A lot of people might knw this already but many still dont, i didnt. If they are any corrections then let me knw.
kudos to Duff for this.
'Next year in Jerusalem' would end many a Jewish prayer - a mystic dream sustained by religious teachings through the years in the wilderness of dispersion; spoken in the ghettos; silenced by Nazi gas chambers. God's Word had endured for 2000 years. Zion had been promised, and the promise lived on in the hearts of the world's Jews.
Occupying the south-west corner of the ancient Fertile Crescent, the modern state of Israel encompasses a sizeable proportion of what was once called Palestine, named after earlier coastal settlers called the Philistines. The names Israel and Palestine stem from the different peoples who entered the region roughly around the twelfth century BC. The Jews, or the tribe of Israel, believed that the land had been given to them by their god. The Philistines, a people of Greek origin, were also settlers searching for a new homeland. Before the region was Israel or Palestine, it was known as Canaan and was populated by a cultured people. It was the Canaanites who developed a linear alphabet, later converted by the Greeks, which became the basis of western writing symbols.
Around 1000 BC, the Jews wrested control of the land from the Philistines and took over Jerusalem, making it the centre of their religion by building the first temple to their god. The country expanded until around 900 BC when it was divided into two kingdoms; Israel in the north and Judah in the south. From then on various conquering armies occupied both kingdoms. After the conquest by the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, an independent jewish Kingdom was revived. Then came the Romans. Around this time Christianity was born, a religion that was adopted by most of the eastern Roman Empire, and thus Palestine became equally as important for the Christians as it was for the Jews. Indeed, the oldest Christian map in the world, the mappi a mondi, which is housed in the English town of Hereford, clearly shows Jerusalem at the centre of the known world.
Around AD 132 the Jews rose up against the Romans in a revolt known as Bar Kokhba. The Jews were crushed in the most brutal fashion, with the Romans slaughtering over half a million of them. The Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe outjudea forever, before scattering the rest of the race to the four corners of the earth. The city where David had sat upon his throne was devastated in a destruction of all that was Jewish. Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina, derived from Israel's ancient enemy, the Philistines. This in turn became anglicised to Palestine. Then, to complicate matters, the Arabs took over the region, bringing with them a new religion, Islam.
Muhammad was born around AD 570 in Mecca, a prosperous trading community that lay on the caravan routes. One of Mecca's great attractions was a large black meteorite, which became the focal point of Islamic religion. Muhammad was a member of the Quraish tribe, which had taken the trading town of Mecca about a century earlier. As an adult, Muhammad preferred his own company and was often found sitting in the surrounding hills meditating. It was here that the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) appeared before him, instructing Muhammad to pass on his words. When he first started to preach the word of God (Allah) he was driven out of Mecca and forced to flee to a nearby oasis which came to be known as Medina. The word Islam means 'submitting to the word of Allah', while those that believe in Allah are called Muslims. It is important to know that Muhammad was a human being who was selected by God (Allah) as his messenger. Before Muhammad died, he stopped briefly in Jerusalem on his way to heaven, tying his horse to the wall and setting foot on a rock on Temple Mount. This act makes the city the third most holy city, equally as sacred to the Muslim faith as it is to the Jews and Christians.
Further turmoil was to engulf the region with the coming of the Crusades, then subjugation by the Turks as part of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish rule lasted for four centuries until eventually, in 1917, the British took the land. Shortly afterwards, following the Balfour Declaration, the state of Israel and a Jewish homeland began to emerge.
So at last the prayers were answered. But the Jewish dream was flawed. In their long absence, the land had been occupied. This was no longer a land without people for a people without land. The Palestinians were still there. Yet the Jews persisted. Ererr Yisrael (land of Israel), the land God granted to them alone, would be re¬born under the nation's religion. Yet all the faith in the world is of little consequence if you lack the political clout to turn your dreams into reality. This clout was forthcoming, not just from the British Government, but also from the Americans. It would seem that the Jews had gained political experience in many lands under a great variety of governmental systems during their long exile. In the early 1930s, the Israelis acquired more land in Palestine, purchased with monies provided by American and British Jews. These Arab land sales and Jewish land purchases contributed greatly to the evolution of an Arab landless class. As a result, many peasants had to leave the land and look for work in the cities, or with the Jewish owners of the citrus groves. Consequently, the number of land sales to Jews by smaller Arab landowners, who needed the capital and were willing to sell portions of their land to try to survive the adverse times, increased. The Jewish intention was, clearly, to establish themselves both numerically and territorially within Palestine and, despite actions to stop immigration, they came in vast numbers from Russia and from the tyranny of Nazi Europe.
