Who's the genius that separated Palestine (West Bank/Gaza Strip) with Israel in the middle?

Answer 1

Agree with koko.

The partition plan was done based on population, I believe, which put Israel in the middle with two pieces off to the side.

Another screw-up by the worthless UN.

Answer 2

The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is the eastern part of the Palestinian territories. It has never belonged to Israel although most the territory has been under Israel military occupation since 1967. It had been captured by Jordan in the late 1940s and was officially relinquished by Jordan to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1988. East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1967 but this has not been recognised by the United Nations or the European Union. Israeli settlements exist in the West Bank but these are considered a violation of international law by the United Nations Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the European Union. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Continued expansion of the settlements in the West bank has been condemned by the United States and the European Union in 2007 and by the US Secretary of State in 2008. The River Jordan and the Dead Sea form the border with Jordan in the east, while Israel borders the West Bank to the north, west and south.

Answer 3

It was a combination of the Zionist organizations and the United Nations.

Actually, the Zionists originally wanted all of Palestine including some parts of what is now Jordan. However, Jordan (which supported Britain during WWII) achieved independence in 1946 and received the territory east of the Jordan river which was anyway a separate administrative unit under the British mandate.

In 1947 the British turned the Palestine matter over to the U.N. which appointed a committee to study the situation (all Europeans). They thought the Zionist demand for all of Palestine was too much and made the recommendation that gave the Zionists the majority of the land (even though they were only 30% of the population and legally owned about 6%) for a Jewish state. They arranged it in a kind of checkerboard so that the some 90+% of the Jews would live in the part alloted to the Jewish state although even there about 45% of the population was non-Jewish. Then, since the Negev was sparsely populated, they gave that to the Jewish state as well, in addition to much of the fertile areas of the north where most Jews lived.

Zionist usually say that the war that followed started with an Arab attack on a bus that killed 7 Jews on November 30 1947, the day after the U.N. voted for the partition. But as Zionist historian Benny Morris notes, that specific attack may have been in retaliation for the murder by the Zionist terrorist group LHI of 5 Bedouins on November 20. Arabs held demonstrations and a few riots in cities against the partition plan, but these soon died down. Villagers in the hinterlands largely continued life as normal.

The Zionist organizations stepped up their terrorist attacks, and began a compaign of ridding the land of its Arab population (a proposition some Zionists had contemplated for many years). For example, a month before Israel was declared in mid-May 1948 and the neighboring Arab states attempted to come to the defense of towns and villages of Palestine, hundreds of Zionist armed forces attacked the village of Deir Yassein, a village outside of the territory allotted to the Jewish state under the U.N. partition plan. They massacred over 100 mostly unarmed villagers.

By mid-May, 56 Arab villages had been depopulated and demolished by Zionist forces. As the Zionists consolidated their plans to "clean up" (nikui in Hebrew) Arab "settlements" (i.e., villages where Palestinians had lived for thousands of years) following the declaration of the state, the ethnic cleansing campaign became more systematic. Deir Yassein was not the worst massacre of that war.

By the end of the war, Israel had conquered about 72% of Palestine, some 500 villages and several major towns were depopulated of Arabs by 1949. Leaving the enclave of Gaza in the south, crowded with refugees, and the West Bank with Israel in the middle. Originally they had wanted all of it, they probably didn't have enough force to take it all at that time.

Zionists ever since have made the ridiculous claim that because Palestine was never a sovereign state the Palestinian people who had lived there some since biblical times had no right to live there.

Answer 4

The nutshell above is pretty good but "shape" of Israel goes back to when the 12 tribes did not wipe out the Philistines.

This "shape" was again instituted with similar boundaries in "rebirth" so to speak. Probably a penalty by God for not taking care of the Philistines.

Now the West bank and Gaza are inhabited by the descendants of nomadic tribes from Jordan.

Answer 5

At first it was the U.N. Then Israel did that itself. Take it from me, bring an eraser and wipe those lines between Israel and the West Bank and write in BOLD "Israel". Israel was created to extend, the Zionists have big dreams and Israel (according to 1948 borders) is not enough. Tell me, what kind of countries do Palestinians have while they have no control on their lands, can't move freely and have to ask for Israel's mercy to let them build houses?

Answer 6

It was a war zone plan by the big powers to keep the Middle East a war zone and only Jews and Arabs get killed in that war zone and they say the Jews are smart.

Answer 7

Actually the two touched or almost touched based on what the UN came up with originally, the arabs started a war and lost a lot of land... I guess you could say they separated the two.

Answer 8

The United Nations, a basically worthless, corrupt organization that accomplishes less than nothing.

Answer 9

I think it was our current president along with the current prime minister of Israel both didnt seek wisdom and counsel of God and dont see that doing that is gonna work biblically/prophetically.

