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Editor's Note:

As of October 22, over 1.4 million people were displaced and over 6,000 fatalities have been reported amid the latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian armed conflict. Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, warns and armed conflicts have characterized relations between the two sides. Historically, Jews and Arabs, who created concurrent Jewish and Arab civilizations respectively have, until the 20th century, coexisted peacefully before the emergence of seemingly irreconcilable differences.

The Global Times will publish a series of in-depth reports on the "Past and Present of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," exploring the historical, religious, and cultural clashes, delving into the various wars and internal struggles between Israelis and Palestinians, and analyzing the power struggles triggered by external influences from Europe and the US, in an attempt to clarify how the past has influenced the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One land, two names

"We will not leave, we will not leave, we will not leave, and we will remain on our land," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Saturday when addressing the Cairo Peace Summit. He warned of any attempts to displace people from the war-torn Gaza Strip, and attempts to displace Palestinians from their homes, media sources reported. Following the outbreak of this round of conflict, Israel demanded that approximately 1.1 million residents in the northern Gaza evacuate to the south to facilitate military operations to eliminate the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a deep struggle, intertwined with historical and religious narratives that have shaped its course for generations," read a Fox News article on October 12.

"Central to this conflict is the land of historical and religious significance to both Jewish and Palestinian communities. The Bible plays a pivotal role, with its promise of the land of Canaan to the descendants of Abraham. For Jewish people, this territory represents the biblical Promised Land, where their forebears settled following their exodus from Egypt … From a Palestinian perspective, their connection to the land is also rooted in biblical heritage, tracing their origins back to the ancient Canaanites and Philistines," read the Fox News article.

Canaan, the ancient name for Palestine, lies at the intersection of three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe, including what is now Israel, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank. According to Israeli historical books, Semites who migrated from the Arabian Peninsula migrated to the area from about 3000 BC to 2500 BC, and both Semitic Jews and Arabs once lived here.

According to publicly available information, ancient Jews originated in the Mesopotamian plain approximately 4,000 years ago. They later migrated to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, known as the Crescent, to escape natural disasters. They then migrated again to the eastern part of the Nile Delta in Egypt due to famine. According to Israeli historical books, around the first half of the 13th century BC, Jewish people, who were unwilling to be enslaved, left Egypt under the leadership of Moses and wandered in the Sinai Peninsula desert for more than 40 years before being led into Canaan by Joshua. Similarly, in the late 13th century BC, another large group called the "Sea Peoples" or Philistines entered Canaan and named the land "Philistia," meaning "the land of the Philistines." In the 5th century BC, Greek historians began using the term "Palestine" to refer to this region.

Around 1000 BC, Jewish people established the Kingdom of Israel in Canaan. The second king of the kingdom, King David (1010 BC-970 BC), is also reported to have led the capture of Jebus (Jerusalem). As with the construction of the palace and the temple of Yahweh, Judaism became the state religion. The scope of the Jewish "Promised Land" also changed due to King David's expansion. According to the Bible, the promised land for God's chosen people was roughly the territory that lay between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean, read a New York Times article. During King David's reign, his kingdom extended from deep within the Sinai Peninsula to the Euphrates River, including large areas of present-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. This is reflected in the description of the Promised Land in the Five Books of Moses, according to publicly available materials.

According to media reports, records show that in around 931BC, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah (the origin of the term "Jewish") existed in tandem. Around the same time, the Philistines occupied the southern coastal plain of Israel. In around 722 BC, the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and as an ancient geographical term, "Israel" ceased to exist. Over a century and a half later, the Kingdom of Judah was also overthrown, and many of its inhabitants were exiled to Babylon. Subsequently, this land was conquered by ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. In 4 BC, 6 AD, 66 AD, and 132 AD, the local Jewish population staged multiple uprisings against Roman occupation, but they were brutally suppressed. From 70 AD to 132 AD, most Jews were forced to leave Canaan, marking the end of the Jewish people's settlement in the region. In 135 AD, after suppressing the uprising, the Roman Empire abolished the province of Judea and merged it with the province of Syria to eliminate memories associated with the Jewish people.

In the year 637 AD, the Arabs defeated the Eastern Roman Empire army and Palestine was incorporated into the Arab Empire. During the Umayyad dynasty (661 AD to 750 AD), Jerusalem, which was once a holy site for Judaism and Christianity, became one of the three major holy sites of Islam, along with Mecca and Medina. Present-day Jerusalem, with an area of only 126 square kilometers, is home to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount for Jews, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque for Muslims, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Via Dolorosa for Christians.

