More On Jews and Arabs (3)

So Israel has pulled back in Gaza, and her Arab assailants are offering another truce—their time honored tactic for getting time to regroup and rearm. And Jimmy Carter looks at us through the TV screen with doe eyes and assures us they have promised him peace and harmony this time.
This is one more chapter in a 2500 year old story. It began, really, about the time the Babylonians (586BC) forced the Hebrews who stilled lived in the land of Israel (Palestine now) to relocate to the east. The land was left empty and the Nabataean Arabs, coming out of Arabia, moved from the area east of the Dead Sea—where they had encroached upon the ancient Edomites and Moabites—into southern Judea.
When the Persians overthrew the Babylonians and sent some Judeans (Jews) back to the area around Jerusalem, the returning Jews found much of their land gone. Assyrians (729BC) had filled the northern and central parts (think west bank) with non-Jews after carting off the northern tribes of Israel.
The Edomites had moved west from what is Jordan today into southern Judea. The Nabataeans were pushing in behind the Edomites. The Jerusalem Jews found themselves in control of a relatively small rump state. It didn’t help that by the Second Century BC Jews began to fight savagely over religious differences—do we worship in the temple only or can we worship in synagogues?
Eventually an ambitious Edomite, Antipater (father of the King Herod who appears in the Christmas story), allied himself with Rome and allowed the Romans to end the civil war in their usual efficient manner. Now Judea was a client state of Rome, ruled by a non-Jew.
(Herod, son of Antipater, had to spend a good bit of his time fighting off Arabs who kept moving up from Arabia and west from Nabataea. This threat briefly stopped when Rome conquered Nabataea as well.)
The Jews revolted twice against Rome. The first time (AD70) got them a nasty head slap, complete with a lot of crucifixions. The second revolt (AD135) earned them some serious Roman retaliation. Jerusalem itself was so completely flattened that an entire Roman legion could pitch its tents on the ruins.
Besides that, Rome decreed that no Jew could live in Judea (the land around Jerusalem) and the Roman Empire remained in charge of that area for roughly 500 more years. The Romans (Byzantines) were driven out by Muslim (Arab) invaders in AD638. The land would remain under Arab/Muslim control (with a brief Crusader interlude in the 1100s) until 1917.
That’s a long time to be out of your own house—AD135 to 1917. But the Jews never forgot their ancient city—dwelling place of their God, Yahweh, and the site of their holy temple. Muslims added insult to injury by building one of their holiest mosques on the site of the Jewish temple that had been destroyed in AD70.
By the 1800s, the land we call Israel today had become an inhospitable desert. Wells had caved in; trees were cut down and not replaced. Only a few Bedouin hung around, living in tents near the occasional oasis. The Muslim Turks who ruled the land did nothing to develop it.
Pogroms arose in Russia in the mid-1800s. Harassed and endangered Russian Jews fled, many to the United States. But a wealthy French Jew—a Rothschild—began buying up land that no one wanted in what was then called Palestine (to show their hatred of Jews, Romans had renamed Israel/Judea Palestine—after the Jews’ ancient enemy, the Philistines).
Jews trickled in to Palestine. Rothschild was persistent. They puttered around looking for ancient wells—using the Biblical record as a means to locate them. The land began slowly, painstakingly, to turn green again.
Arabs sat up and took notice. “Hey, look guys, this isn’t such a bad place after all!” They too began to move in. World War I came—the British promised Palestine to both Jews and Arabs. They needed everybody to fight the Turks. They took physical possession in 1917 when Palestine became a British protectorate.
Jews in Palestine had a few friends in London (notably Churchill), but the Arabs had oil, and His Majesty’s Fleet definitely needed that. So the balance of power in Judea and Galilee (areas of major Jewish settlement) began to tilt clearly toward the Arabs.
Jewish immigration was sharply limited—even when it became obvious that Jews in central Europe were in real danger from the Nazis. Laws were applied leniently to Arabs; harshly to Jews. Unstated British policy became: “Better a thousand Jews should die in gas chambers than one Arab become offended by their presence in Palestine.”
Oil. It was the key—then as it is now. As long as we have no real substitute for it, it will continue to tip the scales on our business in the Levant and beyond.
Arabs will continue to offer truces—and, as soon as they are up, the rockets will fly. Then the oil thirsty West will demand that Israel stop threatening their oil supply and send more diplomatic missions to assure that it continues to flow. And Israel will just have to wait until the next truce is up.
While they continue to eat and farm from the wells their fathers dug and they redug.