As thoughts begin to turn toward other areas of the world, people start to forget about those cultures that have spent their entire history living in a war-zone. The longest ongoing battle know to mankind exists in an area of the world known today as the Middle East. More specifically the Arab-Israeli conflict is situated in what used to be known as Palestine, but today is referred to as Israel.
The land variously called Israel and Palestine is a small, (10,000 square miles at present) land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Some time between about 1800 and 1500 B.C., a Semitic people called Hebrews left Mesopotamia and settled in Canaan. According to the Bible, Moses led the Israelites, or a portion of them out of Egypt and into Canaan, where they conquered other tribes and city-states. King David conquered Jerusalem about 1000 B.C. and established an Israelite kingdom over much of Canaan, but the kingdom was divided into Judea in the south and Israel in the north following the death of David's son, Solomon. Jerusalem remained the center of Jewish sovereignty and of Jewish worship whenever the Jews exercised sovereignty over the country in the subsequent period, up to the Jewish revolt in 133 AD. .
About 61 B.C., Roman troops sacked Jerusalem and the land came under Roman control. Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem in the early years of Roman rule. Roman rulers put down Jewish revolts in about A.D. 70 and A.D. 132. In A.D. 135, the Romans drove the Jews out of Jerusalem. The Romans named the area Palestine. Most of the Jews who continued to practice their religion fled or were forcibly exiled from Palestine, but Jewish communities continued to exist in Galilee, the northernmost part of Palestine. Palestine was governed by the Roman Empire until the A.D. 300's and then by the Byzantine Empire. In time, Christianity spread to most of Palestine. The population consisted of Jewish converts to Christianity and paganism, peoples imported by the Romans and others who had probably inhabited Palestine continuously.
