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The History Behind Tensions Between Israelis And Palestinians

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is long and complex. NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro explains what has lead up to the latest attacks, and how it's different than before.

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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Center for Preventive Action

Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, prompting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to engage in aerial campaigns and ground operations within the Gaza Strip. On June 8, the IDF undertook an operation in central Gaza to rescue four hostages while Gazan authorities reported that 274 Palestinians were killed, and hundreds of others were injured. Other efforts to free the more than one hundred remaining Israeli and foreign hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 have been largely unsuccessful, and their location and health status are unknown. Almost two million Gazans—more than 85 percent of the population—have fled their homes since October 2023. Recent casualty estimates from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry place the death toll in Gaza at around 40,000, though such numbers are challenging to verify due to limited international access to the strip. On July 13, Israel conducted a major strike on south Gaza, targeting two top Hamas commanders that killed at least seventy-one people. Meanwhile, neither Hamas nor Israel have agreed to the terms laid out by U.S. President Joe Biden for a ceasefire and hostage release. 

The conflict has sparked increased regional tensions across the Middle East. Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon have engaged in cross-border skirmishes with the IDF, Yemen’s Houthi rebels have shot missiles at Israel and commercial ships in the Red Sea, and other Iran-backed groups have launched dozens of attacks on U.S. military positions in Iraq and Syria. (For more on the direct confrontation between Iran and Israel and the role of the United States, visit the “ Confrontation with Iran ” page. For more on the direct confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel, visit the “ Instability in Lebanon ” page.) 

The  Israeli-Palestinian conflict  dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1947, the United Nations adopted  Resolution 181 , known as the Partition Plan, which sought to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was created, sparking the first Arab-Israeli War. The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory, but 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and the territory was divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip. 

Over the following years, tensions rose in the region, particularly between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Following the  1956 Suez Crisis  and Israel’s invasion of the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria signed mutual defense pacts in anticipation of a possible mobilization of Israeli troops. In June 1967, following  a series of maneuvers  by Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser, Israel preemptively attacked Egyptian and Syrian air forces, starting the Six-Day War. After the war, Israel gained territorial control over the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Six years later, in what is referred to as the Yom Kippur War or the October War, Egypt and Syria launched  a surprise two-front attack  on Israel to regain their lost territory; the conflict did not result in significant gains for Egypt, Israel, or Syria, but Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat declared the war a victory for Egypt as it allowed Egypt and Syria to  negotiate over previously ceded territory . Finally, in 1979, following a series of cease-fires and peace negotiations, representatives from Egypt and Israel signed the  Camp David Accords , a peace treaty that ended the thirty-year conflict between Egypt and Israel. 

Even though the Camp David Accords improved relations between Israel and its neighbors, the question of Palestinian self-determination and self-governance remained unresolved. In 1987, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rose up against the Israeli government in what is known as the first intifada. The 1993  Oslo I Accords  mediated the conflict, setting up a framework for the Palestinians to govern themselves in the West Bank and Gaza, and enabled mutual recognition between the newly established Palestinian Authority and Israel’s government. In 1995, the  Oslo II  Accords expanded on the first agreement, adding provisions that mandated the complete withdrawal of Israel from 6 cities and 450 towns in the West Bank. 

In 2000, sparked in part by Palestinian grievances over Israel’s control over the West Bank, a stagnating peace process, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s  visit  to the al-Aqsa mosque—the third holiest site in Islam—in September 2000, Palestinians  launched  the second intifada, which would last until 2005. In response, the Israeli government approved the  construction of a barrier wall  around the West Bank in 2002, despite  opposition  from the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. 

Factionalism among the Palestinians flared up when  Hamas  won the Palestinian Authority’s parliamentary elections in 2006, deposing longtime majority party Fatah. This gave Hamas, a political and militant movement inspired by the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, control of the Gaza Strip. Gaza is a small piece of land on the Mediterranean Sea that borders Egypt to the south and has been under the rule of the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority since 1993. The United States and European Union, among others, did not acknowledge Hamas’ electoral victory, as the group has been considered a terrorist organization by western governments since the late 1990s. Following Hamas’ seizure of control,  violence broke out  between Hamas and Fatah. Between 2006 and 2011, a series of failed peace talks and deadly confrontations culminated in an agreement to reconcile.  Fatah entered into a unity government  with Hamas in 2014.

