II. The Historical Causes of the Conflict between Palestine and
Israel
The cause of conflict between Palestine and Israel could be traced back to four thousand years ago when Abraham led his family to the promised land of Canaan around 2000 BCE. In the Book of Genesis, God promised to Abraham that “I will give the whole land of Canaan as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.” (Genesis 17:8) That’s the main reason that Israelis who had been exiled from their home land for over 2,000 years would eventually come back to their home land as promised by God in the Bible or in Jewish Torah.
Abraham had one son with his wife Sarah named Isaac, who had a son named Jacob which later changed to Israel. Jacob, or Israel, had twelve sons and was the ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel. Abraham also had a son with Sarah’s Egyptian maid Hagar named Ishmael. After Hagar had a son, she became disrespectful toward Sarah and Sarah could not tolerate them any more. So Hagar and her son had to leave the Abraham family and went out on their own. Eventually, Ishmael grew up and got married and raised his own family. He also had twelve sons and became the ancestor of the Arab tribes. The resentment between Israelis and Arabs started from the split between Isaac and Ishmael almost four thousand years ago.
About one hundred years later, the Canaan area had a big famine and Abraham’s grandson Jacob(also named Israel) led his family to Egypt while one of his sons Joseph was the chief officer in Egypt. After Joseph passed away, Egyptians began to mistreat Israelites as slaves. Then God called a man named Moses to be the prophet for Israelites and lead them out of Egypt to go back to their promised land in Canaan.
In about 1500 BCE, Moses led his people out of Egypt and eventually came back to their promised land of Canaan after forty years of wandering in the desert. After many generations of fighting with the gentiles in the area, King David, the second king of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah, established Jerusalem as the capital of the kingdom in 1000 BCE. Fifty years later, David’s son King Solomon built the first temple of God in Jerusalem.
After the death of King Solomon, the Kingdom of Israel split into two kingdoms: the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south with Jerusalem as its capital and the Solomon’s temple in it. In 720 BCE, the Kingdom of Israel was conquered and destroyed by the Assyrian Empire, and the Kingdom of Judah submitted as a client state of the Assyrian Empire and then the Babylon Empire.
In 586 BCE, the Babylonians destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Solomon’s Temple after a failed Jewish revolt in Jerusalem. The survivors of the destruction were sent to Babylon as prisoners and slaves. This is the first time ancient Israelites were sent into exile from their homeland after they were defeated by their enemy.
The exile ended with the fall of Babylon to the Achaemenid(Persian) Empire in 538 BCE. Subsequently, the Persian king Cyrus the Great issued a proclamation known as the Edict of Cyrus, which authorized and encouraged exiled Jews to return to Judah. Jews returned to Jerusalem and built the Second Temple in 516 BCE to replace the destroyed Solomon’s Temple.
In 63 BCE, the Roman Republic conquered the Jewish kingdom and later incorporated it into the Roman Empire in 6 AD as the province of Judaea. But Jewish people were not happy with the Roman government and they expected the Messiah to come and lead them to defeat the Roman Empire and become independent from the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately, when Jesus Christ came as a son of a carpenter from Nazareth, all those priests, elders and teachers of the law in the Jewish synagogues did not recognize him nor accept him as their Messiah. Instead, they want the Roman governor Pilate to crucify him for his blasphemy. They made a dreadful mistake and eventually paid a hefty price for this mistake.
In 70 AD, after a failed revolt against the Roman Empire, Jerusalem was destroyed again with its Second Temple totally destroyed also. Jews were expelled from their home land and went on exile all over the world for the next 1,900 years. That’s the second exile for Jewish people in history.
In 638 AD, the Muslim army besieged and captured the city of Jerusalem. According to the Islamic legend, the Islamic prophet Muhammad traveled on the back of a winged horse to Jerusalem in one night around 621 AD and ascended in to heaven from a rock in Jerusalem. This Night Journey and ascent into heaven are marked as one of the most celebrated dates in the Islamic calendar - 27th of the Islamic month of Rajab. Therefore, in 691-692 AD, Muslims built the Dome of the Rock on top of the site of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in memory of this miraculous event.
In 1099, the Christian Crusaders from Europe captured Jerusalem and established the First Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. They converted the Dome of the Rock into a Christian Church and ruled in Jerusalem from 1099 to 1187.
In 1187, Saladin, the Islamic Ayyubid Sultan of both Egypt and Syria, led his army to defeat the Crusaders and re-captured Jerusalem. Saladin reconverted the Dome of the Rock to an Islamic center of worship, but he also allowed Christians to stay in Jerusalem and Western Christian pilgrims could worship freely in Jerusalem.
From 1192-1291, the Crusaders established the Second Crusader Kingdom and gained partial control of Jerusalem through the treaties with the Ayyubid Dynasty. In 1260, the army of the Mongol Empire reached Palestine and captured Jerusalem, which ended the Ayyubid power in the region. A few months later, due to the death of Mongol Great Khan, Mongke, in the battle in China, Hulagu, the brother of Mongke Khan, led the majority of the Mongol army retreated from the Middle East to go back to Mongol with only 10,000 troops left to rule the region.
