ABSTRACT
“Modern Israel had its political origins in the doctrine of nationalism, which . . . permeated Europe in the nineteenth century.” With that observation, Robert O. Freedman sketches the emergence of Zionism, the call of Jewish thinkers for a homeland of their own in Palestine. Prominent among early Zionists was Theodore Herzl, who wrote The Jewish State (1896) and organized the first international Zionist congress. In the heat of World War I and the struggle against Germany and the Ottoman Empire, the English made vague promises of Arab independence from the Ottoman Turks and declared that Palestine west of the Jordan River would be maintained as an internationally controlled zone. But in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 they also promised a Jewish “national home in Palestine.” After World War II, the newly formed United Nations called for the end of the British mandate—the administrative control that the British had exercised over Palestine for some twenty-five years—and endorsed the establishment of two states (with Jerusalem set apart as an international zone), a recommendation that Palestinian Jews accepted but Palestinian Arabs rejected. Freedman summarizes the military conflicts that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948, including the defeat of the invading Arab armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq immediately after the proclamation of the Israeli state in 1948; Israel’s 1956 attack (with England and France) against Egypt; and the 1967 war in which Israel seized the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The chapter concludes with the observation that Israel continues to face threats even beyond the Arab world, as Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has openly called for the destruction of Israel, and Iran backs two enemies of Israel in particular: Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas, which now governs Gaza.
