A Brief History The land we know today as Israel has had many names during its history. In ancient times it was Canaan and Pilistia (coastal land of the Philistines), then Israel and Judea, before reverting to Palestine (the name ultimately derived from the Philistines). In 1948 the modern State of Israel was proclaimed. Early Times Cave dwellers were the earliest inhabitants of the region, especially in the Carmel (Haifa) area. The first real settlements, founded in the Late Stone Age (c.7500 b.c. – 4000 b.c. ), included the world’s oldest walled town, Jericho. This was also the time when people started rearing animals, irrigating the land, and making pottery. By the Early Bronze Age (c.3200 b.c. –2200 b.c. ), people had begun fortifying their towns, building temples and palaces, and founding the first city-states. It was also the time when the region was the homeland of the Canaanites and other tribes familiar from the Bible, which is still the best source of knowledge about ancient Israel. It tells us that Abraham made a covenant with God which called for his descendants to conquer many lands. So Abraham, the first Patriarch, led his nomadic group of Israelites from Mesopotamia to the mountains of Canaan, where they fought the ruling Egyptians. Eventually famine compelled Abraham’s tribes to move into Egypt and into captivity. In about 1250 b.c. , Moses, the Israelites’ new leader, parted the Red Sea and led his people back to Canaan to confront the Philistines, who now controlled much of the land. Moses died on the journey to the Promised Land, but Joshua took over from him, and between 1400 b.c. and 1000 b.c. the tribes of Israel conquered all the lands north and south of Jerusalem, most famously bringing the walls of Old Jericho tumbling down with the sounds of their horns. At this time only the northern area was known as Israel; the south was called Judah. In its Greek form, Judea, it was applied to just Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings. In about 1023 b.c. , the chiefs of the tribes of Israel elected Saul to be their first king. David, the son of Jesse, later became king and conquered Jerusalem, the last undefeated place in the whole territory, and made it his Royal City. He also strengthened the city and brought in the Ark of the Covenant (holding the Ten Commandments) to sanctify it as a holy city and to unite the tribes. His kingdom prospered, and by the time his son Solomon succeeded him, in about 965 b.c. , almost all the extensive, rich lands between the rivers Nile and the Euphrates were part of the Kingdom of Israel. King Solomon ruled during the Golden Age of Jerusalem and is remembered for his wisdom, for the construction of the First Temple, and for his copper mines in the south. After 37 years of rule, Solomon died and the kingdom was split between the northern and southern tribes. In about 721 b.c. , the north (Israel) was invaded and devastated by Assyrians. The tribes of Israel were then scattered to roam the world as the Ten Lost Tribes. Even more devastating was the 587 b.c. invasion by the Nebuchadnezzar-led Babylonians. Jerusalem was razed, the Temple destroyed, and its people forced into exile and slavery. By the fourth century b.c. the Babylonians had been overthrown, and the Israelites returned to their land, which was now under the more tolerant rule of the Persians. The Persians were followed by Alexander the Great, after whom came two Greek generals Seleucus and Ptolemy, who brought Hellenistic control to the Eastern Mediterranean for some two centuries. Around a.d. 141, the three Maccabee brothers overthrew the Seleucids and established their own Hasmonean dynasty and an extensive empire which dominated Palestine as far as the Golan in the north and Gaza in the south. Romans and Christians The Roman invasion of Palestine in 63 b.c. swept aside Jewish resistance, and in 40 b.c. Herod the Great, whose engineering feats and brutality became legendary, was installed as the King of Judea. Jesus was born in Bethlehem in 6 or 5 b.c. (his birth was miscalculated in the sixth century), though it was only in the final three years of his life and ministry that his teachings became a major problem for Jerusalem’s rulers. Ironically, Jesus was condemned not by the Romans, but by the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish legislative court, largely because of his “blasphemous” declaration that he was the Son of God. After his crucifixion, the rather precarious balance of Jewish government under Roman rule turned to revolt in a.d. 66, when the Zealots took Jerusalem. They held it for only four years, but the city was razed once again (just as Jesus had prophesied), the fortress of Masada fell, and the Jews were again taken into exile and slavery. Jewish culture nonetheless survived the second destruction of the Temple. Its centre moved to Tiberias in the Galilee. In a.d. 