From the time the Nazis rose to power in Germany in the early 1930s, their relentless persecution of the Jews drove many to migrate to Israel. This mass influx brought bloody protest from the Palestinians, who carried out raids on Jewish settlements. To protect themselves, the Jews raised an army called the Hagana which armed itself and carried out nocturnal counter¬attacks on Palestinian bases. The Hagana were joined in 1937 by a revolutionary group known as the Irgun, which also began its own operations. The Irgun advocated terrorist tactics equal to those used by the Arabs, who attacked individual Jews. In three weeks in 1937, lrgun bombs planted in Arab market places killed 77 Arabs. At around the same time, British forces dished out some pretty harsh treatment to the Arabs, with over 100 hanged between 1937 and 1939 and many more killed by British troops. Homes of Palestinian families suspected of harbouring guerrillas were dynamited, a practice established by the Hagana and continued by the Israeli Government to this day Even when the British Government tried to curb Irgun acts by hanging one of its members for attacking an Arab bus, it seemed to the Jews to be discriminatory - a cynical attempt by the British to try to show the Arabs they were taking an even-handed approach to the conflict. This act, in turn, appears to have encouraged both the Hagana and Irgun to undertake more intensive actions against Arabs.
It was then that events in European politics began to exert even more influence over events in the Middle East. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and Nazi and fascist propaganda encouraged Arabs of the Middle East to revolt against the British, thus endangering their strategic position in Egypt and the Suez Canal. The British quickly realised that containing any such rebellion would entail a large number of troops being tied down in the Middle East when they would be desperately needed in Europe. Such considerations led to the issuing of a 1939 white paper which, in a stunning reversal of the British policy, called for restrictions on the Jewish immigration and seemed to guarantee the achievement of an Arab Palestine within 10 years. This was a typical British ploy to use Palestine for its own political ends. What would happen today if all the oil producing countries in the Middle East suddenly turned round and refused to give oil to the West unless they recognised Palestine? Would we then go to war - would we take the oil by force of arms?
An understandable reason for proposing a state of Israel evolved after the Second World War ended. We all felt guilty. Emerging from the extermination camps of the Holocaust came the surviving, displaced Jews of Europe. Israel became the haven for these peoples of many different nationalities, bonded by their race and religious faith. Yet they were different from the Jews who had lived in Palestine prior to the state of Israel. These were not peasant farmers; most had been educated, and collectively possessed a wide range of sophisticated skills, among which were many highly trained soldiers.
So, who granted the Jews their wish and why? Was there no other place on the earth that they would have accepted, some vast tract of empty land in America, Canada, or even Russia? The Jewish leaders pushing the dream so hard both in America and Britain must have at least contemplated the risks of setting up a new state of Israel. In hindsight, was it worth the cost in human lives? Did those rich Jews and friendly politicians wittingly sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people to establish a Western foothold in the Middle East? History, religion, politics, even feeling sorry for the Jews made sense. Conversely, the creation of Israel meant dispersing another people, the Palestinian Arabs, a people who have as much legal and moral right to Palestine as any Jew The creation of an independent state of Israel, with a conflicting religion, just had to be asking for trouble. In November 1947 the United Nations divided Palestine, then under British mandate, into Jewish and Arab states. Six months later the British withdrew and, on 14 May 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed.
So, at the moment of its birth, Israel was fighting for its life. The neighbouring Arab states tried to annihilate the Israelis who, with no other place to go, other than into the sea, fought like savages. But they were not alone; the state of Israel had many friends in the West and many advantages for the Western governments, thus the moral and material backing for Israel was provided. So the terrifying carnage began. Eager to establish firm defensive lines and rid themselves of Palestinians within their midst, terror tactics were used. The first came a month before the declaration of the new Israeli state. On the night of 8 April 1948, a combined Irgun/Stern (Stern was an organisation of Israeli freedom fighters which utilised terrorist tactics) unit killed more than a hundred Palestinian Arabs in the village of Deir Yassin, close to the Jerusalem road. The Israelis lost their heads and in a blood lust killed many non-combatants. Many mainstream Jewish leaders called it utterly repugnant. Yet a similar incident was to happen a few years later.
