After a violent Jewish uprising against Roman rule, the Romans dispersed the Jewish population of Palestine to all parts of their empire, which the Jews call the Diaspora. The small Jewish communities thus established in all parts of the Roman world
1959 Merger of Egypt and Syria creates United Arab Republic.
1961 United Arab Republic is dissolved, but Egypt retains name.
1961 Kuwait is granted independence.
1964 Formation of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) escalates guerrilla warfare
Against Israel and provokes Israeli retaliation.
1967 (June) Six-Day War (third Israeli-Arab war); U. S. government supports Israel in
Face of world opinion; Israel occupies much Arab territory.
1973 (Oct.) Egypt attacks Israeli positions in Sinai Peninsula, starting Yom Kippur
War; Arabian oil embargo affects world oil supplies.
1978-1979 Camp David Accords establish permanent peace settlement between Israel and Egypt.
1978 Iranian revolutionaries overthrow monarchy and establish an anti-American
Islamic fundamentalist government.
1978 Israel invades Lebanon, driving out PLO forces.
1979 (Nov. 4) Iranian revolutionaries take Americans hostage in Tehran.
1980 Iran-Iraq war begins.
1991 (Jan.) United States and its allies fight Iraq in Persian Gulf War.
1994 Israeli-PLO peace accords are signed, but negotiations on implementation
Continue.
1996 New Israeli government suspends Syrian-Israeli peace talks.
1997 (Dec.) Islamic Conference Organization Summit is held in Tehran.
1998 Israeli and Palestinian officials agree on autonomy for Palestine, with promise of establishment of Palestinian state.
1998 (Jan.) Iranian president Khatami urges dialogue between Iranian and American
Peoples.
1998 (Feb.) Syria reopens border with Iraq.
(continued)
Clung to their religious beliefs and customs and did not assimilate into the populations among which they found themselves. Over the centuries the peoples of the areas in which the Jews lived formed a virulent animosity toward them which is known as anti-Semitism.
In part anti-Semitism derived from religion. The peoples of the regions to which the Jews were dispersed, which are mostly in modern Europe, became overwhelmingly Christian in religious persuasion. Many Christians blamed the Jews for the crucifixion
Middle East Time Line (continued)
1998 (May) Egyptian business leaders found Cairo Peace Movement to expand
Contacts between Egyptians and Israelis.
1998 (June 16) Israeli warplanes launch missile attacks on suspected Hezbollah
Military bases near Sojod.
1998 (June 30) U. S. jet fires missile at Iraqi antiaircraft battery near Basra.
1998 (Dec.) United States and Britain resume air strikes on Iraq.
1998 (Oct. 21) Turkish and Syrian leaders announce agreement settling dispute over
Turkey's charge that Syria has supported antigovernment Turkish Kurds.
1998 (Nov. 20) Israeli occupation forces begin withdrawal from West Bank territory being handed over to Palestinian National Authority.
1999 (Feb. 7) Jordanian king Hussein dies after forty-six years in power; he is succeeded by his oldest son, who becomes King Abdullah II.
1999 (Mar. 11) Iranian president Khatami has private audience with Pope Paul II at
Vatican during tour of Western Europe designed to improve Iran's ties with the West.
1999 (July 6) Fifty days after winning May 17 election, Ehud Barak is sworn in as
Israel's prime minister and calls for regional cooperation.
1999 (Dec. 10) Turkey is accepted as a candidate for membership in the European Union.
2000 (Jan.) More than two thousand members of the Army of Islamic Salvation and other guerrillas surrender to the Algerian government under a partial amnesty.
2000 (Feb.) Supporters of Iranian president Khatami gain strength in elections to the
National legislature.
2000 (May) Israel announces that it will withdraw unconditionally from Lebanon.
2000 (June) Saad Eddin Ibrahim, chair of Egypt's Ibn Khaldoun Center for
Developmental Studies, is arrested for criticizing his national government.
2000 (June) Foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Yemen sign a treaty on their
Borders based on their 1934 agreement.
Of Jesus Christ, and hated them. Many Jews were moneylenders and middlemen in economic transactions, which accounted for some of the anti-Jewish feeling. Much anti-Semitism came from fear of strangers—xenophobia—and ethnocentrism on the part of the Christian population. Anti-Semitic sentiments led to frequent outbreaks of violence, called pogroms, against the Jewish communities of Europe.
A sensational manifestation of anti-Semitism in France during the 1890's was the Dreyfus affair. Alfred Dreyfus was a French
2000 (June 10) Hafez al-Asad dies and is succeeded as president by his son Bashar al-
Asad.
2000 (Sept. 28) Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visits the Temple Mount;
Palestinians react with protests and riots, and a new cycle of violence begins.
2000 (Oct. 12) A small boat loaded with bombs strikes the USS Cole in the harbor at Aden in Yemen, killing seventeen U. S. sailors and injuring twenty-nine others.
2001 (Feb. 6) Ariel Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel; in the months that follow, Palestinian suicide bombers attack in Israel.
2001 (June) Hezbollah attacks sites in Israel and Israel responds by attacking Syrian
Military sites in the Bekaa Valley.
2001 (Sept. 11) Terrorists of Middle Eastern origin hijack planes in the United States
And fly them into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon Building in Washington, D. C.; the United States maintains that the terrorists are agents of the al-Qaeda group based in Afghanistan.
2001 (Oct. 17) Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi is killed by Palestinians in retaliation for the death of a Palestinian leader.
2002 (Aug. 15) More than six hundred family members of people killed in the September 11 attacks on the United States file suit against the Saudi Arabian company run by Osama bin Laden's family, three Saudi Arabian princes, and the government of Sudan, charging that they provided the terrorists with funds.
2002 (Sept. 19) U. S. president George W. Bush addresses the United Nations, urging the organization to intervene to force Iraq to comply with U. N. directives on weapons of mass destruction.
2003 (Jan. 27) U. N. inspectors reach their first deadline for beginning inspections in Iraq and filing preliminary findings.
2003 (Mar. 20) United States launches invasion of Iraq after Saddam Hussein refuses to
Step down.
Jewish army officer who was accused and convicted of high treason. The ensuing efforts of Dreyfus's brother to prove his innocence provoked outbursts of anti-Semitism throughout France and split French society down the middle. One person covering the affair for an Austrian newspaper was Theodor Herzl, who despaired of any peaceful resolution to what European newspapers referred to as "The Jewish Question." Consequently Herzl formed the Zionist movement.
Zionists believed that Jews would never be treated fairly by non-Jewish governments or be accepted into gentile society. They therefore formulated a plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine as a homeland for all Jews everywhere and as a voice for Jews living in other parts of the world.
The Zionists managed to interest a few wealthy Jews in their project, who financed a few Jewish settlements in Palestine before World War I, but only a few. Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire, which looked with disfavor on the influx of substantial numbers of Jews into its domains.
During World War I the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria against Great Britain, France, and Russia. In 1917, in order to secure a substantial loan from a large Jewish banking house with which to continue the war, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration. This declaration guaranteed British help for the Zionists in establishing a homeland for Jews in Palestine once the war ended.
At the same time, a British officer named T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, managed to rouse parts of the Arab population of the Ottoman Empire against the Ottomans by promising them independence once the war ended, thus encouraging modern Arab nationalism or pan-Arabism. These two mutually incompatible promises by the British government were the seeds of many of the contemporary problems in the Middle East.
World History
