Two miles north of Gaza in Palestine lies a kibbutz. Here, in the 1930s, Jews who had come from Poland set up farms.

Next to the Jews lived Palestinian Arabs, who had their own farms. They had lived there for several centuries.

At that time relations between Muslims and Jews were fairly friendly.

But in the 1930s the Palestinians realised that they were slowly losing their land. Jews arrived in large numbers and kept buying land.

When the state of Israel was established, about 700,000 Palestinians were displaced. They thought that if the problem was resolved quickly they would be able to return home.

But Israel never let them return to their homes.

In an interview with the BBC about ten years ago, former Israeli president Shimon Peres said the Palestinians should ask themselves why they had ended up in this situation.

"Most of the land would have stayed in the Palestinians' hands. They would have had a separate state. But they rejected it. In 1947 they made a mistake. We made no mistake. Why should we apologise for their mistake?" Mr Peres said.

Since 1897, Jews had wanted to build a separate state of their own.

From 1917 to 1948 the land of Palestine was under British control.

Source: BBC Bangla. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.