History In Uniform

The Arab-Israeli Conflict

The dispute between the Jewish state of Israel, the Palestinians, and other Arab peoples has proved to be one of the most intractable and longest-lasting conflicts in modern history. It is also a conflict that has had powerful impacts beyond the Middle East, whether on the price of oil or on the growth of global terrorism.

Jewish settlement in Palestinethen part of the Turkish Ottoman empire began in the early years of the 20th century. The settlers were inspired by the ideals of Zionism, a movement founded in the late 19th century by Theodor Herzl who held that the Jewish people scattered around the world for millennia should create a Jewish state in their biblical homeland.

A major impetus to the Zionist cause came in 1917, when the British foreign secretary, A. J. Balfour, declared that his government would “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Balfour’s aim was to drum up support from Britain’s Jewish population for the British cause in the First World War, then underway. After the defeat of Turkey in 1918, the old Ottoman empire was broken up, and Palestine became a League of Nations mandate, administered by Britain.

Jewish settlement in Palestine increased in the 1920s, leading to violent confrontations with the Arab people who already lived there. Not only were the latter concerned about losing their land, they were also influenced by the new spirit of Arab nationalism. In the First World War the Arabs had aided the Allies by mounting a revolt against the Turks, and had expected to achieve independence as a reward. Instead, much of the former Ottoman empire had been divided between the British and the French.

Violence continued in the 1930s, and plans to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs were shelved following the outbreak of the Second World War. The experience of the Holocaust prompted many surviving European Jews to seek refuge in Palestine, but the British maintained their prewar policy of restricting immigration. Within Palestine, Zionist guerrilla groups such as Irgun and the Stern Gang conducted a violent campaign against British forces, leading Britain to announce in 1947 that it would hand over its mandate to the United Nations.

The UN voted for the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs, but this only served to intensify the fighting between the two sides. On May 14, 1948, the day before the British mandate was due to end, the Jews in Palestine proclaimed the state of Israel.

Israel’s Arab neighbors—Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon—immediately attacked the infant state. Fighting was fierce, but after a ceasefire was agreed in 1949, Israel found itself in possession of more territory than had been allocated it by the UN—around 80 percent of the land area of Palestine.

The creation of Israel had a terrible human cost: violence against Arab civilians by Jewish extremists forced some 500,000 Palestinian Arabs to flee the country in what has come to be known as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), leaving only 200,000 behind. These refugees were housed in camps in Gaza and the West Bank, hoping that they would soon be able to return.

Their cause became the cause of Pan-Arab nationalism, a movement that grew stronger and stronger across the region, especially after the Second Arab–Israeli War—the Suez Crisis of 1956.The Third Arab–Israeli War took place in June 1967.

Alarmed by Egypt’s movement of troops into Sinai, Israel mounted a pre-emptive attack. In six days, Israeli forces seized Sinai from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank from Jordan. Israel determined to hold on to these captured territories for more defendable borders, but this only served to create more Arab refugees and bitterness.

The Fourth Arab–Israeli War came in 1973, during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, when Egypt and Syria launched an attack against Israel on two fronts.

The USA went onto heightened nuclear alert when it believed the USSR was about to commit forces in support of Egypt and Syria. A ceasefire was agreed, but the Arab oil-producing nations imposed a steep hike in the price of oil to punish the West, leading to a severe global economic recession. This pressure resulted in the 1978 Camp David Agreement, by which Israel returned Sinai and Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist.

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). While Palestinians erupted in an Intifada (uprising) in the Occupied Territories, PLO leader Yasser Arafat began to look for a diplomatic solution. In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reached an agreement with Arafat for Palestinian self-rule and a gradual Israeli withdrawal. However, Rabin was soon assassinated by a Jewish extremist opposed to the deal.

Since then, progress has been thwarted by several factors. Israel continues to build settlements in the West Bank, while groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah continue to mount attacks on civilians, leading to fierce military responses. This ongoing cycle fuels hatred of Israel and the USA across the Middle East, fueling the ambitions of global extremist groups.

💀 THE BLACK DEATH: A CALAMITY BEYOND COMPARE

In the middle of the 14th century, Europe was visited by a calamity the like of which it had never previously known, with a rate of mortality unsurpassed even by the two world wars of the last century. It is estimated that across the entire continent, around one-third of the population died within the space of three years.

The cause was a plague pandemic—known at the time as the Great Pestilence and subsequently as the Black Death. More than one contemporary chronicler noted that “the living did not suffice to bury the dead.”

The consequences of the Black Death extended beyond the devastatingly high mortality. It was a grievous blow to the collective psyche of medieval Europe. Gone were the certainties and optimism of the High Middle Ages. It seemed that God was delivering an awful chastisement to his people, not seen since the times of the Old Testament.

