Posted on 04/08/2002 12:52:26 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
3000BC -- Canaanites inhabit Palestine
1125BC -- Israelites conquer the Canaanites
1050BC -- Philistines conquer Israelites.
1000BC -- Under King David, Israelites conquer Philistines and establish the nation of Israel. After his son, King Solomon dies, Israel becomes divided: the north becoming Israel and the south becoming Judah.
722BC -- Israel falls to Assyria
586BC -- Babylon captures Judah -- This defeat resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of most of the Jews to Babylon -- the so-called Babylonian captivity.
539BC -- Under Cyrus the Great, the Persians conquered Babylonia. The Jews were allowed to return to Judaea, a district in Palestine.
333BC -- Alexander the Great captures Palestine. His successors -- the Egyptian Ptolemies and the Syrian Seleucids -- tried without success to force Greek culture and religion on the people.
141-63BC -- The Jews revolted and established an independent state. This lasted until Pompey the Great conquered Palestine for Rome and made it a province of the Roman Empire ruled by Jewish kings. Rome ruled Palestine for about 700 years.
638AD -- Palestine is invaded by Muslim Arab armies that capture Jerusalem. Thus begins 1300 years of Muslim presence in what becomes known as Filastin.
1517 -- The Mamelukes are defeated by the Ottomans, who rule Palestine for the next four hundred years -- until the winter of 1917-18.
1880s -- With the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, Jews begin to migrate to Palestine.
1917-18 -- The British takes Palestine from the Ottomans at the end of World War I.
1917 -- Britain creates Balfour Declaration that outlines conditions to create a "national home" for Jews in Palestine. With this declaration, Britain hoped to gain the support of the Jews for the Allied cause in World War I.
July 24 1922 -- The declaration was incorporated into the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. It outlines the terms under which Britain was given responsibility for temporary administration of the country. The mandate lasted from 1922-1948.
1935 -- Over 60,000 Jews come into Palestine.
1936 -- Because of a fear of Jewish domination, an Arab revolt broke out. This continues on and off until 1939.
1947 -- Britain declares the mandate unworkable and passes the problem over to the United Nations. Under David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish army fights against the Arab
Palestinians and defeats them.
On May 14th 1948, the State of Israel is created. Because of this, five Arab states, in support of the Palestinians, attack the new state but are defeated. This is known as the first Arab-Israeli War. As a result of the war, 780,000 Palestinians became refugees.
1964 -- The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is founded as a political body representing the Palestinians.
1967 -- In another war between Israel and the Arabs (commonly known as the Six Days War), Israel gains control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and other areas previously controlled by the Arabs.
1970 -- The PLO commandos fight with the Jordanian army. The PLO is expelled from the country and settles in Lebanon. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon is 1982 is conducted to disperse some 12,000 PLO members to Syria and other Arab countries.
1988 -- All territorial claims to the Israeli-held West Bank are ceded to the PLO by Jordanian King Hussein.
In December, the United States agrees for the first time to begin direct contact with the PLO.
1991 -- After the Gulf War, the Syrian-backed Lebanese army forced the PLO to retreat from its positions in southern Lebanon.
After decades of violence, conflict and disagreement, PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin meet in the United States on 13 September (1993) to witness the signing of a peace accord between the two groups. The plan stipulated Palestinian self-rule in Israeli-occupied areas, beginning with the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
In May 1994, Palestinian control and administration of these areas began. Israeli forces withdraw from Jericho and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian National Authority assumes control of the areas.
1995 -- Israeli Prime Minister Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli opposed to the peace accord.
1996 -- Binyamin Netanyahu wins the election. Arab leaders are upset by his ultra-conservative views. Netanyahu considerably slows down the peace process.
1998 -- Netanyahu and Arafat meet for peace negotiations at Aspen Institute's Wye River Conference Centre. On 23 October the peace deal is signed (the Wye Accord).
In December, 1998, as part of the Wye Accord, members of the Palestine National Council voted to remove clauses from the PLO's charter that call for the destruction of Israel.
May 1999 -- Israelis elect a new Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, to lead them in the peace process with the Palestinians and neighbouring states.
Sept 2000 -- Intense violence escalates. More than 400 people die in Israel in a matter of 14 weeks (380 Palestinians).
December 2000 -- Barak resigns.
February 2001-- Ariel Sharon is elected Prime Minister. Sharon's victory comes 18 years after an Israeli government investigation found Sharon indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinian refugees were killed in Lebanon, and forced his removal as defense minister, crushing his political ambitions.
He was elected to restore Israel's peace and security in the wake of four-month-long clashes between Palestinians and Israelis. (Ironically, the violence that has killed so far more than 360 Palestinians and over 50 Israeli Jews began at the end of September, after Sharon paid a controversial visit to a Jerusalem shrine.)
Isn't a blockade of one nations ports by another nation generally agreed to be an act of war?
You forget to mention the Israeli policy of selective deforestation of olive groves.
Regards
J.R.
Simply mobilizing along the borders, but not firing a shot, is EFFECTIVELY starting a war with Israel.
Israel has a far smaller population than the neighboring Arab states, and thus has to mobilize a far higher % of its population for war. The Israelis are unable to mobilize their entire army and keep it mobilized for more than a few weeks, maybe a month, before their entire economy would collapse because there's no work getting done. However, the Arab states can stay mobilized far longer. So, basically, Israel generally HAS to strike first; they can't sit around mobilized forever.
In 1967, technically, the Israelis "started" the war because they fired the first shots; The reality was that they really couldn't do much else.
The Arab states are aware they'll get struck preemptively if they even begin to mobilize in a serious way; hence, they don't do so.