In the summer of 2014,  clashes  in the Palestinian territories precipitated a  military confrontation  between the Israeli military and Hamas in which Hamas fired nearly three thousand rockets at Israel, and Israel retaliated with a major offensive in Gaza. The skirmish ended in late August 2014 with a  cease-fire  deal brokered by Egypt, but only after 73 Israelis and 2,251 Palestinians were  killed . After a wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in 2015, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah  announced  that Palestinians would no longer be bound by the territorial divisions created by the  Oslo Accords .

In March of 2018, Israeli troops killed 183 Palestinians and wounded 6,000 others after some Palestinians stormed the perimeter fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel and threw rocks during an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Just months later, Hamas militants fired over one hundred rockets into Israel, and Israel  responded  with strikes on more than fifty targets in Gaza during a twenty-four-hour flare-up. The tense political atmosphere resulted in  a return to disunity  between Fatah and Hamas, with Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party controlling the Palestinian Authority from the West Bank and Hamas  de facto  ruling the Gaza Strip.

The Donald J. Trump administration reversed longstanding U.S. policy by  canceling  funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees, and  relocating the U.S. embassy  from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Trump administration also helped broker the  Abraham Accords , under which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel, becoming only the third and fourth countries in the region—following Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994—to do so. Similar deals followed with Morocco [PDF] and Sudan . Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah  rejected  the accords,  as did Hamas .

In early May 2021, after a court  ruled  in favor of the eviction of several Palestinian families from East Jerusalem properties, protests erupted, with Israeli police  employing  force against demonstrators. After several consecutive days of violence, Hamas, the militant group which governs Gaza, and other Palestinian  militant groups  launched hundreds of  rockets  into Israeli territory. Israel responded with artillery bombardments and airstrikes, killing  more than twenty Palestinians and hitting both military  and non-military infrastructure, including residential buildings,  media headquarters , and  refugee  and  healthcare facilities . After eleven days, Israel and Hamas agreed to a  cease-fire , with both sides claiming victory. The fighting killed more than 250 Palestinians and at least 13 Israelis, wounded nearly 2,000 others, and displaced 72,000 Palestinians.   

The  most far-right and religious government  in Israel’s history, led by Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu and his Likud party and comprising two ultra-Orthodox parties and three far-right parties, was inaugurated in late December 2022. The coalition government prioritized the expansion and development of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank,  endorsed discrimination  against LGBTQ+ people on religious grounds, and voted to  limit  judicial oversight of the government in May 2023 after a  delay  due to nationwide protests in March. 

Following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023, President Joe Biden made a  strong statement of support  for Israel. On the same day that Israel declared war against Hamas, the United States announced that it would send renewed shipments of arms and move its Mediterranean Sea warships closer to Israel. While the UN Security Council called an emergency meeting to discuss the renewed violence, the members  failed to come to a consensus  statement. Given the history of brutality when Israel and Palestinian extremist groups have fought in the past,  international groups quickly expressed concern  for the safety of civilians in Israel and the Palestinian territories as well  as those being held hostage  by militants in Gaza. In the first month of fighting, approximately 1,300 Israelis and 10,000 Palestinians  were killed. Increasing loss of life is of primary concern in the conflict.

While the United States said there was “no direct evidence” that Iranian intelligence and security forces directly helped Hamas plan its October 7 attack, Iran has a  well-established patronage relationship  with Hamas and other extremist groups across the Middle East. Israel has exchanged artillery fire with Iran-backed Hezbollah almost daily and struck Syrian military targets and airports, prompting concern that the war could expand north. To the south, Yemen’s Houthi rebels have launched multiple rounds of missiles at Israel as well. Meanwhile, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, a coalition of Iranian-backed militias, has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks on U.S. military targets in Iraq and Syria since the war began.

A 2023 effort by the United States to help broker a normalization accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia was  thrown into chaos  by the October conflict. Saudi Arabia has long advocated for the rights and safety of Palestinian Arab populations in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Especially in Gaza, those populations are now in the path of IDF operations, jeopardizing the progress the Israelis and Saudis made toward a common understanding. However, the United States says the Saudis have indicated they are still interested in the deal.

In early October 2023, Hamas fighters  fired rockets into Israel and stormed southern Israeli cities and towns across the border of the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,300 Israelis, injuring 3,300, and taking  hundreds of hostages. The attack took Israel by surprise, though the state quickly mounted a deadly retaliatory operation. One day after the October 7 attack, the Israeli cabinet formally  declared war  against Hamas, followed by a  directive from the defense minister to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to carry out a “complete siege” of Gaza. It is the most significant escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in several decades.