At 9.30 p.m. on Wednesday 14 October 1953, Israeli troops attacked the Jordanian border village of Qibya, north-west of Jerusalem. Seven hundred regular Israeli troops participated in the attack in which mortars, machine guns, rifles and explosives were used. More than forty houses as well as the school and the village mosque were destroyed. Every man, woman and child found by the Israelis was killed, a total of 75 innocent villagers were murdered in cold blood.
The neighbouring Arab states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq rejected both the partition of Palestine and the existence of the new nation. In the war that followed (1948-49), Israel emerged victorious and with its territory increased by one half. Arab opposition continued, however, and full-scale fighting broke out again in 1956 (the Sinai campaign), when Israel, joined by France and Great Britain, attacked Egypt after that country had nationalised the Suez Canal. Intervention by the UN, supported by the United States and the Soviet Union, forced a ceasefire.
In 1964, Egypt's President Nasser helped set up the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation). From its shaky start, it was to become the main voice of a homeless people. Most of the Arab nations backed the organisation, funding and equipping its soldiers, known as AI-Fatah. Yasser Arafat was elected overall leader in 1969. The problem was that Arab disunity led to each state constantly bickering with its neighbour. Consequently, fringe and rival groups within the PLO, received separate sponsorship from different Arab countries. On one hand, Egypt would back George Habash's PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), while Syria supported the Ahmed ]abril group. At times they were friends, and at times they clashed, fighting each other. Yet through all this Yasser Arafat and the PLO have survived. In 1967, in the Six-Day War, Israel responded to Egyptian provocation with air attacks and ground victories. The result was a humiliating defeat for Egypt; and more territorial gains for the Israelis, including the West Bank, from where the PLO continued to launch punitive attacks. The Israelis, as always, responded with lightning raids, this time directed against the PLO leaders.
In 1968 the Israelis found themselves embarking on a new policy, after an Israeli passenger was killed on 26 December in a grenade attack on an El Al airliner at Athens airport. In Israel, the mood was one Of frustration. The public seemed to believe that the Israeli security forces did not have any adequate response to the export of Palestinian terrorism from the Middle East to Europe. Israeli Special Forces were landed by helicopter at the International airport just south of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, on 28 December at 9.15 p.m. Undeterred by a gun battle with Lebanese troops, the Israelis blew up thirteen empty civilian aircraft belonging to the Lebanese Middle East Airlines and other Arab countries. The world was shocked by the audacity of the move and condemned Israel as engaging in what was referred to as 'state terrorism'.
Despite this condemnation, the state of Israel continued to counter all forms of aggression. One such development was the gathering of intelligence on terrorist organisations operating on foreign soil. This was done in conjunction with various Western intelligence agencies working closely with Mossad (the Israeli Intelligence Agency) agents. In 1973, Mossad received excellent information about a plan to fire rockets at an El Al jet at Fiumicino airport in Rome. The information included precise details of the modus operandi, the exact date and the names of the attackers. Mossad issued a warning to the Italian security services, who set an ambush for the terrorists and captured five.
The joy felt by the Israeli intelligence did not last long. Italy, under economic and diplomatic pressure from Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, used the first pretext that came its way to release the five Arabs. They were flown to Tripoli in a low-key operation using an old Italian Air Force C-47 Dakota. On 23 November 1973, barely two weeks after returning from Libya, the same aircraft crashed near Venice. Four Italian military officers, the same men who had flown the terrorists to their Tripoli refuge, were killed. Sabotage was immediately suspected, but could never be proved. Thirteen years later, the former head of Hitler's counter-intelligence service, General Viviani, charged that Mossad had caused the crash. The Italian press said that the Israelis were out to punish the government in Rome for being soft on terrorism.