According to an article published on the news website The Conversation, "Israel" and "Palestine" are two names for one land. "Israel" first appears near the end of the 13th century BC within the Egyptian Merneptah Stele, referring apparently to a people (rather than a place) inhabiting what was then "Canaan," read the article.

"Palestina took its name from the coastal territory of the ancient Philistines, enemies of the Israelites (ancestors of the Jews). Subsequent to the Islamic conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, Arab peoples began to settle in the former 'Palestina.' Apart from about 90 years of Crusader domination, the land fell under Muslim control for just under 1,200 years. Although Jewish habitation never ceased, the population was overwhelmingly Arab," said the article.

Genesis of Zionism

Palestine became a part of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. After World War I, the defeated Ottoman Empire, which was allied with Germany, reluctantly handed over the region, including Palestine, to British mandate rule. In the late 19th century, the Zionist movement, particularly among European Jews who feared extinction, began to emigrate in large numbers to the Palestinian-inhabited areas.

Zionism, also known as Jewish nationalism, takes its name from Mount Zion, a small hill outside the Old City of Jerusalem, symbolizing the ancestral homeland of Israel. Despite the industrial revolution and modernization, anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews in Europe persisted. Increasingly, secular European Jews supported the idea of returning to their own homeland and establishing a Jewish state, even though a large number of Jews at the time did not endorse the idea of national restoration. Followers of Zionism believed that only by establishing a purely Jewish state could the fate of oppression and exile that Jews had endured for nearly two millennia be resolved. However, it cannot be ignored that their desired destination, Palestine, was not an "uninhabited land," and the idea of a purely Jewish state inevitably clashed with the basic rights of the indigenous Arab population. The founders of Zionism attempted to reach an agreement with the Ottoman Empire, which would overrule the existence of Palestine at the time, but were unsuccessful. As a result, they focused their efforts on gaining support from Western powers.

World War I brought a significant turning point to the once stagnant Zionist movement. Chemist Chaim Weizmann, who had made important contributions to the British army during the war, became the leader of the Zionist movement. He united with Jewish elites such as the Rothschilds and gained the support of the British government.

However, although the Ottoman Empire was defeated in the war and the UK began its mandatory colonial rule in Palestine, the British did not promptly fulfill their promise to the Jewish people. Instead, they tightened restrictions on Jewish immigration.

At the same time, Palestine witnessed a wave of immigration of Jewish people facing persecution in Eastern Europe. Prompted by the wave of immigration, the leaders of the Zionist movement considered finding a piece of land in Argentina to be their homeland, and the British government also proposed allocating land from its colony, Uganda for a Jewish settlement. However, due to the special religious and historical significance of Palestine, especially Jerusalem, to the Jewish people, the Zionist movement ultimately insisted that returning to Palestine was the only truly satisfactory outcome for the establishment of a homeland.

Far from this decision bringing a satisfactory outcome, it marked the beginning of suffering. Starting from the late 1920s, Arab nationalists, began to push back against the Zionist movement. They organized armed attacks on Jewish settlements and pressured the British to completely close Jewish immigration channels. As the strategic importance of oil increased, the British turned against Jewish people and supported the Arabs, causing further chaos.

The rise of the Nazi regime in Germany and the outbreak of World War II accelerated the "return" of Jews to Palestine. The brutal fact that 6 million Jews perished in the German Nazi-mandated holocaust during the war quickly changed the mainstream opinion in Europe and America, leading to support for the establishment of Israel. Exhausted and depleted from the war, the UK had no choice but to adjudicate the Palestine issue to the United Nations. In November 1947, UN Resolution 181 on the partition of Palestine was passed, marking the official establishment of an Arab state and a Jewish state in the region. This resolution was met with jubilation by the Jewish people, but the allocation of about 55 percent of the land to Israel and the subsequent opposition from Palestinians and other Arab countries sparked controversy.

Hope for peaceful coexistence

On the second day after Israel declared its independence, the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 broke out. By the end of the war in 1949, Palestinians had lost nearly four-fifths of the territory allocated to them by the United Nations, and over 750,000 people were displaced from their homes. The core issues of territory, refugees, the status of Jerusalem, and Jewish settlements have created significant disagreements between Israelis and Palestinians, becoming obstacles to peace talks.

