Historical developments can often be conveyed most simply by maps. This unit focuses on a series of maps about the development of the modern Middle East in general and of the modern State of Israel in specific. The captions under each map give a brief explanation of why the changes occurred.
The unit’s goals are:
• To give a concise historical overview about the evolution of the region and how and why modern Israel emerged.
• To underscore that after the fall of the ancient Jewish State, no other nation emerged in its place. During the
Ottoman Empire’s 400-year rule, the land was divided into unrelated administrative districts.
• To emphasize that all of the modern nations of the Middle East were formed only in the 20th century and that modern Israel is no different in this respect.
• To emphasize how the areas that Jews were entitled to settle kept changing and how Israel’s areas of jurisdiction also kept changing.
• To show how Israel expanded after the 1967 War and how much land it relinquished to make peace with Egypt. |
1. How do maps like those on pages 6 and 7 help tell the history of a region and a nation? How do they simplify
the story of modern Israel and its current situation?
2. How do the maps explain why Israel is said to have been “reborn” and Israel is referred to as “modern” Israel?
3. Judging from the maps, how have wars affected the boundaries of the nations in the region, especially of Israel? How have wars affected the boundaries of other nations (such as the U.S. or European countries)?
4. What is a “nation-state,” and when was the concept introduced in Europe? Why are borders so important to a
nation-state? When did nation-states develop in the Middle East, and why was the concept new (and even strange) in the region?
5. What other ways do you think the Middle East could have been divided? Why did Britain and France choose to divide the area into these particular nation-states? (A good reference on this is Efraim Karsh’s Empires of the Sand.)
6. What was the Palestine Mandate, and what were its original borders? How closely did the borders reflect the Biblical state of Israel? Why did the boundaries shrink between 1920 and 1923?
7. Why did the United Nations recommend the Partition Resolution in 1947? How fair do you think the partition was? Why did Israel end up with more land than the Mandate envisioned, and what happened to the land that was to become the Arab state?
8. What does it mean to “trade land for peace?” How has it worked for or against Israel?
9. What do these maps tell you about Israel’s relative size and security needs? |