In the Yom Kippur War of 1973-74, Egypt, Syria and Iraq attacked Israel on the Jewish holy Day of Atonement, catching the Israelis off guard. Israel recouped quickly and forced the Arab troops back from their initial gains, but at great cost to both sides. Again, a ceasefire was imposed. Israel emerged from these conflicts with large tracts of its neighbours' territories, which it refused to surrender without a firm peace settlement. The first real move towards permanent peace came in 1978, when Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President, Anwar al¬Sadat met at Camp David in America. A peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979 in Washington DC, and Israel began a phased withdrawal from Sinai, completed in 1982. However, little progress was made in negotiations on autonomy for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of Jordan. Devoid of any further overt help from the Arab nations, the Palestinians were left to continue the struggle alone.
In 1982 came a massive Israeli attack, aimed at destroying all military bases of the PLO in South Lebanon. Afterwards, a ten¬week siege of the Muslim sector of West Beirut, a PLO strong¬hold, forced the Palestinians to accept a US-sponsored plan whereby the PLO guerrillas would evacuate Beirut and go to several Arab countries which had agreed to accept them. Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon in 1986. Since then, unrest has continued in the occupied territories with frequent clashes between Arab demonstrators and troops. In the squalid refugee camps of the Arab states the Palestinian refugees waited for vengeance and multiplied so that by the 1980s there were more refugees than there had been forty years earlier. The Arab population of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem totalled more than a million and a half. Still, most of us in the West were only aware of the struggling Israelis constantly trying to build their new state and defend it at the same time. What we did not see was the plight of the Palestinians and the atrocities committed against them. A state, peopled by those who had escaped oppression, had in turn become the oppressor. The only headlines in the Western press devoted to the Palestinians had been in 1972, when the Palestinians turned their ire upon the world. This fury came in the form of black-hooded murderers, who vented their anger on Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics, before hijacking a plane to Entebbe. With these events, modern international terrorism had truly begun.
Taken from Terrorism - Inside a world phenomenon by Barry Davies B.E.M.
Publishers or HP OCR software to blame for spelling/grammatical errors
Anyone not bothered to read this brief history should beware of forming an opinion on this delicate subject.
kudos to Duff for this.
'Next year in Jerusalem' would end many a Jewish prayer - a mystic dream sustained by religious teachings through the years in the wilderness of dispersion; spoken in the ghettos; silenced by Nazi gas chambers. God's Word had endured for 2000 years. Zion had been promised, and the promise lived on in the hearts of the world's Jews.
Occupying the south-west corner of the ancient Fertile Crescent, the modern state of Israel encompasses a sizeable proportion of what was once called Palestine, named after earlier coastal settlers called the Philistines. The names Israel and Palestine stem from the different peoples who entered the region roughly around the twelfth century BC. The Jews, or the tribe of Israel, believed that the land had been given to them by their god. The Philistines, a people of Greek origin, were also settlers searching for a new homeland. Before the region was Israel or Palestine, it was known as Canaan and was populated by a cultured people. It was the Canaanites who developed a linear alphabet, later converted by the Greeks, which became the basis of western writing symbols.
Around 1000 BC, the Jews wrested control of the land from the Philistines and took over Jerusalem, making it the centre of their religion by building the first temple to their god. The country expanded until around 900 BC when it was divided into two kingdoms; Israel in the north and Judah in the south. From then on various conquering armies occupied both kingdoms. After the conquest by the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, an independent jewish Kingdom was revived. Then came the Romans. Around this time Christianity was born, a religion that was adopted by most of the eastern Roman Empire, and thus Palestine became equally as important for the Christians as it was for the Jews. Indeed, the oldest Christian map in the world, the mappi a mondi, which is housed in the English town of Hereford, clearly shows Jerusalem at the centre of the known world.
Around AD 132 the Jews rose up against the Romans in a revolt known as Bar Kokhba. The Jews were crushed in the most brutal fashion, with the Romans slaughtering over half a million of them. The Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe outjudea forever, before scattering the rest of the race to the four corners of the earth. The city where David had sat upon his throne was devastated in a destruction of all that was Jewish. Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina, derived from Israel's ancient enemy, the Philistines. This in turn became anglicised to Palestine. Then, to complicate matters, the Arabs took over the region, bringing with them a new religion, Islam.
