In AD 135, fed up with continual Jewish revolts, the Romans sacked Jerusalem, exiled the Jews from all of their traditional territories outside of a bare-bones settlement near Galilee, and renamed Israel "Palestina." This was when the Jews formed the Diaspora.
For roughly the next 500 years, the Romans and then the Byzantines excluded the Jews from Palestina and turned it over to its original Arabic inhabitants (think Palestinians), Christians, and the pagans who the Romans and Byzantines settled there to pacify the region. The Jews were forced to look on from afar as the Christians, under the patronage of Constantine the Great and his mother, Helena, "Christianized" Jerusalem.
In the 7th century the Muslims (who by this point included Palestine's Arabic inhabitants – the Palestinians) conquered Palestina. While they were generally more inclusive than the Romans and Christians in that they permitted some Jews to return to portions of former Israel, they seized Palestina as a Muslim holy land because Muhammad named its capitol (Jerusalem) one of Islam's three sacred cities and because Palestina was once the home of one of Islam's patriarchs (Abraham).
From the 7th century on, Muslims (the Seljuks, Fatmids, Mameluks, and Ottomans) controlled Palestina uninterrupted except for a brief period from 1099 to 1187 when European Crusaders conquered and held Jerusalem and the territories immediately surrounding it. By the late 1800s only 24,000 Jews lived in Ottoman occupied Palestina. While this number seems significant it pales in comparison to the millions who lived elsewhere.
World War I broke out in 1914. After the Allies defeated the combined forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, Palestina reverted to British control. Because a Muslim government no longer controlled their Holy Land, Jews began returning to Palestina a at a rate not seen for 900 years. The Palestinian majority did not like the returns and began to riot and kill the Jews. The Jews responded by organizing themselves and fighting back. The Palestinians would have destroyed the vastly outnumbered Jews but for British intervention.
The Jews remained a marginal political body in the Middle East until the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust. Galvanized by Hitler's acts, the world decided that it was time to return to Jews to their homeland en mass instead of through a previously arranged piecemeal 15,000 Jew per year immigration limit established by the British and the Palestinians. In 1948, the UN acknowledged the creation of the nation of Israel, carving out a small portion of Palestina for the Israelis. In 1967, the Six Day War broke out and the Israelis captured the West Bank and Gaza. Between the creation of Israel and the subsequent wars shoring up its borders, the Israelis and their actions forced over 4 million Palestinians out of their homes and out of the land that their ancestors had held since the Romans forced the Jews of Israel over 1,000 years earlier.
I write all this to ask the following questions:
1. Given that the land that we know as Israel belonged to the Palestinians for over 1,000 years and because that land is just as sacred to them as it is to the Jews, is it really surprising or wrong that the Palestinians want it back?
2. Should Israel be allowed to fight back against Palestinian aggression/terrorism with appallingly disproportionate means while denying Palestinians the basic respite of foreign assistance?
3. How can we balance the need for a Jewish democratic homeland and God's covenantal promise with the fact that by this point the only options we may have to assure that the Jews keep Israel are to either (1) allow the Jews to eradicate the Palestinians, (2) permit them to enforce a highly oppressive military rule upon the Palestinians, or (3) look the other way as the Middle East does what it wishes with Israel? Does a realistic fourth option exist?
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