Israel  ordered  more than one million Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to evacuate ahead of a ground invasion that began on October 27th. The ground invasion began in the north in conjunction with Israel’s continued aerial assault. The first stage of the ground invasion ended on November 24 with the hostage-for-prisoner swap that also allowed more aid into Gaza. After seven days, the war resumed—particularly in Khan Younis , the largest city in southern Gaza that Israel claims is a Hamas stronghold.

Under pressure from its principal ally, the United States, Israel announced it would begin to withdraw soldiers from the Gaza Strip in January 2024. Since then, military analysts speculate that the IDF has pulled out at least 90 percent of the troops that were in the territory a few months ago, leaving one remaining brigade. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, is unwavering in his position that an Israeli offensive in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip where over one million Palestinians have taken refuge, is essential to eradicating Hamas.

In mid-March, Israel conducted a two-week raid on al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical center in Gaza. Israel claimed Hamas was operating out of al-Shifa, and it reportedly killed 200 fighters and captured an additional 500. The U.S. intelligence community later determined that Hamas had used al-Shifa as a command center and held some hostages there, but the Islamist group evacuated the complex days prior to the Israeli operation. In late April, two mass graves were discovered at al-Shifa and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, another target of an Israeli operation. More than 300 bodies were found among the two sites; the United Nations has called for an independent investigation.

On April 1, Israel launched an airstrike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus, Syria, killing multiple senior Iranian military officers. In response, Iran engaged directly in the war by launching over 300 drones and missiles at Israel on April 13. Though Israel was able to ward off the attack and only sustained minor damage to an air base, the escalation marked Iran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel. As Israel weighed an extensive counterstrike on multiple military targets in Iran, the United States and other allies advised against actions that they feared would further widen the war. Israel ultimately launched a more limited aerial strike on military bases in Isfahan and Tabriz on April 19. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi later downplayed the response, suggesting Iran aimed to avoid further escalation.

Gaza is desperately low on water, fuel, and supplies as Hamas has rejected the most recent cease-fire proposals mediated by the United States and Egypt, while Israel has limited the amount of aid that can enter. Many humanitarian agencies suspended their operations after Israel killed seven World Center Kitchen employees in an airstrike. The World Food Programme warns famine is now imminent in Gaza. Only eleven out of thirty-five hospitals in the strip remain partially functional due to attacks on medical infrastructure and a lack of basic supplies. The World Health Organization has warned of disease spread in addition to mounting civilian casualties.

The displacement of millions more Palestinians presents a challenge for Egypt and Jordan, which have absorbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the past but have resisted accepting anyone during the current war. They fear that Gazans, many of whom were already displaced from elsewhere in Israel, will not be allowed to return once they leave. Egypt also fears that Hamas fighters could enter Egypt and trigger a new war in the Sinai by launching attacks on Israel or destabilizing the authoritarian regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. So far, negotiations have resulted in only 1,100 people exiting Gaza through the Rafah border crossing to Egypt. The other 1.5 million displaced Gazans—70 percent of the territory’s population—remained confined to southern Gaza and face increasingly dire living conditions and security risks.

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Israeli Palestinian Conflict — Israel-Palestine Conflict: Historical Context, Causes, and Resolution

Israel-palestine Conflict: Historical Context, Causes, and Resolution

• Categories: Israeli Palestinian Conflict

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Words: 612 |

Published: Jan 31, 2024

Words: 612 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Historical context, causes of the conflict, major parties involved, international involvement, consequences and impacts, attempts at resolution, current situation and future prospects.

• United Nations. "Israel-Palestine Conflict: An Overview." https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/israel-palestine-conflict/
• BBC News. "Israel and Palestinians: The Conflict Explained." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43789452
• Council on Foreign Relations. "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/israeli-palestinian-conflict

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Religion and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: Cause, Consequence, and Cure

Mohamed Galal Mostafa is a former Egyptian diplomat, and currently a researcher at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by several factors: ethnic, national, historical, and religious. This brief essay focuses on the religious dimension of the conflict, which both historical and recent events suggest lies at its core. That much is almost a truism. What is less often appreciated, however, is how much religion impacts the identity of actors implicated in this conflict, the practical issues at stake, and the relevant policies and attitudes -- even of non-religious participants on both sides. It follows that religion must also be part of any real solution to this tragic and protracted conflict, in ways a concluding paragraph will very briefly outline.

