W<$>ITH the latest flare-up of violence between the Palestinians and the state of Israel, we are once again seeing a modern version of the Indian wars that took place on the North American continent in the 19th century when settlers of European descent displaced the indigenous populations of native peoples who were living there.Those wars ended in the crushing defeat of the so-called Indian nations and by the late 19th century the last battles had been fought and the native peoples largely confined to “reservations”.

It has now been 58 years since the creation of the state of Israel. But the original inhabitants of what was known as British Mandatory Palestine until 1948 continue to resist, forcing the Jewish state to continue to fight what could be called a 21st-century Indian war against them.

There have been many wars fought since 1948, the year the state of Israel was formed. But where other global conflicts during this period had their beginnings and endings there appears to be no end in sight for the ongoing conflict between the Jews and the Arabs.

The Jews have an historical claim to the Holy Land, one which is backed up by the teachings in the Bible which states that the territory was given to them by God. But even then they had to defeat the original inhabitants, the Philistines and the Canaanites, before they could establish their original state.

The Jewish presence in Palestine existed until the Romans destroyed the last Jewish state just after the time of Jesus and the beginning of the Christian age. For thousands of years after that time there did not exist a Jewish state in the region.

During the Crusades, the European Christian powers claimed the Holy Land; following their defeat, the territory was eventually absorbed into what became the Ottoman Empire and remained a minor province of the Muslim Turks until the end of World War One in 1918.

The Romans were the second occupying power to destroy a Jewish state in the Promised Land. Earlier, the Babylonians defeated a Jewish army and deported the population en masse to what is now Iraq.

But many would eventually return to their homeland before the second defeat by the Romans and this event was what precipitated the beginning of the real dispersal of the Jews and the creation of what is known as the Jewish Diaspora — the scattering of the Jewish people.

There was no more serious talk about creating a Jewish state until 1897 when Jewish nationalist Theodor Herzl organised the first Zionist Congress at Baze, Switzerland to publicise Jewish claims to what was now called Palestine. Zionism was a secular creed based on the nationalist movements that were beginning to emerge in the late 19th century.

In 1917, when Britain was at war with the Ottoman Empire, London issued what has since become known as the Balfour Declaration to the Zionist movement. Then British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour declared his sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine on the basis that nothing should be done to prejudice the rights of existing communities already there.

After the war, Britain gained control of Palestine and had to live up to its wartime promise to the Zionists — supervising massive Jewish immigration to the territory. The Palestinian Arab population, then the majority in the area, expressed alarm and began a series of revolts protesting the increased Jewish presence.

The targets of their wrath were the British and the newly-arrived Jewish population. Simultaneously, British troops also became the targets of armed Jewish nationalists who wanted to carve out an Independent Jewish state in Palestine — one from which both the UK and the Arabs had been expelled.

While certainly the mainstream of Jewish immigrant leaders wanted to reach a form of accommodation with their Palestinian Arab neighbours, there were also violent Jewish extremists in terrorist groups like the Stern Gang and the bloodthirsty Irgun Zvai Leumi who wanted to purge the land of Arabs. They undertook any number of atrocities to prompt the Arab population to flee to neighbouring countries.

In 1947 the newly-created United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, which allowed Britain to withdraw its troops.

In 1948, under its first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the state of Israel declared its Independence. And thus began the long series of Arab-Israeli conflict which has led to Israel becoming a modern-day Sparta, a veritable militarised society always ready for war to defend itself.

After defeating the many Arab regular armies which attacked it in the 1940s and ‘50s, it could be said that the first real Palestinian-Israeli war broke out in Lebanon after the Palestinian Liberation Movement (PLO) was formed in 1964.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees settled in Lebanon after the creation of the state of Israel and they established an essentially self-governing state-within-a-state called “Fata land”. This led to Israeli military invasions, the last one in 1982, which saw the withdrawal of the PLO under the supervision of an international peace-keeping force.

The heart of this ongoing conflict is the fact that this small strip of land is claimed by two nations. It has been stated that when the Jews took over the land that it was empty, devoid of any existing population, but the facts are that in 1945 there were 452 predominantly Arab villages in Israel.

Arab sources claim 385 of them were destroyed between 1948 and 1967. The Israelis themselves claimed that some 362 were destroyed and the reason is the same that is advanced today to justify building the wall between the two communities. It was done for security and the wiping out of potential areas of resistance on the part of the Palestinians.

The Palestinians have been the overall losers in that they have lost more and more of their land. So much so that even with the international community’s support for a two-state solution (essentially the same partition plan proposed by the UN in 1947 but which the Palestinian leadership then rejected) the Palestinians will not be able to claim a country with a continuous border, only little strips of land divided by Jewish settlements and military outposts.

It is interesting that while the state of Israel has unleashed the full might of its military on the Palestinians for the sake of the return of one of its soldiers, it holds some 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including women and at least 300 children.

Recently, President Bush visited the Czech Republic, formerly part of Czechoslovakia and an East Bloc country under the control of the old Soviet Union. He praised the attempt to create a Communist government with a so-called human face on the part of the Czech and their resistance in 1968 to the Soviet invasion this attempt at reform prompted.

He said it had been a struggle for freedom. I wonder what he will say when the world witnesses the Palestinian people attempting to resist the next invasion by Israeli tanks, also in a struggle for freedom?