Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

the problem of Palestine was handed over to the newly formed United Nations, which split the country in two. On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181, calling for the creation of two separate and distinct states, each containing its own ethnically and religiously homogeneous “nation.” The Palestinians rejected Resolution 181 outright. The geography of the partition was, according to the Arab Higher Committee representing Palestinian demands, “absurd, impracticable, and unjust.” The resolution established a serpentine border. It gave the Jews, who at the time owned 7 percent of the land and made up less than a third of the population, 56 percent of the country, seven eighths of the citrus groves, most of the arable fields, and a majority of the Mediterranean ports. Some 80 percent of the land that would be the future state of Israel was still private property owned by Arabs.