Muhammad was born around AD 570 in Mecca, a prosperous trading community that lay on the caravan routes. One of Mecca's great attractions was a large black meteorite, which became the focal point of Islamic religion. Muhammad was a member of the Quraish tribe, which had taken the trading town of Mecca about a century earlier. As an adult, Muhammad preferred his own company and was often found sitting in the surrounding hills meditating. It was here that the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) appeared before him, instructing Muhammad to pass on his words. When he first started to preach the word of God (Allah) he was driven out of Mecca and forced to flee to a nearby oasis which came to be known as Medina. The word Islam means 'submitting to the word of Allah', while those that believe in Allah are called Muslims. It is important to know that Muhammad was a human being who was selected by God (Allah) as his messenger. Before Muhammad died, he stopped briefly in Jerusalem on his way to heaven, tying his horse to the wall and setting foot on a rock on Temple Mount. This act makes the city the third most holy city, equally as sacred to the Muslim faith as it is to the Jews and Christians.
Further turmoil was to engulf the region with the coming of the Crusades, then subjugation by the Turks as part of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish rule lasted for four centuries until eventually, in 1917, the British took the land. Shortly afterwards, following the Balfour Declaration, the state of Israel and a Jewish homeland began to emerge.
So at last the prayers were answered. But the Jewish dream was flawed. In their long absence, the land had been occupied. This was no longer a land without people for a people without land. The Palestinians were still there. Yet the Jews persisted. Ererr Yisrael (land of Israel), the land God granted to them alone, would be re¬born under the nation's religion. Yet all the faith in the world is of little consequence if you lack the political clout to turn your dreams into reality. This clout was forthcoming, not just from the British Government, but also from the Americans. It would seem that the Jews had gained political experience in many lands under a great variety of governmental systems during their long exile. In the early 1930s, the Israelis acquired more land in Palestine, purchased with monies provided by American and British Jews. These Arab land sales and Jewish land purchases contributed greatly to the evolution of an Arab landless class. As a result, many peasants had to leave the land and look for work in the cities, or with the Jewish owners of the citrus groves. Consequently, the number of land sales to Jews by smaller Arab landowners, who needed the capital and were willing to sell portions of their land to try to survive the adverse times, increased. The Jewish intention was, clearly, to establish themselves both numerically and territorially within Palestine and, despite actions to stop immigration, they came in vast numbers from Russia and from the tyranny of Nazi Europe.
From the time the Nazis rose to power in Germany in the early 1930s, their relentless persecution of the Jews drove many to migrate to Israel. This mass influx brought bloody protest from the Palestinians, who carried out raids on Jewish settlements. To protect themselves, the Jews raised an army called the Hagana which armed itself and carried out nocturnal counter¬attacks on Palestinian bases. The Hagana were joined in 1937 by a revolutionary group known as the Irgun, which also began its own operations. The Irgun advocated terrorist tactics equal to those used by the Arabs, who attacked individual Jews. In three weeks in 1937, lrgun bombs planted in Arab market places killed 77 Arabs. At around the same time, British forces dished out some pretty harsh treatment to the Arabs, with over 100 hanged between 1937 and 1939 and many more killed by British troops. Homes of Palestinian families suspected of harbouring guerrillas were dynamited, a practice established by the Hagana and continued by the Israeli Government to this day Even when the British Government tried to curb Irgun acts by hanging one of its members for attacking an Arab bus, it seemed to the Jews to be discriminatory - a cynical attempt by the British to try to show the Arabs they were taking an even-handed approach to the conflict. This act, in turn, appears to have encouraged both the Hagana and Irgun to undertake more intensive actions against Arabs.
It was then that events in European politics began to exert even more influence over events in the Middle East. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and Nazi and fascist propaganda encouraged Arabs of the Middle East to revolt against the British, thus endangering their strategic position in Egypt and the Suez Canal. The British quickly realised that containing any such rebellion would entail a large number of troops being tied down in the Middle East when they would be desperately needed in Europe. Such considerations led to the issuing of a 1939 white paper which, in a stunning reversal of the British policy, called for restrictions on the Jewish immigration and seemed to guarantee the achievement of an Arab Palestine within 10 years. This was a typical British ploy to use Palestine for its own political ends. What would happen today if all the oil producing countries in the Middle East suddenly turned round and refused to give oil to the West unless they recognised Palestine? Would we then go to war - would we take the oil by force of arms?
