The name has changed, but the questions about who owns “Israel” have been a cause of conflict and bloodshed since God promised the land to Moses 4,000 years ago. “To your descendants, I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites. (Genesis 15:18–21). If this was a “deed” for the land, no one told the “tenants”. Information about these ancient tribes and the boundaries of their land is sketchy. Even the Euphrates River, the main boundary of the Promised Land, has moved over the last 4,000 years.

Abraham’s descendants moved to Egypt. Eventually, Moses became the leader of the Hebrews. He led them out of Egypt and back to the Promised Land through a long and complicated journey, wandering around the desert for 40 years, fighting wars along the way, and finally reaching the Promised Land. Where God told the Hebrews to kill or enslave the current inhabitants. (There’s a lot of that in the Bible.) The Hebrews built a kingdom, fought more wars with neighbors, lost their religion, regained their religion, lost a war with the Babylonians, left the promised land, and returned back home… just in time to become a vassal of Rome. Which takes us to the year 0, and Jesus.

You’ve heard of Jesus? I’ll skip his history and just remind you that this is the second native religion (Christianity) in Israel. Meanwhile, the Hebrews (now generally called Jews) were unhappy with Roman rule and rebelled. They lost the First and Second Jewish Wars, but won the Third Jewish War and kicked the Romans out of Jerusalem. Rome was used to fighting rebels, but it wasn’t used to losing. Rome returned with overwhelming force and crushed the rebels. In the aftermath, half of the Jews in the world were killed, and Jews were expelled from Jerusalem. This “Dysphoria” left Jews without a homeland for the next two millennia.

The Roman Empire (at least the Western half) collapsed by the 5th century. Mohammad was born in the 6th century, (creating the third native religion, Islam). For 15 centuries empires rose and empires fell, there were Crusades, Silk Road caravans became the main form of international trade, and endless wars raged across what would become Palestine. And the Jews? They suffered centuries of discrimination, genocide, and oppression culminating in the Pogroms of Russia and the Death Camps of Nazi Germany.

At the end of the 19th Century, Europe was awash in Nationalism. Dutchys, city-states, obscure empires, and tiny kingdoms were being reimagined as Nations. Jews were increasingly written out of “official” European history. After a thousand years, Jews remained foreigners and were easy scapegoats for any political problem. It was clear to Jews that they would never be accepted (or safe) in Europe. The solution? Create a political movement, the Zionist movement.

The Zion movement’s goal was to return Jews to the land promised to them by God. The Bible said that even the Hebrew slaves in Egypt could make it to the Promised Land. The Babylonians took the Jews out of Isreal and moved them to Babylon, yet they returned one more to the Promised Land. And for the last 2,000 years, Passover prayers concluded with, “Next year in Jerusalem”. Surely, now was the time for Jews to return!

Jews organized and raised money to buy land from the Ottoman Empire (the legal owners of Palestine). Later they found that strangers had lived on the land as slaves (or serfs) for centuries. These “Palestinians” had nowhere to go. Ironically, many “returning” Jews came from Russia, where they had been forced to move when the Czar confiscated Jewish lands. The Ottoman Empire collapsed soon after, and Palestine fell to the British. After WWII Jews fleeing from the atrocities in Europe began an uncoordinated return to Jerusalem. As refugee ships from around the world headed to Israel, the Middle East was thrown into crisis.

The crisis became a war, which Israel won, becoming a state in 1948. The succession of wars that followed read like the lineages of the Bible… the war of succession begat the Suez crisis, which begat the 6-day war, which begat the war of attrition, which begat the Yom Kippur war, which begat the Lebanon war, which begat the 15 year-long Lebanon conflict, which begat another Lebennon war, which begat the 2008 Gaza war, which begat the 2012 Gaza war, which begat the 2014 Gaza war, which begat… well, you get the idea. In addition to full-out wars, Israel had an endless succession of uprisings, crises, and external wars that spilled into Israel. Hardly a year goes by without someone spilling blood.

Israel returned all of the land it won in wars, except for… Golan in the North, the West Bank, and Gaza in the East. Israel has ignored UN Resolutions and maintained control of these “occupation zones”. Why? Because these are the three most frequently used paths to invade Israel. In the past, Israel had reluctantly agreed to surrender parts of these territories, but new invasions, uprisings, or the arrival of Jewish settlers (legally and illegally) led to new conflicts and reset the clock on Israel leaving.

And now, we have the Israeli/Palestinian War of 2023. Or the Fourth Gaza War. Or whatever history will call it. There are reasons why Hamas, one of the best armed Palestinian groups, chose to attack on October 7th, 2023. There are always reasons. It was the biggest attack on Israel in the 21st century, and it was successful beyond anyone’s expectations. Especially the Israeli military. Which means that Israel will have the biggest retaliation of the 21st Century. Israel’s government said that time it will be different. I believe them.

It’s hard to say how hard Israel will hit back after the attack from Hamas, but they don’t intend to leave Hamas with the ability to retaliate for a long, long time. Even with the best intelligence and the most precise weapons, we can expect very high civilian casualties. After the killing or kidnapping of over 100 foreign tourists, Palestinian citizens will receive little support from the global community. Soon other Palestinian and foreign adversaries of Israel will make aggressive moves, and the Israeli response will grow ever larger.

Hamas claims to have fired 5,000 rockets into Israel, with thousands more in reserve. Until all rockets and factories are destroyed, all decision makers for the attack are eliminated, and most fights are killed or captured, the fighting is likely to continue. Gwynne Dyer, the Dutch journalist and author of the book, “War”, once said “History is not peace followed by war, but war briefly interrupted by periods of peace. The history of Israel and the Middle East certainly proves Dwyer to be correct.

What do you think? Will this be just another bloody (bloodiest?) Israeli/Palestinian conflict? Or do you see something different? Tell us your opinion.