In September 1260, the Egypt-based Mamluk army came to Palestine to challenge the remaining Mongol army and defeated the Mongol army in the Battle of Ain Jalut in the Galilee area. Since then, the Mamluks had ruled the Palestine region for the next 256 years.
In 1516, the Ottoman Empire captured Jerusalem after it defeated Mamluks in the Palestine region. In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on his way to the final defeat of the Mamluks in Egypt. Since then, the Ottoman Empire had ruled the Palestine region for about four hundred years.
In 1914, the First World War broke out and Britain declared war against the Ottoman Empire in November 1914. To enlist the support of the worldwide Jewish community for the war against the Ottoman Empire, the British Government supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population.
On November 2, 1917, the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom Arthur Balfour delivered a letter to Lord Rothschild, a wealthy banker and a leader of the British Jewish community, to declare the British Government’s support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This is called the Balfour Declaration, which greatly increased popular support of Zionism within Jewish community worldwide and eventually led to the emergence of the State of Israel.
In 1917, the British Army defeated the Ottoman army at the Battle of Jerusalem during the First World War, and Jerusalem was under British military administration until the British Mandate was established in 1920. Since then, more and more Jews had migrated to Palestine from all over the world and the conflicts between Jews and Palestinians had intensified.
After World War II, the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust was uncovered, which had caused the death of six million Jews in Nazi Germany’s Concentration Camps, and most people in the world had sympathy for Jews. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations approved the partition plan for Palestine to subdivide it into Jewish State and Arab State with Jerusalem as a Special International Regime at the end of the British Mandate.
While most Jews were happy about the Partition Plan as Jewish States got 56% of the territory, the Palestinian Arab were not happy about it because the Palestinian Arab population numbered twice the Jewish population but only got 42% of the territory. Thus they boycotted this UN Partition Plan of Palestine and most neighboring Arab states also supported Palestinians against this Partition Plan.
On May 14, 1948, the day on which the British Mandate over Palestine expired, the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum and approved a proclamation that declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.
On the next day, May 15, 1948, the League of Arab States declared war against Israel and the armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq invaded what had just ceased to be the British Mandate, marking the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In the end, the Israel Defense Forces defeated the Arab armies and extended their borders beyond the original UN partition between Israel and Arab nations. In 1949, Israel signed the Armistice Agreements with these Arab nations and formally ended the Arab-Israeli War started in 1948.
During this Arab-Israeli War in 1948, over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs either voluntarily left in fear of war or were forced to leave their homes in Palestine. The League of Arab States promised them that they could return to their home after they annihilated the state of Israel, but unfortunately, they lost the war to Israel and Israel refused to let those Palestinians come back to their homes in Israel controlled territory. That caused the problem of Palestinian Refugees lasting till now.
In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan formed an alliance ready to fight against Israel again. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and destroyed nearly all of Egypt’s fighter jets. With its air supremacy, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. After some initial resistance, the Egyptian army retreated from the Sinai Peninsula and Israel occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.
On June 5, 1967, Jordan got the false report of an Egyptian victory and began attacking Israeli positions in Jerusalem. Israel responded with a devastating counterattack on Jordan armies and eventually took full control of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. A few days later, Israeli troops also defeated Syria and captured the Golan Heights from Syria.
This was the first time in almost two thousand years that Jews took back the Old Capital of Jerusalem since it was captured and destroyed by the Roman troops in 70 AD. Ever since then, the Jews had been scattered around the world for almost two thousand years. In 1967, they finally came back to the old capital of the Kingdom of Israel that was established by King David three thousand years ago.
Throughout human history, no other nation could be reborn after over a thousand years of exile from their homeland. But as prophesied by God through the vision shown to prophet Ezekiel, God would revive those “dry bones”, which represented the whole house of Israel, and give them new flesh and new breath of life. Then these “dry bones” would come back to life and become a vast army(Ezekiel 37:1-14), which indicated that Israel would be reborn again with strong military power.
This 2,500-year old prophecy was partially fulfilled in 1948 when the UN approved the Jewish State of Israel to be re-established in their homeland, the current Palestine region, and it was completely fulfilled after the recapture of Jerusalem in 1967.
Therefore, the Jewish people coming back to their homeland after almost two thousand years of exile was prophesied and planned by God almost 2,500 years ago. It’s time for Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to live peacefully together rather than fight against each other until one nation is completely annihilated.
Here is the Divine Revelation from the Peace Messiah for the New Millennium on the current problems and solutions to end the War in the Middle East, especially between Israel and Palestine and its supporters.
I. The Recent War Between Israel and
Hamas/Iran in the Middle East
II. The Historical Causes of the Conflict between Palestine and Israel
III. The Bad Karma that Caused the Conflicts Between Israel and Palestine/Iran
IV. The Political Solution to
Cease Fire in Gaza and End the War in the Middle East
V. The Spiritual Solutions for Permanent Peace and Reconciliation
