The British short story writer Saki (H. H. Munro) once described the island of Crete as a place that has produced more history than could be consumed locally. The same might be said of Palestine, the region that includes the contemporary State of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The area in question is quite small. It stretches from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Jordan River in the east and from Lebanon in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Sinai Peninsula in the south. Israel in its commonly recognized borders is roughly the size of the state of New Jersey. And Israel comprises almost 80 percent of the territory designated “Palestine” after World War I. (As with most everything else pertaining to Palestine, there are those who would challenge even these simple assertions. According to right-wing Revisionist Zionists, whom we shall meet again later in our story, and [ironically] the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which we shall also meet again, Palestine includes the territory of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as well. Hence, the slogan of the latter group: “The road to Jerusalem begins in Amman.”)

The population of Palestine is also small. Israel's population is about 7.8 million, smaller than the population of London or New York City. There are approximately 4.3 million Palestinians in the Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) – a population a little larger than that of Los Angeles. (Although the exact figure is unknown, estimates for the total number of Palestinians in the world run as high as 9 million.) Since 1948, wars between Israel and its neighbors have claimed upwards of 150,000 casualties. These wars were certainly tragic, but they just as certainly pale in horror when compared with the most grievous squandering of lives in the region during its recent history. In the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, there were 500,000 to 1 million dead and 1 million to 2 million wounded. Outside the region, there was the Bosnian war of 1992–5 (upwards of 250,000 dead), the 1994–5 genocide in Rwanda (500,000 to 850,000 dead), and the ongoing civil war in the Sudan (approximately 1.5 million dead from war and war-created famine).