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Almost every text and ritual of the Jewish faith recalls the land that the Biblical Israelites seized from the Canaanites and to which, according to Genesis, Abraham received the title deed from God. This religious tradition has maintained a sense of community among Jews scattered over the world since the Romans destroyed the Palestine Jewish community in A.D. 135. For centuries, Passover and Yom Kippur services have ended with "Next year in Jerusalem!" And the Psalmist sang:
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget its cunning.
The Arabs, too, have deep roots in Palestine and an undeniable moral claim: therein lies the tragedy of the situation. They seized the country in the wave of conquest launched by the successors of Mohammed in the 7th century after Christ, and later wrested it back from the Christian Crusaders. Arabs have lived in Palestine for 1,300 years, and until recently made up the vast majority of the population. To Arabs, the Israelis are newcomers who in a generation or two wrested the land away from them. For the Moslems, too, Palestine has sacred connotations: tradition holds that the Prophet visited Heaven by ascending a ladder of light from the spot that is now marked by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
The Jews' religious, emotional and historic claim to Palestine as their homeland is probably stronger than the Arabs', but by itself the homeland plea can never be sufficient. In countless other cases, that plea and its underlying impulse have dissipated themselves. If it were not so, confusion would be considerable: the Celts could claim England; the Ainus, Japan; and the American Indians, the U.S.
The Jewish claim to modern Palestine is more realistically based; it derives from the territorial mandate that the British received from the League of Nations after the collapse of Turkey in World War I and later passed on to the U.N. That mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, promising the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Most of the Arab states now contesting Israel's claim did not exist themselves at the time, but a few Arab leaders agreed to the Balfour Declaration (whose meaning may or may not have been clear to them). The majority of Arabs probably disagreed.
The fact is that in 1947 the U.N. proposed partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs objected to the plan; the Jews accepted. In 1948, Israel proclaimed itself a state, and the world so recognized it. Karl Deutsch, professor of political science at Yale, compares the establishment of Israel to an act of "eminent domain," carried out by the world community.