Why is religion at the core of this conflict?

Several religious factors pertinent to Islam and Judaism dictate the role of religion as the main factor in the conflict, notably including the sanctity of holy sites and the apocalyptic narratives of both religions, which are detrimental to any potential for lasting peace between the two sides. Extreme religious Zionists in Israel increasingly see themselves as guardians and definers of the how the Jewish state should be, and are very stringent when it comes to any concessions to the Arabs. On the other hand, Islamist groups in Palestine and elsewhere in the Islamic world advocate the necessity of liberating the “holy” territories and sites for religious reasons, and preach violence and hatred against Israel and the Jewish people.

Religion-based rumors propagated by extremists in the media and social media about the hidden religious agendas of the other side exacerbate these tensions. Examples include rumors about a “Jewish Plan” to destroy al Aqsa mosque and build the Jewish third temple on its remnants, and, on the other side rumors that Muslims hold the annihilation of Jews at the core of their belief.

In addition, worsening socio-economic conditions in the Arab and Islamic world contribute to the growth of religious radicalism, pushing a larger percentage of youth towards fanaticism, and religion-inspired politics.

The advent of the Arab spring, ironically, also posed a threat to Arab-Israeli peace, as previously stable regimes were often challenged by extreme political views. A prominent example was the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who after succeeding to the presidency in 2012, threatened to compromise the peace agreement with Israel based on their religious ideology – even if they did not immediately tear up the treaty.

Practical Consequences O n Negotiations

If we take a closer look at the permanent status issues – borders, security, mutual recognition, refugees, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the issue of authority over Jerusalem -- we find that the last two are directly linked to the faiths of Jewish people and Muslim people around the world. The original ownership and authority over Jerusalem are highly contested due to the presence of holy sites for Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the city. This conflict is also deeply rooted in history, in which Jerusalem has been attacked fifty-two times, captured and recaptured forty-four times, besieged twenty-three times, and destroyed twice. The city was ruled by the Ancient Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Israelites, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, Byzantines, the Islamic Caliphates, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and finally the British, before its division into Israeli and Jordanian sectors from 1948 to 1967.

In Jewish and Biblical history, Jerusalem was the capital of the Kingdom of Israel during the reign of King David. It is also home to the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall, both highly sanctified sites in Judaism. In Islamic history, the city was the first Muslim Qiblah (the direction which Muslims face during their prayer). It is also the place where Prophet Muhammad’s Isra’ and Mi'raj (bringing forward and ascension to heaven, also called the night journey) ensued according to the Qur’an.

Thus the sanctity of Jerusalem resonates among many Muslims around the world, not just Palestinians. Reactions in the Arab and the Islamic world to the recent violence in Gaza and the West Bank after the U.S. decision to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem suggest that many view this issue mainly in a religious light. The narratives on social media platforms and the media in general in those countries usually included references to religion, even among seemingly secular people.

The issue of West Bank settlements, too, has a religious aspect. It concerns the physical restoration of the biblical land of Israel before the return of the Messiah, something central to the beliefs of some orthodox Jews. They continue to settle the West Bank to fulfill this prophecy, clashing with the local Palestinians.

On the other hand, according to fundamentalist schools of Islam, at the end of days, the whole land of Israel and Palestine should be under Islamic rule. Prophecies surrounding this issue are deeply rooted in some versions of the Hadith (traditional sayings of the Prophet), although only implied in the Qur’an.

Historical and Organizational Consequences

As far back as the 1948 war, some Jewish extremist groups justified their contribution to the conflict as part of a divinely promised return to the holy land of Israel. More recently, however, the most extreme such groups, like the “Gush Emunim Underground” which plotted to bomb the mosques in the Temple Mount area back in the 1980s, have been banned by the Israeli authorities

On the other side, several religious extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood justified their contribution to the conflict in 1948 as an eschatological event pertinent to the approach of the Day of Judgment. Nowadays, terrorist Brotherhood offshoots like Hamas call for using violence against Israel in the name of Islam, without distinction between civilian and military targets. They continue to use religion to gain supporters in Gaza and elsewhere by propagating this apocalyptic narrative. This Muslim Brotherhood group ideology, stretching through many Arab (and several non-Arab) countries, seeks to revive Islam and re-establish the historical Islamic Caliphate by seizing power. They consider Israel to be a “foreign object” in the continuum of a potential Islamic Caliphate, and they continue to call for the use of violence against it.

