ISRAEL IS 70 YEARS OLD

(part 5)

Immediate conflict with the Arab world

When the United Nations passed the resolution in 1947, the Arab nations in and around Palestine mobilized for war. Their determination and "motto" was to drive the Jews "to the sea". This has been a continuous struggling battle since the state of Israel was incepted.

Since that resolution and the 1947-48 Civil War, still under the British mandate, the Jewish and Arab communities began clashing and fighting. Obviously, the Arab community had the help of the foreign Arab forces around the territory.

This continued and led to the 1948 Israeli-Arab war which lasted for the two years after the birth of the Israel state.

Neighboring countries, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, fortified by troops from other Arab countries sent their expeditionary troops, but the Jewish nation still emerged victorious.

This Jewish victory shut down all questions up to then that the Jewish state would persist. It also resulted in the displacement of more than 700,000 Arabs from the area of Palestine who fled to the surrounding Arab nations. Meantime, since 1940 to the late 70's , and seldom mentioned is the fact that a similar number of Jews also fled or were expelled from Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa and resettled in Israel.

The influx of these refugees strained the Arab countries with the unusual dilemma of granting them citizenship and assimilating them but which would upset their own delicate political balances as well as by doing this they would admit Israel's right to exist.

Meantime, these original refugees and their descendants have multiplied into a stateless nation of millions of people that are still fighting both literally and politically for the reversal of their exile and establishment of a Palestinian state.

What is so amazingly not only to you (don't deny it) and me, as well to most observers is how Israel, such a small state and completely dwarfed in every way by its enemies, managed to not only survive the first military conflict but also to build a thriving and stable democracy capable of defending itself time and time again.

During the last decades, the story of Israel is a constant cycle of provocations and fighting from all its neighbours on every side. From all of these, the most significant and with more impact was what is known by the "Six Day War" which clearly demarked Israel as the dominant force in the region and which is still standing and maintained up to today.

In 1967, more specifically in June of that year, Egypt blockaded Eilat, Israel's Red Sea port and the Arab leaders announced their determination to wipe out the Jewish state. However, as the armies from Egypt, Jordan and Syria were still gathering in a position for an attack, Israel launched a devastating preemptive strike and gained a miraculous victory no one could have predicted. Israeli forces repelled the Arab coalition in all three fronts and simultaneously. In the process, also tripled its area. The Golan Heights from Syria, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the most important of them all : Jerusalem and the area known as West Bank from Jordan.

This has created another displacement of another 250,000 Palestinian refugees to contribute to the worsening of the situation while allowing the Jewish nation to freely return to and settle in Jerusalem. How important is this according to the Bible? How important is this to the Zionists?

For Zionists, Jerusalem was the ultimate prize and the answer to more than 1,900 years of praying, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

(to be continued…)