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from the Egyptians the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan This more than tripled the territory under its control Following the Six-Day War many Palestinians began to focus their support on the PLO HISTORY in 1993 Israel and the PLO signed a peace agreement The Israelis agreed to a staged withdrawal from parts of Gaza and the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority PA was set up to take civil control there But the peace process stalled in the late 1990s and in 2000 a second intifada began In 2005 Israel withdrew its settlers and troops from Gaza and the territory fell under the control of Hamas an Islamic militant group captured substantial territories from all three countries including Gaza and the West Bank Over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs living in these two territories now found themselves under Israeli authority In 1973 Egypt and Syria struck Israel again during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur Israel drove them back but was shaken by the surprise attack In 1987 the first intifada broke out This was a Palestinian rebellion against Israeli military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank Then A masked Palestinian in Jerusalem’s Old City prepares to hurl a rock from a sling in December 2000 during the second or al-Aqsa intifada The uprising was sparked by a controversial visit by Israeli politician Ariel Sharon to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound of the Temple Mount in September 2000 One of the mosque minarets can be seen in the background of this photo 13

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