Jerusalem, held sacred by Jews, Christians, and…
2020 CE
Jerusalem, held sacred by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, would in an ideal world be an international city.
The city cannot, however serve as the capital of more than one nation, and Jewish Israel has claimed it as hers.
It is extremely unlikely that the Israelis will ever relinquish Jerusalem voluntarily.
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Substantial amendments to the Russian constitution proposed in January 2020 take effect in July following a national vote, allowing Putin to run for two more six-year presidential terms after his current term ends.
Russia launches a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
The invasion is preceded by a Russian military buildup in occupied Crimea and around Ukraine, and by Russia's recognition of the breakaway separatist regions in eastern Ukraine.
The invasion is the largest conventional military attack in Europe since the Second World War.
At about 06:00 Moscow time, Putin announces a "special military operation" in eastern Ukraine; minutes later, cities of Ukraine are attacked by missiles.
Two hours later, Russian ground forces enter the country.
The invasion is met with widespread international condemnation, with further sanctions against Russia
Anti-war protests in Russia are met with mass arrests.
The Golan Heights, the hilly area overlooking the upper Jordan River valley on the west, is another area militarily occupied by Israel.
After the Arab-Israeli War of 1948/1949, Syria had fortified the western crest of the Golan Heights, which commands the Hula Valley, the Sea of Galilee, and the upper Jordan River valley, all in Israel.
In these sections, many Israeli civilians had been killed by Syrian artillery and sniper fire; agriculture and fishing were rendered difficult, and at times impossible.
The area had been part of extreme southwestern Syria until 1967, when it came under Israeli military occupation, and in December 1981, Israel unilaterally annexed the part of the Golan it held.
As long as Israel exists, it is unlikely to relinquish the Golan, because the Israelis have a deep-rooted fear—not without reason—of enemy guns firing down upon their cities and villages from these strategic heights.
The Golan's population in 1988 was estimated to be twenty-three thousand nine hundred, at least twenty thousand of whom were Jewish settlers.
More than ninety-five percent of Jordan's population are Sunnite Muslims; Christians constitute most of the rest, of whom two-thirds adhere to the Rum, or Greek Orthodox Church.
Other Christian groups include the Greek Catholics, also called the Melchites, or Catholics of the Byzantine rite, who recognize the supremacy of the Roman pope; the Roman Catholic community, headed by a pope-appointed patriarch; and the small Syrian Orthodox, or Jacobite, church, whose members use Syriac in their liturgy.
Most non-Arab Christians are Armenians, and the majority belong to the Gregorian, or Armenian, Orthodox church, while the rest attend the Armenian Catholic church.
There are several Protestant denominations representing communities whose converts came almost entirely from other Christian sects.
About half of Jordan's population is Palestinian.
The influx of Palestinian refugees not only altered Jordan's demographic map but has also affected its political, social, and economic life.
Jordan's population in the late 1940s was between two hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand.
After the 1948/1949 Arab-Israeli War and the annexation of the West Bank, Jordanian citizenship was granted to some four hundred thousand Palestinians, who were residents of and remained in the West Bank, and to about half a million refugees from the new Israeli state.
Many of these refugees settled east of the Jordan River.
Between 1949 and 1967, Palestinians continued to move east in large numbers.
After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, an estimated three hundred and ten thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, sought refuge in Jordan; thereafter immigration from the West Bank continued at a lower rate.
In 1988, Jordan renounced its claims to the West Bank, which had been under its rule from 1948 to 1967.
During the 1990/1991 Persian Gulf War, some three hundred thosusand additional Palestinians fled Kuwait (or were expelled) to Jordan.
Most Palestinians are employed and hold full Jordanian citizenship.
By the mid-1990s, approximately one million three hundred thousand Palestinians, representing about one-third of Jordan's population, were registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provided education, medical care, relief assistance, and social services.
About one-sixth of these refugees live in camps in Jordan.
Jordan's Hashemite dynasty, whose ancestors were the hereditary emirs of Mecca until the Saudi-Wahhabis conquered the Hejaz in the mid-1920s, have the support of the Bedouin, but have often be at odds with the majority of the populace who, like many in the more secularly oriented Arab lands, would prefer a constitutional republic to a hereditary autocracy, however enlightened or benevolent.
“Occupied Palestine” includes the densely populated Gaza Strip, occupying one hundred and forty square miles (three hundred and sixtyy-three square kilometers) along the Mediterranean Sea just northeast of the Sinai Peninsula, unusual in being a densely settled area not recognized as a de jure part of any extant country.