Answer 10

Here's the whole, sad story in a nutshell:

From 1517-1917 Turkey's Ottoman Empire controlled a vast Arab empire, a portion of which is today Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. During World War I (1914-1918), Turkey supported Germany. When Germany was defeated, so were the Turks. In 1916 control of the southern portion of their Ottoman Empire was "mandated" to France and Britain under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the Arab region into zones of influence. Lebanon and Syria were assigned (mandated) to France... and "Palestine" (today's Jordan, Israel and "West Bank") was mandated to Great Britain. Because no other peoples had ever established a national homeland in "Palestine" since the Jews had done it 2,000 years before, the British "looked favorably" upon the creation of a Jewish National Homeland throughout ALL of Palestine. The Jews had already begun mass immigration into Palestine in the 1880's in an effort to rid the land of swamps and malaria and prepare for the rebirth of Israel. This Jewish effort to revitalize the land attracted an equally large immigration of Arabs from neighboring areas who were drawn by employment opportunities and healthier living conditions. There was never any attempt to "rid" the area of what few Arabs there or those Arab masses that immigrated into this area along with the Jews!

In 1923, the British divided the "Palestine" portion of the Ottoman Empire into two administrative districts. Jews would be permitted only west of the Jordan river. In effect, the British had "chopped off" 75% of the originally proposed Jewish Palestinian homeland to form an Arab Palestinian nation called Trans-Jordan (meaning "across the Jordan River"). This territory east of the Jordan River was given to Emir Abdullah (from Hejaz, now Saudi Arabia) who was not even an Arab-"Palestinian!" This portion of Palestine was renamed Trans-Jordan. Trans-Jordan and would again be renamed "Jordan" in 1946. In other words, the eastern 3/4 of Palestine would be renamed TWICE, in effect, erasing all connection to the name "Palestine!" However, the bottom line is that the Palestinian Arabs had THEIR "Arab Palestinian" homeland. The remaining 25% of Palestine (now WEST of the Jordan River) was to be the Jewish Palestinian homeland. However, sharing was not part of the Arab psychological makeup then nor now.

Encouraged and incited by growing Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, the Arabs of that small remaining Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River launched never-ending murderous attacks upon the Jewish Palestinians in an effort to drive them out. Most terrifying were the Hebron massacres of 1929 and later during the 1936-39 "Arab Revolt." The British at first tried to maintain order but soon (due to the large oil deposits being discovered throughout the Arab Middle East) turned a blind eye. It became painfully clear to the Palestinian Jews that they must fight the Arabs AND drive out the British.

The Palestinian Jews were forced to form an organized defense against the Arabs Palestinians... thus was formed the Hagana, the beginnings of the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF]. There was also a Jewish underground called the Irgun led by Menachem Begin (who later became Prime Minister of Israel). Besides fighting the Arabs, the Irgun was instrumental in driving out the pro-Arab British. Finally in 1947 the British had enough and turned the Palestine matter over to the United Nations.

The 1947 U.N. Resolution 181 partition plan was to divide the remaining 25% of Palestine into a Jewish Palestinian State and a SECOND Arab Palestinian State (Trans-Jordan being the first) based upon population concentrations. The Jewish Palestinians accepted... the Arab Palestinians rejected. The Arabs still wanted ALL of Palestine... both east AND west of the Jordan River.

Our Palestinian Cousins started the '48 war, and in so doing released the warlike appetites of a nation of survivors, a people with no place to run, who had repressed their rage for millennia, and had now earned full title to it!

On May 14, 1948 the "Palestinian" Jews finally declared their own State of Israel and became "Israelis." On the next day, seven neighboring Arab armies... Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen... invaded Israel. Most of the Arabs living within the boundaries of the newly declared "ISRAEL" were encouraged to leave by the invading Arab armies to facilitate the slaughter of the Jews and were promised to be given all Jewish property after the victorious Arab armies won the war. The truth is that 70% of the Arab Palestinians who left in 1948 -- perhaps 300,000 to 400,000 of them -- never saw an Israeli soldier! They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated; we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit those nice Jewish properties as well.

They guessed wrong; and the Arab Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women. So much for the blatant lie about Jews throwing out all the [Palestinian] Arabs! The remaining 30% either (1) saw for themselves that these Jews would fight and die for their new nation and decided to pack up and leave or (2) were driven off the land as a normal consequence of war.

When the 19 month war ended, Israel survived despite a 1% loss of its entire population! Those Arabs who did not flee became today's Israeli-Arab citizens. Those who fled became the seeds of the first wave of "Palestinian Arab refugees."

The Arab propagandists and apologists almost never mentioned that in 1948, Arab armies launched a war against a one-day-old Israel. Instead they focus on the main consequence of that war: the creation of Arab refugees, stating that Israel "short of genocide" expelled 800,000 of them. This not only disagrees with UN estimates of a bit over 400,000 refugees but also ignores the fact that most of the Arabs/Palestinians were encouraged to leave by the Arab World itself!