There was surely something rotten in the heart of humanity to warrant such devastation, and something particularly rotten in God’s church, which could do nothing to stem the deadly tide of the disease. To many people, it seemed that the Last Days had come, that time of tribulation for humanity that was to precede the second coming of Christ.

In the Middle Ages, people had no idea as to what caused disease, and thus found themselves helpless to prevent its spread or to effect a cure. It was not until the end of the 19th century that scientists identified the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that causes plague, and realized that it was transmitted by the bites of fleas carried by black rats.

The commonest form of the disease suffered during the Black Death was probably bubonic plague—so called after the hard black buboes, the size of an egg or even an apple, that appeared in the groin and armpits. Those infected became fevered and delirious, suffered violent chest pains, and vomited blood. Few lived for more than three or four days, and many died in a matter of hours. In winter, the pneumonic strain of the disease, spread by coughing, was more common, while a third strain, septicaemic plague, infected the blood and killed its victims before any symptoms appeared. Some scientists today believe the pandemic may in fact have been viral in origin.

The Black Death probably originated in the steppes of central Asia, and spread via the trade routes to Europe. In one account, the Tartars besieging the Black Sea port of Kaffa (modern Theodosia) in the Crimea in 1346 were forced to abandon operations because of the disease, but before they left they catapulted the corpses of those who had died over the walls in the hope of infecting the inhabitants.

The following year Genoese traders—or the rats aboard their ships—carried the disease from Kaffa to Messina in Sicily, and in 1348 it swept right across the Mediterranean lands and reached England.

By 1349–50 the plague had devastated France, all of Britain, Scandinavia, Germany and central Europe. “It passed most rapidly from place to place,” recorded the English chronicler Robert of Avesbury, “swiftly killing ere midday many who in the morning had been well … On the same day twenty, forty, sixty and very often more corpses were committed to the same grave.” In the English port of Bristol, the grass grew long in the silent streets. In some places, the mortality reached as high as 60 percent, and across Europe, at the lowest estimate, some 25 million people perished.

In the face of the almost unimaginable horror of the Black Death, people resorted to all sorts of desperate remedies. The disease was most commonly attributed to bad air, so doors and windows were kept shut, aromatic substances burned, and those who ventured out carried sponges soaked in vinegar. Some blamed the water supply, which, they said, must have been polluted with spiders, frogs and lizards—embodiments of earth, dirt and the Devil—or even with the flesh of the basilisk, a mythical serpent who could kill a man with a single glance. Scapegoats were sought everywhere—the lepers, the rich, the poor, the clergy and, most popularly, the Jews, who were subjected to widespread pogroms.

The avoidance of unclean living and the purgation of hidden sin became something of an obsession, and mass outbreaks of self-flagellation swept across Germany, the Low Countries and France. The flagellants, who spurned the company of women, adopted such names as the Cross-bearers, the Flagellant Brethren and the Brethren of the Cross, and in their ritualized and bloody sessions they sought to purge not only their own sins, but to take on the sins of the world and so avert the plague and the complete annihilation of humankind.The flagellants thus attracted great popular approbation, and at first they were tolerated and even encouraged by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. However, once the flagellants appeared to threaten the established order, they were roundly condemned, and in October 1349 Pope Clement VI issued a Bull for their suppression.

Humanity had fallen out of God’s favor, and across Europe a new mood of pessimism prevailed. The literature and art of the period are filled with images of death and damnation—visions of Hell and the Devil, the Dance of Death, the Grim Reaper, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.The realization of the deadly consequences of sin led to a growth in piety, and with it criticisms of the laxity and worldliness of the clergy. Various protest movements emerged, such as the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia, and their rejection of papal authority foreshadowed the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

It was not just the established authority of the church that was challenged. Once the pestilence passed, those agricultural workers who survived found their services much sought after, leading to demands for better pay. Such demands were resisted by the landowning classes; in England, for example, the Statute of Labourers of 1351 attempted to freeze wages at pre-plague levels.

The resulting discontent among both peasants and townspeople, exacerbated by heavy taxes, led to popular rebellions—the Jacquerie of 1358 in France, for example, and the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381. There was also unrest in the cities of Flanders and Italy. Although such rebellions were suppressed, by the end of the century the shortage of labor had led to the abandonment of serfdom in many parts of Europe, and real wages for the mass of the population had risen to hitherto unknown levels.For many, the Black Death ushered in a golden age of relative plenty.

The Vikings(Northmen)

Between the 8th and 11th centuries, waves of raiders and migrants swept out of Scandinavia and stamped their mark on aperiod that has come to be known as the “Viking Age.” Long feared as brutal pillagers and deliverers of merciless slaughter, the Vikings were also expert seafarers, long-distance traders and fine craftsmen, and in many places settled down as peaceful farmers, generally integrating with the indigenous peoples and cultures. By the end of the 11th century nearly all had swapped their pagan beliefs for Christianity.

