Conformity and Challenges in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Years 359the Iranian Communists come to power, and so they used coercive means to
drive Russia out of Iran. A few years later, Iran would emerge again as a
crucial site for global politics, again due to oil, as the U.S. engineered the coup
against the government there in 1953, as noted.
Just a few years before that, the country of Israel had come into being, and
would become another area of struggle in the region. Israelis settled in
Palestine, an area that was between 80-90 percent Arab before World War II.
But the Holocaust so horribly shocked the world that Jews from all over,
motivated by the ideology of Zionism–the idea that all Jews had a homeland
in Palestine—began to flood into the area, even waging a guerrilla/terrorist
war to drive out the British occupation forces in Palestine and force well over
a million Arabs out of the country and into places like Lebanon and Jordan.
FIGuRE 7-5 Map of Israel, 1948