Islamic State: "We Will Take Spain Back"

[frazzled]

8. Arab armies conquered the Iberian peninsula beginning in 8th century AD

They didn't originate there. That's 2000 years after the Jews were living in the region that is now Israel (c. 1200 BCE), and continued to live there. There's a pretty big difference between Spanish Muslims declaring they wish to retake Spain: it's as if modern day Romans decided that they were indeed the real rulers of Israel and Palestinian lands, since they had conquered and ruledthem once.

Fer chrissake, THIMK.

By contrast to the "invasion" model of ownership, the establishment of the modern state of Israel was part of a series of internationally sanctioned plans that dealt with the dissolution of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire in the early 20th century.

The land, and the Jews, had been conquered over the millennia by many empires--Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine ... and not until the 7th century AD was the region conquered by the Islamic Empire. The majority of the population then was Jews, many of whom were converted to Islam. At any rate, by 1099 the Islamic Empire was in turnconquered by the Crusaders, who ruled until 1291. Finally, by the 1500s, the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire conquered the entire region and ruled all the way until 1917. That was when the League of Nations, and then the UN, got involved in straightening out the region:

In 1917, towards the end of World War I, South Western Syria, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, was occupied by British forces. The United Kingdom was granted control of the area west of the River Jordan now comprising the State of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Mandatory Palestine), and on the east bank of what later became Jordan (as a separate mandate) by the Versailles Peace Conference which established the League of Nations in 1919. Herbert Samuel, a former Postmaster General in the British cabinet, who was instrumental in drafting the Balfour Declaration was appointed the first High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine, generally simply known as Palestine. During World War I the British had made two promises regarding territory in the Middle East. Britain had promised the local Arabs, through Lawrence of Arabia, independence for a united Arab country covering most of the Arab Middle East, in exchange for their supporting the British; and Britain had promised to create and foster a Jewish national home as laid out in the Balfour Declaration, 1917.

In 1947, following increasing levels of violence, the British government expressed a wish to withdraw from Palestine. The proposed plan of partition would have split Palestine into two states, an Arab state and a Jewish state, and the City of Jerusalem, giving slightly more than half the land area to the proposed Jewish state. Immediately following the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of a resolution recommending the adoption and implementation of the Partition Plan (Resolution 181(II) ), and the subsequent declaration of statehood by the Jewish National Council, civil war broke out between the Arab community and the Jewish community, as armies of the Arab League, which rejected the Partition Plan which Israel accepted, sought to squelch the new Jewish state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judaism_in_the_Land_of_Israel#Under_Islamic_rule_.28638.E2.80.931099.29