In parallel to this extreme Sunni side, ever since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, Iran has been the fiercest in opposing Israel. Its radical regime calls openly for the destruction of Israel and asserts the necessity of this quest from a theological standpoint. It finances Hezbollah and Hamas and supplies them with weapons and training, as well as supporting Assad’s forces in Syria, thereby posing a direct security threat to Israel – all allegedly in the name of Islam.

Social Consequences

For two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, direct peacemaking was achieved with Israel. Nevertheless, that did not entail the people-to-people or cultural normalization that is assumed to accompany peace, due to many reasons -- including religious ones. Accepting peace with Israel may be viewed as religious treachery, which goes against the beliefs not only of extremists but also of many relative moderates in Arab states. The key point is that these various forms of religion-based conflict drivers are not limited to religious groups, but are linked to much wider bases in society. This results from two major factors, as follows:

Interest and Identity Overlap: Interests of religious extremists who are directly linked to the religious drivers at many instances overlap with other segments in the Arab and Islamic societies. They share some elements of their identities, if not the whole. For example, a secular nationalist Palestinian and an extremely religious, Salafi Palestinian in the Qassam Brigades of Hamas may share very similar views of Israel. Much the same is true of some secularists, traditionalists, and fundamentalists in other Arab or Islamic societies.

Systematic Abuse of Linkages to Wider Bases in Societies: Religious extremists in the Arab and Islamic world and in Israel, whether violent or not, have used deliberately the ideological and functional linkages to connect to wider bases in their respective countries. Ideologically, links with the wider society are established by trying to radicalize elements that have this potential, either due to natural tendencies toward perceived communal self-defense, or to the superficial knowledge of their religions. For example, extremists would use an isolated incident of violence against the Jewish community to justify retaliation by their wider society. A non-religious traditional Arab might well share the fear of secularization, and of “Jewish influence,” with the Islamist.  Functionally, extreme Imams have very strong tools at their disposals across the Arab and Islamic world to promote violence through their mosques and privately funded media, subjecting people repeatedly to the narrative and rhetoric of violence against Israel in particular and Jewish people in general.

Possible Interventions

To contribute to curbing the religious violence in this conflict, several interventions can be considered: interfaith dialogue; the remembrance of past fruitful cooperation between Jews and Muslims, ever since the seventh century; and focusing on religious texts asserting positive and tolerant religious values, and reinforcing these values in educational systems on both sides. These are perhaps not new ideas. What should be new, however, is the urgency and centrality of this religious component as part of any current effort to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian “deal of the century” – or even just to mitigate the conflict and pave the way for peaceful coexistence in the long-term future.

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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Timeline

Explore the history and important events behind the long-standing Middle East conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians from 1947 to today. 

Smoke rises in Gaza following Israeli strikes on October 9, 2023.

Source: Mohammed Salem / Reuters

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians reflects a long-standing struggle in the region encompassing the land between the Jordan River to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. That conflict has deep historical roots, shaped by statehood claims from the Israelis and the Palestinians that have been supported by various international agendas and activities over time. 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back more than a century, with flashpoints building from the United Nations’ 1947 initial UN Partition Plan to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to the recent Israel-Hamas war sparked in October 2023.

Despite continued efforts at brokering peace—including the 1979 Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, and the 2020 Abraham Accords—conflict has persisted.

This timeline explores some of the pivotal moments in the conflict from 1947 to today.

Universal History Archive

The UN General Assembly passes Resolution 181 calling for the partition of the Palestinian territories into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The resolution also envisions an international, UN-run body to administer Jerusalem. The Palestinian territories had been under the military and administrative control of the United Kingdom (known as a mandate) since the 1917 defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Civil strife and violence between the Jewish and Arab communities of the Palestinian territories intensifies.

Saar Yaacov/Israel GPO

Israel declares its independence as the British rule ends. Sparked by Israel’s declaration of independence, the first Arab-Israeli War begins. Egypt (supported by Saudi Arabian, Sudanese, and Yemeni troops), Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria invade Israel. The fighting continues until 1949, when Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria sign armistice agreements.