331, Constantine, the Roman emperor, legalised Christianity and together with his mother, Helen, developed and excavated Christian sites. Pilgrim interest in the Holy Land (as it was first called at this time) began on a massive scale that has continued to this day. Thus began a period of prosperity which was only brought to a violent end in 614 when Persian armies invaded. Once again Judea was conquered by foreign forces and Jerusalem reduced to rubble. Arabs and Crusaders In 622 Islam was born, according to the teachings of the prophet Mohammed. Islamic armies swiftly conquered the whole of the Middle East. By 638 they controlled Palestine, and with the construction of the Dome of the Rock and the El-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem this became the third-holiest of all Muslim cities (after Mecca and Medina). Muslim rule was largely tolerant, and continued peacefully for nearly four centuries with a joint Christian-Muslim protectorate of Holy Places. In 1009, however, churches were destroyed by the fanatical Caliph (Arab ruler) Hakim, and in 1071 Seljuk Turks took over Jerusalem and began attacking Christian pilgrims. The Pope called on Christian Europe to launch a Crusade to defend the Holy Land, and in 1099, under the command of Godfrey de Bouillon, the Crusaders took Jerusalem. Their brutality was legendary; Jews fared no better than Muslims and were massacred as “God killers. ” The Crusaders set up their own kingdom in Jerusalem and began another Crusade to gain more of the Holy Land. They managed to control much of the country for nearly a century before the Muslim leader Saladin (Salah-ad-Din) defeated them in 1187. A year later, Richard the Lionheart, one of the leaders of the Third Crusade, won back Akko (Acre) but failed to regain Jerusalem. Other Crusades followed, but the knights never recovered their earlier territories, and by the end of the 13th century were faced with a new enemy. Mamelukes to Zionism Akko fell to the Egyptian Mamelukes (freed slaves of Turkish/Circassian origin) in 1291, bringing to an end the Crusader period. The Mame­lukes ruled Palestine for two hundred years, leaving behind some very fine architecture. In 1516, the Turkish Ottoman dynasty conquered the whole of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, extending their Middle-Eastern empire. Their second sultan, Suleiman (the Magnificent), is renowned for constructing new walls and gates and roughly reshaping the Old City of Jerusalem into its modern form. During his reign Palestine flourished, but his successors proved less able, and over the next four centuries the country continuously declined to become a virtual backwater. In the last decades of the 19th century, many thousands of Jews of the Diaspora seeking refuge from persecution immigrated to Palestine. In 1878 the first modern Jewish colony was founded at Rosh Pina, and in 1896 Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionism movement that called for the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, published his sem­inal work, The Jewish State. The British Mandate Around the turn of the century Britain and other countries had noted with great interest the developments in Palestine, and during World War I the British courted Jews and Arabs for help to get rid of the Ottoman Empire. They promised to the one a national Jewish homeland and to the other protection of their rights, as set out in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The Ottoman Empire surrendered when World War I ended the following year, and, following a declaration by the League of Nations (the forerunner to the United Nations), Britain became rulers of Palestine by mandate. A massive inflow of Jewish immigrants from around the world followed, increasing tension between Arab and Jew. In spite of British attempts to appease both sides, Arab attacks on Jewish settlers became common, Jews retaliated, and the British imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration. A Jewish underground resistance force (Irgun) was set up to fight the British and smuggle more Jews into Israel. In the 1930s, persecution of European Jews forced even greater numbers to flee to the Holy Land. Palestinian ports, such as Haifa, were blockaded by the British to prevent more Jewish immigrants from flooding in. World War II forced the Jewish people into an alliance with the British against the common Nazi enemy. Even so, by 1947 immigration had swollen the Jewish population to such an extent that Jews now outnumbered Arabs three to one (600,000 to 200,000), and the violence continued to escalate. Unable to solve “the Palestinian problem,” the British presented it to the United Nations, whose solution was to partition the country into two territories. According to this plan, areas that were predominantly Arab — the Gaza Strip, the central part of the country, the northwest corner, and the