I don’t have cable, and I’ve watched every taped episode of “Sports Night” at least four times, so lately I’ve started playing chess with my roommate in order to waste time. I’m pretty bad, and Ross is pretty good, so I lose a lot. Even so, I’m still glad that I can’t watch television, because all there is to watch these days is the slow disintegration of any peace in the Middle East.

The violence began around 2000 years ago and no, I’m not kidding. In the year 66, the Jewish people revolted against their Roman rulers - the uprising didn’t go so well, and in 70, Jerusalem was destroyed - including the Temple, which was the legal and cultural center of the Jewish world. With this defeat, the ancient Israelis fled and scattered around the world in what became known as the Diaspora. The Jewish people became a nation without a homeland.

What used to be Israel soon was handed from government to government. After the Romans came the Byzantine Christians, and after that, the Muslims. The Muslims established another holy place called the Dome of the Rock where the Temple used to stand. So in the same space - an area of about one square block - are these two incredibly important religious sites: one Jewish, one Muslim. Remember this and you’re halfway to understanding tonight’s news.

The Arabs stayed in the area off and on until 1300, where they were periodically bothered by various Crusades. The Crusades were a series of wars fought by Christian Europe in an effort to capture the Holy Land from “the infidels.” Those infidels were mostly Muslim, although sometimes they were Christian. The Crusades were unbelievably bloody disasters that only occasionally achieved their goal. In the end, they gave way to more Arab rule - first by the Egyptians and then by the Ottomans, beginning in 1517.

The Ottoman is one of those vaguely familiar empires that will only come up as an answer to a Jeopardy question. They were fantastically powerful and wealthy, ruled most of the Middle East and influenced the world’s politics from the 1500s until World War I. Now when you hear the word ‘Ottoman’ you think of a footstool. Consider that the United States is barely 200 years old. We don’t have any furniture at all named after us.

This brings us up to 1917, which isn’t bad, considering that we started at the year 70 and I’ve only written 450 words so far. The general picture is this: Israel began as the Jewish nation but soon fell under the rule of other cultures, most notably Islam. While their homeland was fought over, captured and lost by other people, Jews settled all over the world. Some Jews always have remained in the Middle East, but the far larger portion of the people were scattered throughout the world.

Even though Judaism survived in Europe, Asia and the Americas, it was never a peaceful survival. The Holocaust is only the latest of a 20th-century-long history of persecution of the Jewish people. Wherever Jewish people went, they were greeted with hostility and violence. It was not a calm existence, and the memory of their own country has always dominated the Judaic culture. Toward the end of the 19th century, a movement to re-establish Israel gained momentum - this movement was called Zionism.

Okay, back to 1917. The Ottomans lost everything but their furniture when they were defeated in World War I. Everything that was part of the Ottoman Empire reverted to the control of the League of Nations - a forerunner of the United Nations. The League of Nations handed over administration of the area to Great Britain.

Great Britain called the area the Mandate of Palestine, and it was huge - it included everything bound by Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Persia. The League, acknowledging the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” voted to establish a Jewish National Home - Eretz Israel - in the area. The entire Mandate of Palestine then would be divided into Israel to the east of the Jordan River, and the Transjordan to the west. There would be land for the Jews and for the Arabs.

From 1918 to 1948, more than a quarter of a million Jews immigrated to the British-ruled area. Some came from Russia, some from Poland, and some from Germany - and all of them escaped persecution.

By 1948, the League of Nations was dead. The United Nations was up and running, though. On May 14, 1948, the Nation of Israel declared its existence after more than two thousand years. On that day, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq all declared war on the new nation.

Peace was established in 1949, but by then East Jerusalem had been captured by Jordan and many Jordanian Arabs had settled there.

In 1956, Egypt attacked Israel and lost. In 1967, Egypt attacked again, joined by Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. All of the Arab world tried to destroy the new nation, but the war lasted only six days. By the end, Israel had recaptured the land around East Jerusalem - the West Bank - as well as a strip of Mediterranean coast around the city of Gaza.

This is the heart of the current crisis. East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip contain thousands of Jordanian Arabs who have fought a civil war against Israel since their capture in 1967. This civil war is what we see as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the past 30 years, the inhabitants of these reclaimed areas have fought for sovereignty through terrorism, murder and kidnapping.

This summer, the president of Israel, Ehud Barak, offered the representative of the Palestinian people, Yasser Arafat, the greatest compromise yet in the matter: more than 90 percent of the West Bank for a Palestinian nation, control over part of Jerusalem and a solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees in other parts of Israel.

Arafat was unwilling to even use the offer as a start to negotiations, and instead left the conference. Rather than begin talking toward peace, he spent the next few months agitating the Palestinian people until the community was seething with indignant anger. That anger reached a climax when a member of the Israeli government visited the site of the destroyed temple - remember, it’s also the site of the Muslim Dome of the Rock - and this action, seen as a terrible insult, prompted Arafat to send his people against the Israeli police. His people: teenagers and children, equipped with rocks and homemade bombs, sent to confront a police force that is armed and scared. And the Israeli people can’t figure out why their overtures of peace were met with only violence; why their desire to simply exist in their traditional homeland has been met only with hostility; why their offers of compromise have been met with a refusal to talk.

I can’t figure it out either, so instead of watching the world unravel on television for no good reason, I’m going to keep playing chess against Ross.

Rishi Kundi is State News graduate columnist whose column appears every other Wednesday. He can be reached at kundiris@msu.edu.