Today, with the exception of very few countries, the rights and political status of the Jewish people are guaranteed. Against this backdrop, how to promote progress within Israel along the only viable and nonviolent path, and save both Palestinians and Israelis from "imminent catastrophe", are questions that many historians contemplate. Some of them believe that the prolonged turmoil is a result of negligence toward the interests of the Palestinian population during the nation-building process. They argue that Zionism, as an ideological mission for the establishment of Israel, should not supersede the rights of other minority groups in any subsequent system.

Some observers believe that throughout history, the Jewish people have endured great suffering but have also achieved great accomplishments, becoming a driving force in the progress of global civilization. The Palestinian people, on the other hand, have inherited the tragic fate of the Jewish people, who have been without a country, wandering for nearly 2,000 years. Today, Hamas represents the extreme aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish a state on equal footing with Israel. As long as this goal is not achieved, there will be people who will follow the path of Hamas. As China has consistently maintained, the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in the "two-state solution," which means establishing an independent Palestinian state. Only through this can peaceful coexistence between Palestine and Israel be achieved, and harmony between the Arab and Jewish nations be realized.

Protecting the legitimate rights and interests of investors, especially small and medium-sized consumers, is the core task of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), Wu Qing, chairman of the CSRC, China's top securities regulator, said in his first appearance before media during the ongoing two sessions.

"In a market like ours, where small- and medium-sized investors account for the vast majority, protecting the legitimate rights and interests of investors is the core task of the CSRC," Wu said.

Ensuring fairness and openness should be the most important principle for market regulators, according to Wu.

Corporate IPOs should never be focused on extracting money from the market and fraud should be resolutely cracked down upon, said Wu.

Wu vowed to aggressively enhance regulatory oversight on companies seeking IPOs and intermediaries in the IPO process and fix loopholes on illegal selling of shares by shareholders.

In Wu's first open appearance to media since he took his new post, Wu said he is still one day short of completing his first month's tenure at the post that oversees the world's second largest capital market.

Wu joked that "I am still learning and am a rookie," adding that he has been listening to ideas from all sides.

Key work for the CSRC will include enhancing regulatory oversight with severe punishment for violators in accordance with the law and rigorously manage the regulatory team, Wu said.

The regulator won't hesitate to act to correct extreme situations when the market seriously deviates from its fundamentals, irrational and violent fluctuations occur, liquidity is exhausted, market panic occurs and serious draining of confidence appears, Wu said.

Wu was appointed as a new chief of the country's top securities regulatory agency on February 7 amid a whirlwind week in the Chinese stock market, marked by swift efforts by the Chinese government to tackle volatility.

Since he took office, the Chinese A share market has recovered much of its recent losses, finishing at 3,039.93 points at the Shanghai bourse and 9,395.65 points at Shenzhen bourse on Wednesday.

In order to promote the healthy development of the capital market and protect investors' rights and interests, the CSRC has held symposiums to listen to opinions and suggestions on improving the basic system of the capital market, strengthening the protection of the rule of law and visiting listed firms to help them address difficulties to achieve high-quality development.

Microscopy Masters asks one thing of citizen scientists: Find proteins in electron microscope images. The task will probably give participants new appreciation for biologists who decipher the structures of teeny, tiny molecules. It’s not easy.

The goal of the online project, created by researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is to improve biologists’ ability to construct detailed, three-dimensional models of proteins.

Using cryo-electron microscopy — which involves freezing, then imaging a sample — the researchers have taken thousands of photos of their current target, a protein complex involved in breaking down other, unwanted proteins. Each image contains 10 to 100 copies of the complex. It takes that many images to capture a protein from every angle. Once the 2-D images are stitched together, researchers can reconstruct the protein’s globular, 3-D shape at near-atomic resolution.
Microscopy Masters enlists volunteers to do the necessary first step of combing through the photos to find the protein molecules — a time-consuming job that people do better than computers. The task may feel daunting, as each black-and-white image resembles a fuzzy TV screen. Only some of the dark smudges in any given image will be molecules of interest; others will be actual smudges or globs of proteins too jumbled to be of use. Fortunately, a practice tutorial offers a crash course in protein identification. And each image will be classified by many users, alleviating some of the pressure of worrying about marking the wrong thing.

Data from the project will help researchers improve protein-picking computer algorithms, says project member Jacob Bruggemann. That way computers can take over the painstaking work.

SAN DIEGO — On some planets that orbit whirling stars, spring and autumn might be the best time to hit the beach, whereas summer offers a midyear respite from sweltering heat. These worlds’ orbits can take them over regions of their sun that radiate wildly different amounts of heat.

