Hostility Between The Arabs And The Jews example essay topic

What is the world coming to? People fighting over land! But this is what has been happening in the Middle East for a century. The Jews want Palestine yet the Arabs want it to, but who should have the rightful claim to it?

For the best part of the century this conflict has been a very complex problem with important ramifications for the international community. Both have religious foundations in Palestine, which have caused a lot of unease. The Arabs say that they have lived in the vicinity for at least 1900 years. The Arab prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca but died in Jerusalem so it holds religious value but then you have the Jews who say the land is theirs. They believe the have lived there long before the Arabs therefore they have the right to claim the land back. But couldn't the same be said for the Aboriginals of Australia and the Plains Indians of America?

Both resided in their countries centuries before the settlers arrived! Could they too claim their country back? If so wouldn't it just create chaos? That's what the Arab-Israeli conflict is though chaos? The Jewish religion believes that the bible allocated Palestine to be their ancient homeland, yet in the bible the word "Palestine' doesn't appear, so could that mean that the bible refers to another place? And that Palestine is not the "Promised Land".

I know that the Jewish religion has suffered throughout time and that Anti-Semitism was ever increasing in the early 20th century but is that justification for creating a crisis that is still continuing even today. Perhaps it was the worldwide sympathy felt for them after Hitler's atrocities that has given them more power than they should ever have had. The Arabs and the Jewish peoples lived in a kind of co-existence for years. The hostility between the Arabs and the Jews now could be attributed to that of greed, pride or politics but the fact is that more than half of the Palestinian Arabs have been driven from their homes as the Jews have claimed more land. The Jews that lived in Russia were discriminated against because of their beliefs; they wanted to go somewhere where they could be free to follow their religion without prosecution. I agree with this but what right do they have to turn people out of Israel??

The West Bank is at the heart of the conflict and though it is only a scrap of land it is the foundation for the fighting! The borders are altered continuously depending on which side that you ask! Some see it as not just a fight for land but as one for water more than anything else! When the Balfour Declaration was created in 1917 it was like a promise from Britain to help the Jews obtain their own state. To encourage this the Jews used scapegoats such as Alfred Dreyfuss as propaganda, this showed the Anti-Semitism in Governments. They used cases like this to there own advantage, using sympathy again to promote the case for a country of their own!

When the country of Israel was declared in 1948 it was met by bad reactions from the Arabs. They call this time the "An-Nak ben" which actually means the catastrophe. This just added to the already existing tension and caused bitterness amongst the Arabs that is central to the conflict. People from all religions reside in different countries! So why does it matter where they live? It matters to both sides as Jerusalem is at the centre of each religion, the "holy city" as it is called.

Couldn't one say that the Jews have forfeited any claim to it when they left over 2000 years ago? Though there were certain circumstances leading to the Jews leaving Palestine, shouldn't the Arabs be able to have some kind of claim as well? The original Palestinians became Arabs, so isn't that saying something? I know that this letter is perhaps slightly bias but I wanted every reader to know what is happening in the Middle East.

What all the killing and anger is for, I hope that I have achieved this! I will leave this letter with something for you to think about, a quote from General Moshe Dayan: "It's not true that Arabs hate the Jews for personal, religious, or racial reasons! They see us rightly from their Point Of View as westerners, foreigners, even invaders who seized an Arab country to create a Jewish state... Since we are obliged to achieve our aims against the wishes of the Arabs we must live in permanent war.".