1963: the Ga'ould seed the area with "Palestinian" Pod People to cause trouble.
Since Arafat was born in Cairo, how did he get to be Palastinian?
Yep...and so is the rest of the world. None of us sprouted from the soil. Conquest is the way of the world.
Another, small oversight. Arafat turns down 'Peace Accord' by which all Israeli, and neutral accounts gave the Palestinians way too much.
They wiped out the entire Egyptian Air Force, bombs loaded, on the ground just as they were gassing up and heading to combat. The Mosad knew their flight plan. Good intel wins wars, and in an area as compact as that, it pays to have a hair trigger.
In 1967, the Arabs "technically" started the war by blockading an international waterway to Israeli shipping (a recognized act of war). The Jordanians were even more "technical" by firing the first shots at their armistice lines with Israel.
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© St. Petersburg Times, published August 3, 2000
JERUSALEM -- In the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, there's one big issue that's not even on the table. Yet it's very much on the minds of thousands of Jews -- those who left their homes in Arab countries after Israel's 1948 war of independence.
The flight of an estimated 800,000 Arab Jews "is not well known in the rest of the world," concedes Jacob Efrati, a Jew who was born in Libya. "The reason is that Israel did not want to cause any more misery so it made every effort to absorb them."
The 1948 war, which pitted the new nation of Israel against several Arab countries, resulted in a transfer of population the likes of which the world has rarely seen. In just a few months of 1948, at least 600,000 Palestinian Arabs left or were driven from their homes on Israeli soil. Over the next few years, Arab countries saw the departure of most of their Jewish residents, about 600,000 of whom settled in the new Jewish state.
It was not an easy transfer for either side, and its repercussions are still being felt. Palestinians are demanding the "right of return" to their land or at least compensation for property losses. Next to the fate of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugee question is probably the toughest issue facing negotiators.
But Jewish refugees say they too should be compensated.
If negotiators ever compared figures for property lost by Arabs who fled Israel with those for Jews who fled Arab countries, Efrati insists, the results would be revealing. "I'm sure it would show that we lost more," he says.
In many ways, Efrati's story is that of the Jewish people throughout history. His ancestors moved from place to place -- Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain -- because, as he says, "nobody wanted the Jews." They finally settled in the North African nation of Libya where his grandfather became chief rabbi. But as anti-Semitism rose after the 1948 war, his family was on the move. In 1951, when he was 6, they left all their possessions and took a ship across the Mediterranean to Haifa, Israel. For almost four years, they lived in a tent on an old British military base, hauling water from a quarter-mile away and cooking on a tiny oil burner.
"Jews from all over the world came here," he says. "There were very few buildings at the start of Israel but in two years Israel absorbed almost 2.5-million Jews."
Helped by donations from the Jewish diaspora, the new nation provided shelter, albeit modest, and education for the new arrivals. Efrati became an economist and is city auditor of Maale Adumin, the Jewish settlement in the West Bank near Jerusalem.
Efrati's wife is also a refugee. But she took a very different route to Israel.
Tzvia Efrati was born in Iraq, home of one of the largest Jewish communities in the Arab world. Jews had lived there since 586 B.C. when Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, captured Jerusalem, destroyed the first Jewish temple and drove the exiles hundreds of miles across the desert.
Mrs. Efrati's family owned a small garment factory in Irbil, in northern Iraq. Relations were good between the city's 4,000 Jews and its Arab residents -- most of the factory's customers were Arab, and Mrs. Efrati's mother frequented the same Turkish bath as Muslim women.
"The first problem was the start of World War II and the Holocaust, when Arabs decided they would do the same to Jewish people," Mrs. Efrati says. In 1942, some Jewish residents in Irbil were attacked and stoned, frightening her family and other Jews into temporarily closing their businesses and hiding in their homes.
An influential Arab citizen of Irbil ordered an end to the violence "and we had some quiet years," Mrs. Efrati says. "But after that the Jews were afraid -- it was never the same as before."
After Israel declared statehood in 1948, the Iraqi government decided to expel all of Iraq's Jews. Israel, founded as a homeland for the Jewish people, felt it had no choice but to accept any who wanted to come.
The relocation of tens of thousands of men, women and children took more than two years, as Jews from all over Iraq were rounded up and transported to Baghdad. There they had to wait to board planes furnished by the Israeli government.
Mrs. Efrati was too young to remember, but her parents told her what happened.
"There was a cop standing in front of the door. He made sure my mother left everything except her wedding ring and watch, which had to have a leather band. They couldn't take any gold -- she was wearing a gold headpiece and gold (jewelry) on her feet, and she had to take them off. Then the cops sealed the door with wax so nobody could open it."
In moving to Israel in 1951, Mrs. Efrati's parents went from prosperity to penury. First they lived in a tent, then a prefab house with a mud floor. The only work her father could find was as a street cleaner. Her mother, who once had her own household staff, became janitor of a high school.
But the educational opportunities were there, and Mrs. Efrati took them. Today she heads a department in the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing. The Efratis' own home is a spacious terrace apartment with a sweeping view of Jerusalem.
Despite the hardships of their early years in Israel, the Efratis see a key difference between how Israel and the Arab world handled the vast floods of refugees in the years after the 1948 war.
They fault rich Arab countries for not accepting more Palestinians, or at least giving them greater help. As a result, the Efratis say, thousands of Palestinians still live in squalid refugee camps.
"The point is, we (in Israel) feel responsible for our brothers," says Jacob Efrati.
"It's been about 50 years," his wife adds. "Look at how we live 50 years later and look at how Palestinians live."
-- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com
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