West Bank — were to remain under Arab control as Palestine, while the southern Negev Des­ert and the northern coastal strip would form the new State of Israel. Jerusalem, the most fiercely disputed real-estate, came under international protection. The State of Israel On 14 May 1948 the British Mandate ended and the State of Israel was proclaimed. Immediately the first Israel-Arab war erupted, with the new state engaged in fighting the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. After a year of war the UN interceded to broker a peace agreement. Israel’s boundaries were redrawn and expanded to almost what they are now, whereas the Palestinian Arab territories were reduced to the central-eastern area, known as the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem was divided into east and west, under the control of Jordan and Israel respectively. Jewish settlers still flooded into Israel, and new settlements continued to be built. But the young state was soon engaged in another crisis with an Arab neighbour. Gamal Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal international waters triggered a combined Israeli-French and British attack on Egypt, and the start of the Sinai War. The outcome was further territorial gains for Israel with control of the Sinai and the Gaza Strip. However, strong international pressure forced Israel to withdraw — with Egypt reclaiming the Sinai and a UN force installed in the Gaza Strip. No fewer than eleven years passed before the next major Arab-Israeli conflict flared. As Arab armies massed on the borders of Israel in 1967, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq with a preemptive strike. The war was over in six days. Israel gained total control of Palestine, including Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights. Attempting to regain the Sinai and the Golan, Egypt and Syria struck back at Israel in 1973, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur. Israel was caught off guard but held out on the Syrian front for over a month. Finally, peace was agreed, with a UN buffer zone created in Golan Heights. Egypt and Israel made an important movement towards a permanent peace between an Arab nation and Israel when they agreed to a treaty in 1978. Yet, further military action lay four years away. The Israeli army invaded southern Leba­non in 1982 to safeguard its northern border against attack by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israeli forces then penetrated north to bombard PLO positions in Beirut. They forced the PLO out, but without much support within Israel. Intifada to the Present A fatal road incident in the Gaza Strip in December 1987 set off the Palestinian intifada (uprising) against the Israeli troops in the Occupied Territories. Stone throwing and petrol bombing were early weapons, but subsequently the Palestinian Fundamentalist movement Hamas took to other forms of anti-Jewish violence, such as the 1994 suicide bombing of a Tel Aviv bus which resulted in the death of 22 people. More traumatic to the hard-bitten Israelis was the launching of Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa during the Gulf War of 1990–91. Little physical damage was inflicted, but the psychological effect was significant. The Israelis couldn’t even retaliate, being restrained by pressure from the American government, which wanted to preserve the Arab alliance against Iraq. The most dramatic recent changes in the relationship between Arab and Jew became public in 1993 when the Oslo peace accord was finally made between former enemies, the PLO (acknowledged representative of the Palestinian people) and the Israeli government. The accord allowed Jericho and the Gaza Strip a limited form of self-government under the auspices of the PLO. Another bout of progress occurred in 1994 when a peace agreement was signed with Jordan, leading to the opening of the southern Eilat-Aqaba and Arava border routes. In November 1994 the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and his foreign minister Shimon Peres jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in celebration of their considerable achievements. One year later Rabin was assassinated. His successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, an American-educated conservative, has slowed the implementation of the Oslo accord. The peace process is fragile; the Gaza Strip is still given to unrest and the Israeli government watches cautiously to see if Yasser Arafat’s PLO can effectively police its allotted territories, free of the influence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad (“Holy War,” an Islamic fundamentalist movement). The Palestinian Arabs are irritated by Israeli land seizures. For visitors the peace dividend is currently considerable, allowing access to the number of great sights that lie in the Sinai and Jordan, including the fabulous city of Petra.