As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intensifies with Israel advancing ground invasion against Hamas, cutting off the densely populated area from southern Gaza, more than 10,812 Palestinians have been killed and approximately 400,000 people remain stranded in the area, although hundreds of thousand Palestinians had evacuated northern Gaza while in Israel, more than 1,400 lives have been lost since October 7, 2023.
However, as the conflict deepens children have been more affected with over 4,000 losing lives, more than 6,000 left nursing injuries while others displaced and left homeless with no families since they are vulnerable.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports indicate that the conflict has left over 4,104 children dead in Gaza. This implies that more than 100 children die daily on average. Reports from UNICEF also show that, 47% of Gaza’s population are children.
While speaking to the United Nations Security Council on Friday, November 10, 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that on average, a child is killed every 10 minutes in the Gaza Strip, adding that, nowhere and no one is safe.
According to Ghebreyesus, half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals and two-thirds of its primary healthcare centers were not operational, stating that, the healthcare system is deteriorating since the health centers that were operational were jam-packed.
Amid the conflict, there’s world’s failed efforts to reconcile Israel and Palestine as many are coming out to talk about the magnitude of the conflict without offering solutions, or even other countries remaining cold on the issue. For instance, some scholars have come out to criticize the US, saying that it has ignored the hopelessness of the Israel-Palestine conflict for too long, adding that Joe Biden, the US President seemed to recognize that hopelessness was where danger lay, but was unwilling to take meaningful action to address it.
The general exhaustion with the seemingly unending cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians has strengthened a historical notion of the conflict as an ancient and religious one. It’s crucial to understand that, there can be no assessment of the present, nor discussion of the future, without an understanding of how the conflict unfolded from the beginning.
The Israeli-Palestinian war stretches way back in the early history, about a few thousand years ago. Early in 1700 BC, following God’s call, there were three devotees of the Jewish people that is Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who settled in Canaan, the Promised Land.
The ancient origin of Israel is derived from the Hebrew Bible which points back to Abraham, who is considered the father of both Judaism through his son Isaac, and Islam that birthed from his son Ishmael.
Way back in the biblical context, the descendants of Abraham are believed to have been under the Egyptians’ slavery for equivalent to hundreds of years before they could settle in Canaan the Promised Land, the present day Israel, West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, parts of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which region later had a name; the Land of Israel, the Promised Land, the Palestine region or the Holy Land. The word Israel originates from Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, who was renamed Israel by the Hebrew God in the Bible.
Israel, the world’s only Jewish area located East of the Mediterranean Sea, and Palestine the territory of the Arab population that hails from the Israel controlled land has been long well-known for their enduring conflict by the Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The tension between the two has been deteriorating over the years climaxing with many violent clashes from both sides.
In 1000 BC, King Saul established the Israelite monarch which was then ruled by King David who made Jerusalem the Capital of his kingdom. King Solomon who replaced his father King David, built the first temple in the ancient Jerusalem. In around 931 BC, after the death of King Solomon, the united kingdom was divided into two Kingdoms, which is Israel as the Northern kingdom with Samaria as the Capital, and Judah as the Southern kingdom with Jerusalem as the Capital. The land became home to majority of the Jews.
However, around 722 BC, it’s said that, the Assyrians invaded and destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and in 568 BC, the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple, which was later in around 516 BC, replaced by a second temple.
In the following several centuries, the land of present-day Israel was conquered and ruled by various groups, like the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians, Mamelukes, and Islamists, among others which led to the significant decrease of the Jewish population. The Roman Empire during the conquest gave the name Palestine to Judah with an intention to break the Jewish connection with the land of Israel. During the 63 BC, Christianity which started as a sect of the Jewish became dominant till the end of the Roman Empire in 476 AD.
The 7th Century (636) became an era of conquest, beginning with Islam and Jerusalem became the Holy City to three religions which include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the 11th century, Christians were intensively persecuted by the Seljuk Turks-a central Asian Empire with an ambition to expand its territory, Christians in Europe ran several crusades to bring the Holy City back to the hands of Christians. During this period, many Jews were killed while others were making pilgrimages everywhere, mostly in Western Europe.
Uganda Proposed to be a Jewish Homeland
In 1903, the Uganda Scheme was a proposal by Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial Secretary, and then met with the Australian-Hungarian journalist-Theodor (Benjamin Ze’ev) Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement who agreed to create a Jewish homeland in a portion of British East Africa.
It was later, presented at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel on August 26, 1903, by Herzl, as a temporary refuge for Jews to escape the rising anti-Semitism in Europe. 295 delegates at the Congress voted in favor of sending a fact-finding group to East Africa (the Karamoja region in North-Eastern Uganda), while 178 voted against.
The proposal continued to face opposition from both the Zionist movement and the British Colony, as some delegates viewed it as a betrayal of the Basel Program and a conflict between Palestine and Uganda. The discord threatened to divide the organization, with some Eastern European delegates dramatically walking out of the meeting and others expressing their loss of trust in Herzl and the steering committee. Moreover, the emotional tension remained high, with some delegates falling on each other’s necks, weeping, and a young student fainting.
However, in 1905, the plan was mainly rejected partly due to the opposition by the former High Commissioner of East Africa and the white settlers in the area. This led the British to withdraw the offer.
From 1517 to 1917, the current Israel, together with the biggest part of the Middle East, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic superpower under the chief leader, known as the Sultan and the land was unofficially called Palestine. In the same period, many Jews joined a movement called Zionism with an aim of creating a Jewish state in its enchant homeland. However, in the 20th century, ten thousands of Jews began to go back to the region.
The Israel-Palestine war, one of the longest continuing conflicts which dates back from a few thousand years ago, rotates around many problems. However, the very fascinating one is the problem of sharing a relatively small but geographically varied strip of land sitting between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Two nations on one land. Nonetheless, this can be solved by drawing borders.
There was a failure of successive attempts to establish independent states that satisfy the claims of both Jewish and Palestinian nationalism to the same territorial space. This is as a result of 1897, World Zionist Organization meeting held in Basel, Switzerland when the Zionist leaders identified Palestine as the land in which to build a Jewish national home and secure for Jews their own state.
The story will continue when we will be looking at Israel and Palestine under the British Rule
