What happened to the Palestinians as a consequence of the 1948 War? Now internationally known as Israel, this significant area of land (approx 10,000 square miles

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What happened to the Palestinians

as a consequence of the 1948 War?

Now internationally known as Israel, this significant area of land (approx 10,000 square miles) is situated in the middle East at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. The capital is Jerusalem and its neighbouring countries are Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The state language is Hebrew, however over the years the range of people populating the land has considerably grown. Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, Romanian and Persian people all occupy Israel. The land too ranges from the fertile densely populated Mediterranean coastal plains to the lowest place on earth; the Great Rift Valley.

The Israeli/Palestine conflict has been a major issue ever since the ancient times when it was originally the homeland of the Jews, Judea (meaning the area around Jerusalem). In 6 AD the Romans conquered Judea and it was renamed Palestine. The Jews were forcibly exiled from their homeland and scattered across the world. Then in 7 AD Palestine was conquered by the Arab followers of the prophet Muhammed, Arabs then occupied Palestine for thousands of years and Islam and the Arabic language became a familiar way of life for the Palestinian population. In 1516 Palestine was conquered by the Turkish ottoman Empire. In the late years of the 19th century, anti-semitism in Russia and then France became more and more severe. In 1865 a writer, Eugen Dühring, called for the extermination of all Jews. Some Jews believed that they could tackle the problem with assimilation and just try to blend in with the population whereas most Jews realised that they would only be safe in a state of their own. It was then that the Jewish movement to reclaim their homeland, Zionism was founded. Originally they were open to excepting any site as a homeland but history's biblical connections led them back to Palestine. The Jews believed that Palestine (Israel) was given to them by God and were chosen to live in the promised land. The Zionist slogan called Palestine "a land without people for a people without land", the Jews completely ignored the massive Arab population already occupying Palestine and did not seem to fully understand the fact that the Arabs were not willing to just give up their country. Zionism became a formal organisation in 1897 with their first Zionist leader as Theodore Herzl. Jews started to transfer to Palestine and by 1914 the total population of Palestine stood at 700,000 with roughly 85,000 Jewish.
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In July 1915 the McMahon correspondence was set up. Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Caira, negotiated in 1915-16 with Husain Ibn Ali, the Sheriff of Mecca, in which the British government tried to gain support against the Ottoman Empire and implied that she would support an Independent Arab state.

After Turkey had been defeated in the First World War France and Britain agreed to split the Ottoman's land between themselves in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 (named after two diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot) with Palestine falling under the rule of ...

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