Israel & the West Bank Region

To religious Jews, it is known as Judea and Samaria, the true historical cradle of the Jewish people. To Arabs and Palestinian sympathizers, it is the occupied Territories. To more neutral observers, it is called simply the West Bank -- the portion of historic Palestine that fell under Jordanian administration after Israel's 1948 war of independence, and passed into Israeli hands following its 1967 victory over an Arab coalition. It is a small parcel of land, measuring roughly twenty-five by seventy-five miles -- but it has become one of the most contentious pieces of real estate in the world.

To understand the basis for conflicting rights and claims over the West Bank, it is necessary to briefly outline its modern history. Th

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As Jewish immigration into Palestine continued, predominantly Jewish and Arab areas came to form a patchwork throughout the region. In the course of the rising struggle, Jews were driven out of some areas, notably Hebron, where they had previously lived since biblical times. In 1947, the U.N. partition plan for Palestine called for both Jewish and Arab states, separated by an elaborately drawn border that more or less separated the chief areas of settlement. The Jewish Agency, the nascent Israeli state, accepted the partition plan, though it produced a very hard-to-defend border and greatly complicated even normal state administration. It also placed many of those areas most linked to Jewish history -- such as Hebron itself, and above all the Old City of Jerusalem -- in the Arab sector (Johnson, 1987, p. 532). The Arab states did not accept the U.N. partition plan, and went to war with the avowed purpose of "driving the Jews into the sea." Instead, Israel won the war, and the 1949 truce line redrew the map of Palestine considerably in Israel's favor. Nevertheless, the West Bank and Gaza remained in Arab hands. They could have been constituted then and there as a Palestinian state, a solution which would have met the dema
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1388
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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