“Seasons on a planet like this must be really strange,” says Jonathon Ahlers, a graduate student at the University of Idaho in Moscow, who presented his findings June 15 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Some stars spin so fast that they bulge in the middle. That bulge pushes the equator away from the blazing core, making it much cooler than the poles. A fraction of these stars also host planets that travel on cockeyed orbits, which take these worlds alternately over the poles and equator of their sun.

Ahlers developed computer simulations to see how the differences in solar energy combined with the tilted orbits might affect a planet’s seasons. The outcome depends on how the planet’s axis is tipped relative to its orbit. For a world whose north and south poles periodically face the star’s equator, “you get a cooler summer than normal and an extremely cold winter, but spring and autumn can be hotter than summer,” says Ahlers. “You get two distinct hottest times of the year.”

How that plays out depends on how the planet is built: an atmosphere or oceans could mitigate climate extremes. Ahlers has yet to work out those details. “It’s doing a lot,” he says, “but what, I don’t really know yet.”

It’s not the size of a snake’s muscles that matter, but how it uses them. King snakes can defeat larger snakes in a wrestling match to the death because of how they coil around their prey, researchers report March 15 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

King snakes wrap around their food and squeeze with about twice as much pressure as rat snakes do, says David Penning, a functional morphologist at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin. Penning, along with colleague Brad Moon at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, measured the constriction capabilities of almost 200 snakes. “King snakes are just little brutes,” Penning says.
King snakes, which are common in North American forests and grasslands, are constrictor snakes that “wrestle for a living,” Penning says. They mainly eat rodents, birds and eggs, squeezing so hard, they can stop their prey’s heart (SN: 8/22/15, p. 4). In addition, about a quarter of the king snake diet is other snakes. King snakes can easily attack and eat vipers because they’re immune to the venom, but when they take on larger constrictors, such as rat snakes, it has been unclear what gives them the edge. “That’s not how nature goes,” Penning says, because predators are usually larger than their prey.

King snakes, though, can eat snakes up to 35 percent larger than themselves. One of the largest king snake conquests on record, from 1893, is of a 5-foot-3-inch rat snake, about 17 percent larger than the 4-foot-6-inch king snake that consumed it, Penning says.
“David Penning is really one of the first researchers that has been looking at the anatomy, physiology and function of these snakes” to understand how king snakes are superior to rat snakes, says Anthony Herrel, a functional morphologist and evolutionary biologist at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
To determine what makes these snakes kings, Penning and Moon compared their muscle size, ability to escape attack and the strength of their squeeze to that of rat snakes. In one test, the researchers shook dead rodents enticingly in front of the snakes to goad them into striking and squeezing. Sensors on the rodents recorded the pressure of the squeeze.

The king snakes constricted with an average pressure of about 20 kilopascals, stronger than the pumping pressure of a human heart. Rat snakes in the same tests applied only about 10 kilopascals of pressure.

But the king snakes weren’t bigger body builders. Controlling for body size, the two kinds of snakes “had the exact same quantity of muscle,” Penning says.

The snakes’ more powerful constriction is probably due to how they use their muscles, not how much muscle they have, the researchers conclude. They observed that the majority of king snakes in the study wrapped around their food like a spring in what Penning calls the “curly fry pattern.” Rat snakes didn’t always coil in the same way and often ended up looking like a “weird pile of spaghetti,” he says.

Penning plans to study how other factors influence constriction as well, such as how long the king snakes can squeeze, how hungry they are and the temperature of their environment.

NEW ORLEANS — Saturn’s mighty rings cast a long shadow on the gas giant — and not just in visible light.

Final observations from the Cassini spacecraft show that the rings block the sunlight that charges particles in Saturn’s atmosphere. The rings may even be raining charged water particles onto the planet, researchers report online December 11 in Science and at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

In the months before plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere in September (SN Online: 9/15/17), the Cassini spacecraft made a series of dives between the gas giant and its iconic rings (SN Online: 4/21/17). Some of those orbits took the spacecraft directly into Saturn’s ionosphere, a layer of charged particles in the upper atmosphere. The charged particles are mostly the result of ultraviolet radiation from the sun separating electrons from atoms.
Jan-Erik Wahlund of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Uppsala and Ann Persoon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City and their colleagues examined data from 11 of Cassini’s dives through the rings. The researchers found a lower density of charged particles in the regions associated with the ring shadows than elsewhere in the ionosphere. That finding suggests the rings block ultraviolet light, the team concludes.

