Palestine Trends of Power: A Survey of Three Thousand Years of Palestine History

THE establishment of the state of Israel in a part of Palestine was the result among other factors of a rare sequence of favorable constellations in world power. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I opened the country to large-scale Jewish immigration. Political growth and consolidation of Jewish power was facilitated by the legal machinery of the Mandate and the military protection of the Mandatory Power. The decline of British control in Asia and her partial withdrawal after World War II gave the newly grown Jewish population an opportunity to assert its independence and attain statehood. Outside the boundaries of the state of Israel a similar process of dissolution and new formation of political forces in the Middle East had taken place from Egypt to India. Political power as organized by and embodied in states approaches the causeeffect relation near enough to permit representation and classification according to logical pattern and recurring tendencies. An analysis of the rise and fall of Poland, for instance, in the last two centuries would clearly bring out the power constellation of her neighbors as constituting a basic law of her existence. Poland flourished only when her three more powerful eighbors quarreled. It is therefore quite legitimate to ask whether there exist also in the case of Palestine certain trends of power the analysis and study of which may add to our understanding of past and present events in that country. Palestine is not an area in which political independence thrives, a fact due to geographical factors which will have to be assessed by way of an introduction to the historical part. Together with Syria, Palestine forms a narrow isthmus of fertile soil which separates the no-man's land of the vast Arabian Desert in the east from the no-man's land of the Mediterranean Sea in the west and which links the Nile Valley and the inhabitable western fringe of Arabia with the centers of cultivation in western Asia. In the form of a two-pronged highroad, one branch running along the maritime plain in the west and the other on the eastern range in Transjordan,l the coun1 Referred to in the Bible as "king's highway" (Num. 20:17); see also G. A. Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1931), p. 48.