Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Based on Wikipedia: Israeli–Palestinian conflict

In 1882, a small group of Jewish settlers arrived in Ottoman Palestine. They came from Europe, fleeing persecution and carrying with them an idea that would reshape the Middle East: Zionism, the belief that Jewish people needed their own homeland. What they found was a land already inhabited by Arab Palestinians who had lived there for generations. This collision of two peoples, both claiming the same small strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, would become one of the most intractable conflicts of the modern era.

To understand what's happening in Gaza today, you have to understand how we got here.

The Birth of Two Nationalisms

The late 1800s saw the rise of nationalism across Europe. Jews, who had faced centuries of persecution culminating in devastating pogroms in Russia, began asking a fundamental question: Would they ever be safe as minorities in other people's countries? Theodor Herzl and other Zionist thinkers concluded the answer was no. The solution, they argued, was a Jewish state.

But where? Several locations were considered, including Argentina and Uganda. Palestine won out, largely because of its deep historical and religious significance to Judaism. Jerusalem had been the center of ancient Jewish kingdoms. The Western Wall remained a site of pilgrimage. For religious and secular Zionists alike, this land held unique meaning.

The early Jewish settlers bought land, often from absentee Ottoman landlords. When they did, they frequently evicted the Arab tenant farmers who had worked that land for generations. This pattern of displacement would become central to Palestinian grievances.

Meanwhile, Arab nationalism was also awakening. As the Ottoman Empire weakened, Arabs began imagining independent states of their own. Palestinians weren't merely passive observers to Zionist immigration—they recognized early on what mass Jewish settlement might mean for their own presence in the land.

Britain Makes Contradictory Promises

World War I changed everything. The Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, and Britain saw an opportunity to gain allies in the Middle East. In a remarkable display of diplomatic double-dealing, Britain made promises to almost everyone—and kept almost none of them.

First came the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915-1916. Sir Henry McMahon, Britain's High Commissioner in Egypt, exchanged letters with Sharif Hussein of Mecca. The gist: if Arabs revolted against the Ottomans, Britain would support an independent Arab state that appeared to include Palestine. Hussein agreed. The Arab Revolt began in 1916, famously aided by T.E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia.

But Britain was simultaneously negotiating the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France, secretly carving up the Ottoman territories between them. No independent Arab state. Just European colonial zones.

Then came the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In a single paragraph, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised to support "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The letter added, almost as an afterthought, that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

This was the original sin of British policy: promising the same land to two different peoples. The contradictions would take decades to fully explode, but the fuse was lit.

The Mandate Years

After the war, Britain received a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine. Jewish immigration increased dramatically. In 1922, Jews comprised about 11 percent of Palestine's population. By 1947, they were nearly one-third.

The newcomers didn't simply move in among the existing population. Many Zionist leaders explicitly advocated for separation—Jewish labor, Jewish agriculture, a Jewish economy distinct from the Arab one. Some went further, discussing "transfer" of the Arab population. Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued that the idea of removing Arabs was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism" from its earliest days.

Arabs noticed. Violence erupted repeatedly. In 1920, riots broke out in Jerusalem. In 1921, Jaffa. In 1929, a particularly brutal outbreak killed 133 Jews and 116 Arabs, with massacres of Jewish communities in Hebron and Safed.

The Jewish community responded by building military capacity. The Haganah, a paramilitary defense force, was established. What began as neighborhood watch groups would eventually become the core of the Israeli Defense Forces.

The Arab Revolt

By the mid-1930s, Palestinian Arabs felt increasingly desperate. Jewish immigration was accelerating, particularly as Jews fled Nazi persecution in Europe. Land was passing from Arab to Jewish ownership. The British seemed firmly committed to their Zionist policy.

In 1936, Palestinians launched a general strike that evolved into a full-scale revolt. For three years, they fought British forces and Jewish paramilitaries. Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian cleric who had organized an armed group called the Black Hand, became a martyr when British forces killed him in 1935—his name lives on today in Hamas's military wing, the Qassam Brigades.

The British crushed the revolt with overwhelming force. By some estimates, 10 percent of the adult male Palestinian population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. The Palestinian leadership was scattered. The economy was devastated. When the crucial confrontation with Zionism came a decade later, Palestinians would face it weakened and divided.

The revolt did produce one significant shift: the 1939 White Paper, in which Britain essentially reversed the Balfour Declaration, promising to limit Jewish immigration and work toward an independent Palestinian state. But it was too late to satisfy either side. And World War II was about to begin.

