The Roots of Arab-Israeli Rage, Part 1

In AD 70, the Romans crushed a Jewish revolt, sacked Jerusalem, and destroyed its sacred temple--the focal point of Jewish life. Jews were slaughtered, enslaved, or driven away. By 135, when another rebellion met with the same fate, no Jew could set foot in Jerusalem. The old city was rebuilt as a Greco-Roman one--complete with circus, amphitheater, and baths--and Judea was renamed Palestine.

When Rome turned Christian, Jerusalem followed suit, and churches went up around the sites holy to those in the faith. Pilgrims flocked in, and came for three centuries--until 638, when the city fell to a Muslim army from Arabia.

Muslims, too, held Jerusalem holy. Early on, they even faced toward it in prayer rather than Mecca. Within a century, the Dome of the Rock had been built on the site where Muhammad is said to have ascended into heaven, the Al-Aqsa Mosque had gone up next door, and Jerusalem had become an Arab and Muslim city. Except for a century or two of Crusader rule after 1099, Muslims held sway there almost continuously for more than a thousand years.

But then came Zionism, a 19th-century movement rooted in the idea that the Jewish people, dispersed and persecuted, deserved an autonomous home. That's where the modern Arab-Israeli conflict--and our timeline history of it--begins.

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