An understandable reason for proposing a state of Israel evolved after the Second World War ended. We all felt guilty. Emerging from the extermination camps of the Holocaust came the surviving, displaced Jews of Europe. Israel became the haven for these peoples of many different nationalities, bonded by their race and religious faith. Yet they were different from the Jews who had lived in Palestine prior to the state of Israel. These were not peasant farmers; most had been educated, and collectively possessed a wide range of sophisticated skills, among which were many highly trained soldiers.
So, who granted the Jews their wish and why? Was there no other place on the earth that they would have accepted, some vast tract of empty land in America, Canada, or even Russia? The Jewish leaders pushing the dream so hard both in America and Britain must have at least contemplated the risks of setting up a new state of Israel. In hindsight, was it worth the cost in human lives? Did those rich Jews and friendly politicians wittingly sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people to establish a Western foothold in the Middle East? History, religion, politics, even feeling sorry for the Jews made sense. Conversely, the creation of Israel meant dispersing another people, the Palestinian Arabs, a people who have as much legal and moral right to Palestine as any Jew The creation of an independent state of Israel, with a conflicting religion, just had to be asking for trouble. In November 1947 the United Nations divided Palestine, then under British mandate, into Jewish and Arab states. Six months later the British withdrew and, on 14 May 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed.
So, at the moment of its birth, Israel was fighting for its life. The neighbouring Arab states tried to annihilate the Israelis who, with no other place to go, other than into the sea, fought like savages. But they were not alone; the state of Israel had many friends in the West and many advantages for the Western governments, thus the moral and material backing for Israel was provided. So the terrifying carnage began. Eager to establish firm defensive lines and rid themselves of Palestinians within their midst, terror tactics were used. The first came a month before the declaration of the new Israeli state. On the night of 8 April 1948, a combined Irgun/Stern (Stern was an organisation of Israeli freedom fighters which utilised terrorist tactics) unit killed more than a hundred Palestinian Arabs in the village of Deir Yassin, close to the Jerusalem road. The Israelis lost their heads and in a blood lust killed many non-combatants. Many mainstream Jewish leaders called it utterly repugnant. Yet a similar incident was to happen a few years later.
At 9.30 p.m. on Wednesday 14 October 1953, Israeli troops attacked the Jordanian border village of Qibya, north-west of Jerusalem. Seven hundred regular Israeli troops participated in the attack in which mortars, machine guns, rifles and explosives were used. More than forty houses as well as the school and the village mosque were destroyed. Every man, woman and child found by the Israelis was killed, a total of 75 innocent villagers were murdered in cold blood.
The neighbouring Arab states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq rejected both the partition of Palestine and the existence of the new nation. In the war that followed (1948-49), Israel emerged victorious and with its territory increased by one half. Arab opposition continued, however, and full-scale fighting broke out again in 1956 (the Sinai campaign), when Israel, joined by France and Great Britain, attacked Egypt after that country had nationalised the Suez Canal. Intervention by the UN, supported by the United States and the Soviet Union, forced a ceasefire.
In 1964, Egypt's President Nasser helped set up the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation). From its shaky start, it was to become the main voice of a homeless people. Most of the Arab nations backed the organisation, funding and equipping its soldiers, known as AI-Fatah. Yasser Arafat was elected overall leader in 1969. The problem was that Arab disunity led to each state constantly bickering with its neighbour. Consequently, fringe and rival groups within the PLO, received separate sponsorship from different Arab countries. On one hand, Egypt would back George Habash's PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), while Syria supported the Ahmed ]abril group. At times they were friends, and at times they clashed, fighting each other. Yet through all this Yasser Arafat and the PLO have survived. In 1967, in the Six-Day War, Israel responded to Egyptian provocation with air attacks and ground victories. The result was a humiliating defeat for Egypt; and more territorial gains for the Israelis, including the West Bank, from where the PLO continued to launch punitive attacks. The Israelis, as always, responded with lightning raids, this time directed against the PLO leaders.