The Holocaust and Its Aftermath

The murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust transformed the Zionist project from a contested colonial venture into an urgent humanitarian necessity in the eyes of much of the Western world. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors had nowhere to go. Many countries, including the United States, refused to accept significant numbers of refugees.

The Zionist movement in Palestine shifted from negotiation to armed confrontation with the British. Jewish paramilitary groups—the Haganah, the Irgun, and the smaller Lehi—launched what they called an insurgency and the British called terrorism. The most notorious attack was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people.

Britain, exhausted by World War II and unable to reconcile its promises to Jews and Arabs, handed the problem to the newly formed United Nations.

Partition and War

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states—one Jewish, one Arab—with Jerusalem under international control. The partition plan allocated about 56 percent of the land to the Jewish state, though Jews owned only about 7 percent of the land and comprised about a third of the population.

The Zionist leadership accepted the plan, though privately many viewed it as a starting point for expansion. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister, wrote in his diary that the boundaries were not final.

Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan. From their perspective, they were being asked to give up their homeland to make amends for a European genocide they had no part in. Arab states announced they would not accept partition.

Violence erupted immediately. The day after the UN vote, Arabs attacked Jewish buses and neighborhoods. Jews retaliated. Within weeks, the conflict had escalated into full civil war.

What happened over the following months remains bitterly contested. Israelis call it the War of Independence. Palestinians call it the Nakba—the Catastrophe. What is undisputed is that by the time fighting ended in 1949, more than 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled from their homes. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, many deliberately demolished to prevent refugees from returning.

Israel emerged controlling 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine—far more than the UN partition plan had allocated. Jordan occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and its holy sites. Egypt held the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian state envisioned by the UN never came into existence.

Refugees and the Right of Return

The 1948 refugees and their descendants now number in the millions. They live in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza—many just miles from homes they or their grandparents fled three-quarters of a century ago.

Palestinians insist on their right to return to their original homes, a right they argue is guaranteed by international law, specifically UN General Assembly Resolution 194 from December 1948. Israel categorically rejects this, arguing that allowing millions of Palestinians to return would end Israel's existence as a Jewish state. In 1950, Israel passed the Law of Return, granting automatic citizenship to any Jew anywhere in the world—while denying Palestinian refugees the right to reclaim their former homes.

This asymmetry—Jews who have never lived in Israel can move there tomorrow, while Palestinians whose families lived there for centuries cannot return—remains one of the conflict's most emotionally charged issues.

The 1967 War and the Occupation

In June 1967, Israel fought a brief war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In six days, Israeli forces captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and—most significantly for the Palestinian question—the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

For the first time, all of historic Palestine was under Israeli control. But it came with a problem: the territories contained over a million Palestinians. Israel faced a choice. It could annex the territories and grant Palestinians citizenship, which would eventually create an Arab majority and end the Jewish character of the state. It could withdraw and allow Palestinian independence. Or it could occupy the territories indefinitely without annexing them, keeping the land without the people.

Israel chose the third option. More than half a century later, the occupation continues.

Settlements and the Changing Landscape

Almost immediately after the 1967 war, Israel began building settlements in the occupied territories. The first were in the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley, framed as security measures. But soon, ideologically motivated settlers began establishing communities throughout the West Bank, particularly in areas with biblical significance.

Today, over 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlements are connected by roads that Palestinians often cannot use, protected by Israeli soldiers, and supplied with water and electricity from Israeli infrastructure. The West Bank has become fragmented into disconnected enclaves.

The international community, with the exception of the United States (which has wavered on the issue), considers the settlements illegal under international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. Israel disputes this interpretation.

The Palestine Liberation Organization

Palestinian political organization took time to emerge from the catastrophe of 1948. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded, initially as a tool of Arab states rather than an independent Palestinian voice. That changed in 1969 when Yasser Arafat, leader of the guerrilla group Fatah, became PLO chairman.

Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the PLO conducted armed attacks against Israel from bases in Jordan and then Lebanon. Some attacks targeted civilians, including the notorious massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the PLO-affiliated Black September organization. Israel responded with assassinations of PLO leaders and, in 1982, a full-scale invasion of Lebanon.

By the late 1980s, the PLO had begun shifting toward diplomacy. In 1988, Arafat formally recognized Israel's right to exist and renounced terrorism. This opened the door to what would become the Oslo peace process.

