Israel 66
of Israel was a melting pot that consisted
chiefly of the remnants of previous empires and civilisations, co-existing on a
single piece of land – a group of people
that were commonly known as “Palestinians”. That’s right: prior to 1948, the
word “Palestinian” referred to all of the
land’s inhabitants; be they Jewish, Arab,
or anything else for that matter.
What really sets these Palestinians
apart, though, isn’t so much that this
group also included a significant number
of Jews, but that none of them ever actually ruled the land in which they lived.
They were always under the thumb of
some foreign power or another. This is a
critical point to understand because
with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and
with Britain effectively acting as guardians of the land until the plans laid out
by the Balfour Declaration (the 1917 resolution that laid out the plans for sideby-side Jewish/Ar X