The term Viking is unknown in modern English before the early 19th century. It
may owe its origins to Old English wíc, a temporary camp, or Old Norse vík, an
inlet, suggesting the kinds of places these marauders may have been encountered. To their contemporaries, they were simply Norsemen—the menfrom the north.

The men from the north As far as England was concerned, the Viking Agecommenced when the abbey on the island of Lindisfarne, off the Northumbriancoast, was destroyed by a fleet of Norse longships on June 8, 793. All the monkswere killed. The event sent shockwaves through the Christian kingdoms of northwest Europe: “Never before,” recorded the contemporary scholar Alcuin of
York, “has such an atrocity been seen.” Two years later, in search of furthertreasure, the Vikings attacked the abbey on the small Hebridean island of Iona,the cradle of Christianity in Scotland. Many more such raids were to follow, theDanes attacking the east coast of England and northwest France, while theNorwegians concentrated on the Hebrides, the western seaboard of Scotland, the Isle of Man and the coasts of Ireland.

They also occupied the Orkney, Shetland
and Faroe Islands, and established colonies on Iceland and Greenland, and even
a short-lived settlement in North America that they called “Vinland,” which may
have been on Newfoundland, or even in Maine.

Vikings from Sweden turned their attention eastward across the Baltic to Russia,
sailing down the Volga to the Caspian Sea and the Dnieper to the Black Sea, and
even mounting an attack on Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire.

Although this failed, the Byzantine emperors were so impressed by the fighting
skills of the Vikings that they later recruited large numbers to form their personal
bodyguard, known as the Varangian Guard. In Russia, the Swedes were known
as the Rus, and established the most important early Russian principality, based
on Kiev.

Quite what prompted the Viking expansion is the subject of some debate, but it is likely that in their harsh northern homelands agricultural production lagged behind population growth, prompting many to eye up the richer, more temperate Lands to the south. The raiders may also have been aware of weaknesses in their
target territories: England at this period consisted of a number of competing Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, while across the Channel the Frankish empire created
by Charlemagne was beginning to crumble following the death of Louis the
Pious in 840.

The Vikings in the British Isles At first in northwest Europe the Vikings came
as raiders, but before long they began to settle, and a number of Norsekingdoms, such as those centered on Dublin and York, began to emerge. By thelater 9th century the Vikings had overwhelmed the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia. Only Wessex, under King Alfred theGreat, held out, and over the course of the following century his successorsFought back and succeeded in unifying England.

However, a large swathe ofeastern England had been settled by the Danes, and until the late 11th centuryDanish laws and customs prevailed in this area, known as “the Danelaw.” Vikinginfluence can still be detected in many English place names: for example, the common suffix -by, Old Norse for “farm” or “village,” is found in such names as Grimsby, Whitby and Derby.

The late 10th century witnessed a renewal of large-scale Viking attacks, and theEnglish king, Ethelred the Unready, sought to buy the raiders off with large sumsof money known as “Danegeld.” Ethelred’s sobriquet “Unready” is from Old English unraed, meaning “lacking good counsel,” and he justified thisdescription when in 1002 perhaps in an attempt to restore national pride he ordered the massacre of all the Danes in England.

Among the slaughtered was the sister of the king of Denmark, Sweyn Forkbeard, who ordered an escalationin Danish attacks and who in 1013 arrived in England in person. Ethelred fled,and Sweyn was proclaimed king. Although Sweyn died the following year, his son C**t was to rule England for two decades, a period of peace and relative
prosperity.

C**t himself, who was also the most powerful figure in Scandinavia at this time, was received in Rome by the pope and the Holy Roman emperor as a Christian prince among Christian princes.

Danish rule of England came to an end with the death of C**t’s son Harthacnut in 1042. But Norse ambition was still focused on England, and in 1066 the invasion of the Norwegian king Harold Hardrada was brought to an end when he was killed at Stamford Bridge near York. Shortly afterward, Duke William of Normandy, the French-speaking descendant of Viking raiders, landed in Sussex.

His victory at the Battle of Hastings was to change the course of English history Elsewhere in the British Isles, Norse rule continued. In Ireland, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and Limerick remained largely Viking towns until theAnglo-Norman invasion of the later 12th century. In Scotland, the Hebrides remained in Norwegian hands until the Scots defeated King Haakon IV of
Norway at Largs in 1263.

Orkney and Shetland were only transferred to the Scottish Crown in 1472, as part of the dowry for a dynastic marriage, and the
people of those islands, with their Norse ancestry, still do not regard themselves
as an integral part of Scotland.