아프리카ㆍ중동

The nationalist spirit that then swept the international order in early 20th century beckoned to both European Jews, who fled to Palestine, and local Palestinian Arabs, that for different reasons, felt downtrodden and humiliated. Like other Arabs, the Palestinians were under colonial dominion, first by the Ottoman Empire that ruled Palestine for some 400 years, then by Great Britain that took over Palestine at the end of the First World War. When new Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan were being carved out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, the Palestinian Arabs too sought to obtain a country of their own. At the same time, for a variety of reasons, virulent antisemitism in Europe reached new heights. Publications such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in 1905 in Russia, generated theories of an international Jewish conspiracy. These fomented waves of massacres of Jews across all Eastern Europe and in Russia in particular. Feeling unwanted anywhere, the Jews concluded that they must have a state of their own in their ancestral land of Israel – now called Palestine. Arab and Jewish forms of nationalism emerged, promising an unshackling from bonds that deprived these beleaguered peoples of significance and dignity. The trouble was that the apparent way out of their misery brought them into a deadly conflict with each other, the brutal aftershocks of which have been reverberating till the present time.