The Intifadas

In December 1987, Palestinians in the occupied territories launched a popular uprising—the First Intifada. Unlike the PLO's armed struggle from abroad, this was a grassroots revolt from within: strikes, boycotts, stone-throwing protests, civil disobedience. Israeli forces responded harshly, with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly ordering soldiers to break the bones of protesters.

The First Intifada lasted until 1993 and fundamentally changed the conflict's dynamics. It demonstrated that Palestinians under occupation could resist without waiting for Arab armies to save them. It also brought international attention to conditions in the territories and increased pressure on both sides to negotiate.

In 2000, a Second Intifada erupted. This one was far bloodier. Palestinian militants carried out suicide bombings in Israeli cities, killing over a thousand Israeli civilians. Israeli forces reoccupied Palestinian cities they had withdrawn from under Oslo, killing thousands of Palestinians. The peace process collapsed entirely.

Israel's response included the construction of a separation barrier—a wall, in many places—that cut deep into the West Bank. Israel argued it was necessary to prevent suicide bombers from entering. Palestinians saw it as a land grab, since the barrier's route incorporated many settlements onto the Israeli side.

Gaza Under Hamas

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, evacuating all settlements and military forces. Many Israelis hoped this would end their entanglement with Gaza's 1.4 million Palestinians.

It didn't. In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections. Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—had been founded during the First Intifada as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike the PLO, Hamas refused to recognize Israel's right to exist and continued to advocate for armed resistance.

After a brief civil war between Hamas and Fatah, Hamas took complete control of Gaza in 2007. Israel and Egypt immediately imposed a blockade, severely restricting the movement of people and goods into and out of the territory. Israel argued this was necessary to prevent Hamas from acquiring weapons. Critics called it collective punishment of Gaza's civilian population.

Since then, Israel and Hamas have fought multiple wars—in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and most devastatingly, the ongoing war that began in October 2023. Each follows a similar pattern: Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities; Israel responds with airstrikes and ground operations in the densely populated territory; civilians die in large numbers; eventually, a ceasefire is brokered; nothing is resolved.

The Current Crisis

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Israel in the country's history. Militants broke through the Gaza fence and attacked communities in southern Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people—mostly civilians—and taking over 200 hostages.

Israel's response has been unprecedented in scale. As of this writing, Israeli military operations have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of them civilians. Much of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed. More than two million people have been displaced, many multiple times. International organizations have warned of famine conditions.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found it plausible that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—a provisional ruling while the full case proceeds. Israel rejects this characterization, arguing its operations target Hamas militants who deliberately hide among civilians.

The Two-State Solution and Its Discontents

Since the late 1980s, the international consensus has supported a two-state solution: Israel and Palestine existing side by side along the pre-1967 borders, with some negotiated land swaps, shared or divided Jerusalem, and an agreed resolution for refugees.

This consensus has grown increasingly theoretical. The settlement enterprise has made a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank increasingly difficult to envision. Gaza and the West Bank have been politically and physically separated for nearly two decades. Israeli politics have shifted rightward, with growing support for annexation of West Bank territory. Palestinian politics are divided between an aging, unpopular Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

Some now advocate for a one-state solution—though they disagree about what that state would look like. Israeli expansionists envision annexing territories without granting Palestinians citizenship. Palestinian activists and some on the Israeli left imagine a single democratic state with equal rights for all—which, given demographics, would likely not have a Jewish majority.

Neither vision currently seems achievable. What continues, instead, is a status quo that neither side can sustain indefinitely but neither can find a way to end.

Why It Matters

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonates far beyond its small geographic scope. For Jews worldwide, Israel represents survival after the Holocaust—a refuge that cannot be abandoned. For Palestinians, it represents colonialism and dispossession—wrongs that cannot be forgotten. For the Arab and Muslim world, Palestinian suffering is a wound that shapes attitudes toward the West. For American politics, Israel is a uniquely charged issue, with evangelical Christians, Jewish Americans, and progressive activists all holding passionate, often conflicting views.

The conflict also raises fundamental questions about competing rights. What happens when two peoples both have legitimate claims to the same land? How do you balance security against human rights? When does self-defense become aggression? What is justice when everyone has been wronged?

These are not questions with easy answers. Anyone who tells you otherwise—who says one side is purely right and the other purely wrong—is simplifying a reality that has defied resolution for over a century. Understanding the history doesn't tell you what should happen next. But it's impossible to think clearly about the future without understanding how we got here.