In 1968 the Israelis found themselves embarking on a new policy, after an Israeli passenger was killed on 26 December in a grenade attack on an El Al airliner at Athens airport. In Israel, the mood was one Of frustration. The public seemed to believe that the Israeli security forces did not have any adequate response to the export of Palestinian terrorism from the Middle East to Europe. Israeli Special Forces were landed by helicopter at the International airport just south of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, on 28 December at 9.15 p.m. Undeterred by a gun battle with Lebanese troops, the Israelis blew up thirteen empty civilian aircraft belonging to the Lebanese Middle East Airlines and other Arab countries. The world was shocked by the audacity of the move and condemned Israel as engaging in what was referred to as 'state terrorism'.
Despite this condemnation, the state of Israel continued to counter all forms of aggression. One such development was the gathering of intelligence on terrorist organisations operating on foreign soil. This was done in conjunction with various Western intelligence agencies working closely with Mossad (the Israeli Intelligence Agency) agents. In 1973, Mossad received excellent information about a plan to fire rockets at an El Al jet at Fiumicino airport in Rome. The information included precise details of the modus operandi, the exact date and the names of the attackers. Mossad issued a warning to the Italian security services, who set an ambush for the terrorists and captured five.
The joy felt by the Israeli intelligence did not last long. Italy, under economic and diplomatic pressure from Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, used the first pretext that came its way to release the five Arabs. They were flown to Tripoli in a low-key operation using an old Italian Air Force C-47 Dakota. On 23 November 1973, barely two weeks after returning from Libya, the same aircraft crashed near Venice. Four Italian military officers, the same men who had flown the terrorists to their Tripoli refuge, were killed. Sabotage was immediately suspected, but could never be proved. Thirteen years later, the former head of Hitler's counter-intelligence service, General Viviani, charged that Mossad had caused the crash. The Italian press said that the Israelis were out to punish the government in Rome for being soft on terrorism.
In the Yom Kippur War of 1973-74, Egypt, Syria and Iraq attacked Israel on the Jewish holy Day of Atonement, catching the Israelis off guard. Israel recouped quickly and forced the Arab troops back from their initial gains, but at great cost to both sides. Again, a ceasefire was imposed. Israel emerged from these conflicts with large tracts of its neighbours' territories, which it refused to surrender without a firm peace settlement. The first real move towards permanent peace came in 1978, when Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President, Anwar al¬Sadat met at Camp David in America. A peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979 in Washington DC, and Israel began a phased withdrawal from Sinai, completed in 1982. However, little progress was made in negotiations on autonomy for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of Jordan. Devoid of any further overt help from the Arab nations, the Palestinians were left to continue the struggle alone.
In 1982 came a massive Israeli attack, aimed at destroying all military bases of the PLO in South Lebanon. Afterwards, a ten¬week siege of the Muslim sector of West Beirut, a PLO strong¬hold, forced the Palestinians to accept a US-sponsored plan whereby the PLO guerrillas would evacuate Beirut and go to several Arab countries which had agreed to accept them. Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon in 1986. Since then, unrest has continued in the occupied territories with frequent clashes between Arab demonstrators and troops. In the squalid refugee camps of the Arab states the Palestinian refugees waited for vengeance and multiplied so that by the 1980s there were more refugees than there had been forty years earlier. The Arab population of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem totalled more than a million and a half. Still, most of us in the West were only aware of the struggling Israelis constantly trying to build their new state and defend it at the same time. What we did not see was the plight of the Palestinians and the atrocities committed against them. A state, peopled by those who had escaped oppression, had in turn become the oppressor. The only headlines in the Western press devoted to the Palestinians had been in 1972, when the Palestinians turned their ire upon the world. This fury came in the form of black-hooded murderers, who vented their anger on Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics, before hijacking a plane to Entebbe. With these events, modern international terrorism had truly begun.
Taken from Terrorism - Inside a world phenomenon by Barry Davies B.E.M.
Publishers or HP OCR software to blame for spelling/grammatical errors
Anyone not bothered to read this brief history should beware of forming an opinion on this delicate subject.