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CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE SHINING STAR
THE WAR TORN HISTORY OF ISRAEL
In the near future, the country of Israel is going to take a more prominent role in world
affairs, so let’s take a brief look at their historical development to see why tensions have
continued to increase in the Middle East.
The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians around 722 BC, and the
threat of captivity and slaughter forced them to flee. Those people became known as the “ten lost
tribes.” The other two tribes, Benjamin and Judah (where the word “Jew” came from), remained
in the south. Through the years, Jerusalem and Palestine became one of the most overrun areas in
the world: Babylonian (587 BC-536 BC), Medo-Persian (536 BC-533 BC), Greek (331 BC-301
BC), Egyptian (301 BC-198 BC), Syrian (198 BC-63 BC), and Roman (63 BC-395 AD). Most of
the Jews had fled from the land, and only a small group remained in Jerusalem until 70 AD,
when the Romans burned the city. By 135, all of the Jews had been driven out. Still the area
continued to be the subject of contention as it was conquered by the Byzantine (396-638),
Mohammedan (639-1099), Crusader (1100-1291), Moslem (1292), Egyptian-Mamaluke (1292-
1917), and Turks (1917).
In 1895, Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jew, wrote a book called The Jewish State (Der
Judenstadt) that began the movement towards the establishment of an independent Jewish state.
In 1897, he arranged the first World Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland. Now known as
‘Zionists’ (for Mount Zion in Palestine), a fund was started to raise money to buy land, and a
blue and white flag was chosen, the colors of the tallith prayer shawl. Herzl traveled around the
world, especially in Europe, to lobby for his group. In 1903, a year before he died, England
offered the Jews the African country of Uganda, which they rejected, because they knew that
Palestine was their country. According to the Bible (Gen. 15:18), Israel’s promised land stretches
from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in Syria, and includes the countries of Syria and
Lebanon.
In 1904, Dr. Chaim Weizmann (who would become Israel’s first President), was made
Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester in England. The
Polish-born Jew had studied Chemistry in Germany, and taught in Switzerland and England.
During World War I, Germany was producing 250,000 shells a day, while England was only
producing 2,500, due to a shortage of acetone because of the lack of wood alcohol. Weizmann
isolated an organism capable of transforming the starch of cereals, most notably that of maize,
and later chestnuts, into acetone butyl alcohol. Because of these advanced experimentations and
the contribution of explosives (TNT) to the allied cause, Weizmann was credited with saving the
British Army. The only thanks he wanted, was for Palestine to be established as a national
homeland for the Jews.
The Sykes-Picat Agreement was a secret wartime agreement between England and France to
divide between them the lands of the Ottoman Empire once World War 1 ended. Among the
terms was the establishment of an Arab state in ‘southern Palestine.’ However, the Arabs became
upset that Britain decided to instead engineer its own rule over all Palestine through the League
of Nations. England essentially ruled Palestine as a colony until 1948.
On November 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour sent this