In order to understand any persistent conflict in the world, one must investigate its historical origins. The Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East remains one of the most dangerous flashpoints facing the human race in 2005 because it involves elements of great power politics, cultural, religious, and racial prejudice, the struggle to control oil, and the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, primarily, but not exclusively by Israel.
In 1922 the League of Nations laid the groundwork for the conflict by giving both France and England colonial authority in areas of the Ottoman Empire that was conquered by the West in the First World War, thereby creating the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, as well as Jordan, then known as Transjordan, and Palestine (Wikipedia 2004). The population of Palestine at the time of the mandate consisted of 589,200 Muslims, 83,800 Jews and 71,500 Christians.
The core of the conflict is a fight between two religions for control of a small strip of land to which they each feel entitled รป the Jews because of the alleged entitlement from God they received for the Promised Land in the Bible, and the Arabs because of their centuries of control and initial majority status.
Soon after the mandate Jews began to immigrate in large numbers into the Holy Land, guided by the ideology of Zionism, which held that because of a long history of diaspora and its attendant persecutions, Jews should return to their mythical/historical homeland. This angered the local Arabs, and they resisted from the beginning with violence.
In 1947 the United Nations partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab sectors. Israel declared its independence and the Arabs attacked from all sides. By 1949 the Arab armies had been defeated. Major demographic movements of people resulted from the conflict, with 600,000 Jews flooding into the new state from other Middle Eastern countries, and 750,000 Arab refugees being margina...