Blocked sunlight can’t explain everything surprising about the ionosphere, though. The ionosphere was more variable than the researchers expected, with its electron density sometimes changing by more than an order of magnitude from one Cassini orbit to the next.

Charged water particles chipped off of the rings could periodically splash into the ionosphere and sop up the free electrons, the researchers suggest. This idea, known as “ring rain,” was proposed in the 1980s (SN: 8/9/86, p. 84) but has still never been observed directly.

On an expedition to an icy island chain off the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip, researchers discovered a massive supercolony of more than 1.5 million Adélie penguins, according to a study published March 2 in Scientific Reports.

Scientists had known of an Adélie penguin colony (Pygoscelis adeliae) in these Danger Islands, but satellite images revealed more guano on the rocky islands than could be explained by the colony’s expected numbers.

Even though the tiny island chain is only about 10 kilometers across, researchers hadn’t realized the extent of the penguin population, says study coauthor Heather Lynch, an ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “In the Antarctic, distances are so vast, something major could be just around the corner and you wouldn’t know.”
The researchers did a preliminary head count, took drone images and collected mud cores during a 2015 expedition. The team then spent about a year using a computer algorithm to analyze the images to more fully count 751,527 penguin nests, Lynch says. For every nesting bird, the scientists assumed there was a partner penguin out at sea.
Next, the team hopes to analyze the guano content in the collected layers of mud to discover how long the penguins have been nesting in the Danger Islands.
The discovery is good news for fans of the flightless bird. Elsewhere in Antarctica where the climate is more volatile, penguin colonies are in decline. “I hope this provides impetus for a marine protected area in the Danger Islands with expanded borders from what has been proposed,” Lynch says.

Archaeopteryx was a flapper, not just a glider. The shape of the ancient bird’s wing bones suggests it was capable of short bursts of active, flapping flight, similar to how modern birds like pheasants and quails fly to escape predators, a new study finds.

One of the earliest birds, Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, spanning the evolutionary gap between modern birds and feathered dinosaurs. Fossils of the primitive fowl have been instrumental in the recognition that birds are dinosaurs (SN Online: 7/31/14). But researchers have long wrangled over how well these ancient dino-birds could fly.
Archaeopteryx doesn’t have several features considered essential to flight in modern birds, such as a keeled breastbone to which several important flight muscles attach; a ball-and-socket arrangement that allows the wing to flap fully up over the back and down again; and a muscle pulley system that links chest and shoulder muscles, allowing the birds to swiftly alternate between powerful downstrokes and upstrokes. Previous researchers also have suggested that Archaeopteryx’s plumage was too delicate and might have snapped with vigorous flapping (SN: 6/5/10, p. 12). Based on these observations, the primitive bird was thought to merely glide from branch to branch, rather than flapping its wings to fly.

Paleontologist Dennis Voeten and colleagues decided to look for other features that might indicate the dino-birds flapped their wings while flying. The researchers used X-ray microtomography to examine two different wing bones — the humerus, or upper arm bone, and a lower arm bone called the ulna — in three Archaeopteryx fossils.

The team compared the thickness of the bones’ walls and their resistance to torsion — a twisting force that birds’ wings withstand during flapping flight — with similar bones from several dinosaurs, flying reptiles called pterosaurs and modern birds. Archaeopteryx had wing bone structures most similar to pheasants and quails, birds that are capable of small bursts of active flapping flight, the researchers report March 13 in Nature Communications.

In examining the shape of the wing bones, the study takes a novel approach to the question of whether Archaeopteryx could fly, says ornithologist Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt, who was not involved in the research.
But the study doesn’t answer whether Archaeopteryx could launch itself from the ground into the air. “Their results convincingly show that it could do active flight” once it was already airborne, Mayr says. “What they do not explain is how it would have been possible to produce strong flapping flight to take off from the ground.” Other early birds might have used a combination of wing and leg strength to launch into the air, but this hasn’t been shown for Archaeopteryx (SN: 11/26/16, p. 9).

To understand whether and how Achaeopteryx actually flew, researchers would need to reconstruct the animal’s full range of motion — a challenging prospect given that muscles don’t fossilize, says Voeten, of Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic.

The primitive birds, without flight adaptations such as the muscle pulley system, wouldn’t have been capable of the full range of flapping motion birds today use. Instead, other parts of its anatomy indicate Archaeopteryx may have thrown its wings upward and forward, similar to a swimmer’s butterfly stroke, Voeten says. “Dedicated studies would need to show if it would work that way.”