The majority of its population, twelve hundred and three thousand in 2001, is Muslim Arab, among whom live scattered “outposts” of some seven thousand Jewish settlers, who have taken a large portion of the most desirable lands.
Living conditions in the Gaza Strip are typically poor, because of its dense and rapidly increasing population (the area's growth rate is one of the highest in the world); inadequate water, sewage, and electrical services; and high rates of unemployment.
Agriculture is the economic mainstay of the employed population, and nearly three-fourths of the land area is under cultivation.
Political tension and outbreaks of violence have often led Israeli authorities to close the border for extended periods, placing many Palestinians out of work.
The international airport in Gaza, which opened in November 1998, is closed, its runways torn up by Israeli bulldozers.
Gaza City and its surroundings continue to be greatly overpopulated by Arab refugees from Palestine.
A serious territorial issue is southern Lebanon, illegally occupied by Israel as a “security zone” for eighteen years, until the Shi'ite Hezbollah militia finally drove them out.
As with the West Bank, a key factor is water.
The waters of southern Lebanon's Litani River, considered by the Jewish Revisionists (the ideological ancestor of Likud) to be the northern boundary of the God-given Eretz Yisra'el, irrigate one of Lebanon's most extensive farming regions, Al-Biqa'.
The Israelis want access to that water, and to that end have proposed, and at times forged, various political and military alliances with the Maronite Christians of Lebanon.
Israel, the most technological developed and militarily powerful nation in the region, has the near unconditional support of the world's only true superpower.
Given the de facto economic and political alliance between worldwide Jewry and the United States, that is unlikely to change.
Currently, Israel legally possesses seventy-eight of historic Palestine, that is, the lands west of the Jordan, and militarily occupies the remaining twenty-two percent.
The West Bank, the area of the former British-mandated (1920 to 1947) territory of Palestine west of the Jordan River, had been claimed from 1949 to 1988 as part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan but has been occupied from 1967 by Israel.
The principal Palestinian municipalities of the West Bank are Janin, Nabulus, and Ram Allah north of Jerusalem and Bethlehem (Bayt Lahm) and Hebron (al-Khalil) south of Jerusalem.
Jericho (Ariha) is the chief municipality of the Jordan River Valley.
Between 1967 and 1977 an estimated sixty-three hundred Palestinians had been evicted from East Jerusalem and replaced by Jewish immigrants.
Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the issue of Israeli rule over the West Bank Palestinians remained unsolved.
Israel had regarded possession of the West Bank as vital to its security while it remained menaced by neighboring Jordan and Syria, and the growing number of Israeli settlements had further stiffened Israeli unwillingness to relinquish control of the area.
The approximately twenty-two hundred and seventy-square mile(fifty-nine hundred square-kilometer) area, home to some one million fifty-four thousand mostly Palestinians in 1993, is the center of contending Arab and Israeli aspirations in Palestine.
The territory, excluding East Jerusalem, is also known within Israel by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria.
Most Israelis Jews consider it theirs, either by divine right, right of conquest, or both.
There are some one hundred and eighty-two thousand illegal Jewish settlers in the West bank, and another one hundred and seventy-six thousand Jewish settlers, equally illegal under international law, in East Jerusalem.
On moral grounds, the case for a sovereign state based on ethnic purity and an institutional religious creed is a form of national socialism, which works pretty well for Israel’s Jewish majority Jews but not so well for the nation’s Arabs, Christians, and Muslims.
The Jews do have a very special history, however.
Without a nation of their own, history has shown that they are targets for any regime, any mob, looking for a scapegoat, and the consequences of that paradigm over the past couple of millennia have periodically been nothing less than horrific.
So, yes, its seems that the Jews must maintain they state they have fought so hard to establish.
The Palestinians?
They need a state, too, and not someone else’s.
The Palestinians are ethnically an urbanized and semi-urbanized mix of many peoples besides Arabs, including Greeks and Syrians; most are Muslim, but many are Christians, and the majority have an ancestral claim to Palestinian lands.
Palestine, as a nation, must function as a sovereign state, like Israel and its neighbors.
The economic position of the orders is secured by their extensive landholdings, which generally have been donated to them for the support of their churches, schools, and other establishments.
Given the general lack of interest on the part of Spanish colonials—clustered in Manila and dependent on the galleon trade—in developing agriculture, the religious orders had become by the eighteenth century the largest landholders in the islands, with their estates concentrated in the Central Luzon region.
Land rents—paid often by Chinese mestizo inquilinos, who plant cash crops for export—provide them with the sort of income that enables many friars to live like princes in palatial establishments.