Bettmann / Getty Images

Over the course of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, at least seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees flee their homes in an exodus known to Palestinians as the nakba  (Arabic for “catastrophe”). Israel wins the war, retaining the territory provided to it by the United Nations and capturing some of the areas designated for the imagined future Palestinian state. Israel gains control of West Jerusalem, Egypt gains the Gaza Strip, and Jordan gains the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its historic Jewish quarter. In 1948, the UN General Assembly passes Resolution 194, which calls for the repatriation of Palestinian refugees . The Palestinians will later point to Resolution 194 as having established a “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The specific parameters of that return are debated in the decades that follow, including among many descendants from the 1948 refugees and the three hundred thousand Palestinians who will flee their homes during the June 1967 war.

Israel GPO.

Israel and several of its Arab neighbors fight the Six-Day War. Israel wins a decisive victory: it suffers seven hundred casualties; its adversaries suffer nearly twenty thousand. Israel emerges with control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—areas inhabited primarily by Palestinians—as well as all of East Jerusalem. Israel also takes control of Syria’s Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, which is part of Egypt. Israel will stay in the Sinai Peninsula until April 1982.

Yutaka Nagata / United Nations

The UN Security Council passes Resolution 242 calling for Israeli “withdrawal … from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and for the termination of “states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty , territorial integrity, and political independence of every state in the area and the right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” The resolution establishes the concept of land for peace .

Another Arab-Israeli war, known variously as the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War, and the October War, is fought when Egypt and Syria attempt to retake the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. Cold War tensions spike as the Soviet Union aids Egypt and Syria and the United States aids Israel. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries begins an oil embargo on countries that support Israel, and the price of oil skyrockets. The fighting ends after a UN-sponsored cease-fire (negotiated by the United States and the Soviet Union) takes hold. The UN Security Council passes Resolution 338, which calls for implementing UN Security Council Resolution 242.

Warren K. Leffler / Library of Congress.

Israel and Egypt sign the Camp David Accords, which establish a basis for a peace treaty between the two countries. The accords also commit the Israeli and Egyptian governments, along with other parties, to negotiate the disposition of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  

François Lochon / Getty Images

Egypt and Israel sign a peace treaty, the first between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors. The treaty commits Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and evacuate its settlements there. The termination of the state of war between Egypt and Israel leads to the normalization of diplomatic and commercial relations between the two countries. Israel’s prime minister and Egypt’s president exchange letters reaffirming their commitment—outlined in the Camp David Accords—to negotiate the disposition of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Jim Hollander / Reuters

An Israeli driver kills four Palestinians in a car accident that sparks the first intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. The image of Palestinians throwing rocks at Israeli tanks becomes the enduring image of the intifada. Over the next six years, roughly 200 Israelis and 1,300 Palestinians are killed.

A Palestinian cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin establishes the militant group Hamas as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas endorses jihad as a way to regain territory for Muslims; the United States designates Hamas a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.  

Ali Jareki / Reuters

King Hussein of Jordan relinquishes his country’s claims to the West Bank and East Jerusalem in favor of the claims of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In December of the same year, PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat denounces violence, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and acknowledges UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the concept of land for peace. The United States responds to Arafat’s announcement by beginning direct talks with him, though it suspends the talks following a Palestinian terrorist attack against Israel.

David Valdez / U.S. National Archives

The Madrid Peace Conference begins, sponsored jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union . Israeli, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian delegates attend the first negotiations among those parties. The talks proceed along bilateral tracks between Israel and its neighbors, though the Lebanese join the Syrian delegation and the Jordanian team includes Palestinian representatives. A multilateral track includes the wider Arab world and addresses regional issues. The talks last for two years without any breakthroughs.  

Saar Yaacov / Israel GPO.

Secret negotiations in Norway result in the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, also known as the Oslo Accords. Before the accords are signed, Israel and the PLO recognize each other in an exchange of letters. Israel and the PLO agree to the creation of the Palestinian Authority to temporarily administer the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Israel also agrees to begin withdrawing from parts of the West Bank, though large swaths of land and Israeli settlements remain under the Israeli military’s exclusive control. The Oslo Accords envision a peace agreement by 1999. Palestinian leader Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for their efforts on the Oslo Accords.  

Patrick Baz / AFP / Getty Images

The Israelis and the Palestinians sign the Gaza-Jericho Agreement, which begins implementation of the Oslo Accords. The agreement provides for an Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho, a town in the West Bank, and for a transfer of authority from Israeli administration to the newly formed Palestinian Authority. The agreement also establishes the structure and composition of the Palestinian Authority, its jurisdiction and legislative powers, a Palestinian police force, and relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat returns to the Gaza Strip after a long absence.

