Israel : a fight for peace

Abstract

The history of Israel is an odd one. I say this because unlike other states, the history of Israel is not a sequence of events occurring within a particular geographical context but the collective experience of a scattered population united only by their religious background. The memories of the Jews in Poland are equally part of Israeli history as the memories of their contemporary co-religionists in other parts of the world. Therefore to understand Israeli history is to understand the history of a people. There are many opinions regarding the birth of Israeli history. Did it start off with God's promises to Abraham as we are told in the old testament? Did it start off with The Balfour Declaration of 1917? Or did Israeli history start off with the proclamation of its independence on the 14th May 1948? The answer to these questions may be left to the historians. In the meantime it seems, at least to this student that the most important issues do not concern Israel's past but its future. The state of Israel as we know it today only has a history spanning just over fifty years. However the sequence of events that led to its creation go back a little bit longer than that. Before Independence was declared on the 14th May 1948 the region in question was know as Palestine. It consists of a narrow stretch of fertile territory that lies between the desert and the Mediterranean. Palestine was located on the land bridge between Asia and Africa and has been inhabited since the earliest times.