Sa'ar Ya'acov / Israel Government Press Office Photo

Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty, settling their territorial dispute and agreeing to future cooperation in sectors such as trade and tourism. This is Israel’s second peace treaty with an Arab state. It accords special administrative responsibilities for Jerusalem’s Muslim holy places to Jordan.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators sign the Interim Agreement, sometimes called Oslo II. It gives the Palestinians control over additional areas of the West Bank and defines the security, electoral, public administration, and economic arrangements that will govern those areas until a final peace agreement is reached in 1999.

President Bill Clinton hosts Israeli and Palestinian leaders for talks at Camp David. Reports indicate that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is prepared to accept, among other things, Palestinian sovereignty over some 91 percent of the West Bank and certain parts of Jerusalem. The deal would include a land swap in which some Israeli land would go to the Palestinians in compensation for the remaining 9 percent of the West Bank, which would go to Israel. Two weeks of intensive discussion, however, fails to produce an agreement. President Clinton blames Arafat for the failure. Before leaving office several months later, Clinton lays out proposals for both sides. Talks between them continue, but without success.  

Natalie Behring / Reuters

Israeli politicians, including Ariel Sharon, a controversial retired Israeli general, visit the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. The Palestinians view the visit as an effort to change the status quo at the holy site. The ensuing demonstrations turn violent, marking the beginning of a second intifada. It will last until 2005 and be markedly more violent than the first intifada. Four thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis die.

Nir Elias / Reuters

A terrorist attack kills thirty people at a Passover celebration at a hotel in the Israeli city of Netanya. As a result, the Israeli military reoccupies portions of the West Bank, including the city of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority is located and where Arafat has his West Bank headquarters.

Israel begins building a security barrier in the West Bank to protect Israeli cities and towns from terrorist attacks. The barrier, which is a wall in some stretches and a fence in others, is controversial because in places it cuts deep into West Bank territory to protect settlements. The Palestinians are cut off from Jerusalem, some Palestinian villages are sliced in half, and some Palestinians are unable to get to work or school as a result of the security barrier’s path. Israel’s Supreme Court forces changes in the barrier’s route, but the barrier continues to impede Palestinian movement and commerce in certain areas.    

Ali Jarekji / Reuters

The Quartet, an informal group created to pursue Middle East peace comprising the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union , puts forth a Road Map for Peace based on the outline President George W. Bush offered in his 2002 speech. The road map lays out a plan for peace based on Palestinian reforms and a cessation of terrorism in return for an end to Israeli settlements and a new Palestinian state.  

Paul Hanna / Reuters

Israel begins a unilateral withdrawal of settlers and military forces from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military remains in control of Gaza’s borders (except the Gaza-Egypt border, which is controlled by Egypt), airspace, and coastline. After Israel’s withdrawal, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad , and other smaller militant groups fire rockets from Gaza into southern Israel.

Ahmed Jadallah / Reuters

Hamas defeats Fatah, a Palestinian political faction founded in 1950s which was a long-dominant faction within the PLO, in Palestinian elections. The United States and other countries suspend their aid to the Palestinian Authority  because they consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization. Fatah and Hamas make a deal to govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip together. The deal quickly fails, and Hamas takes over the Gaza Strip in 2007.

Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

Hamas operatives kidnap an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit on Israeli soil near the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military tries and fails to free him. He is held captive in Gaza until Israel—with the help of Egypt and the United States—negotiates his release in 2012.

Ammar Awad / Reuters

Israel attacks the Gaza Strip following nearly eight hundred rocket attacks from Gaza on Israeli towns in the months of November and December. The war lasts less than a month but kills hundreds of civilians, in addition to hundreds of combatants, and sparks international criticism.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Secretary of State John Kerry seeks to restart final status negotiations. The process begins with the Israeli’s agreement to release 104 Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinians’ agreement not to use their new observer state status at the United Nations to advance the cause of statehood. Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority collapsed in April 2014 over such issues as Israeli settlement growth, the status of a final round of prisoners, and Palestinian attempts to join several international organizations.

Suhaib Salem / Reuters

The PLO and Hamas sign an agreement to form a unity government. Tensions between the factions remain, however, and no unity government is formed. Gaza and the West Bank remain disconnected and under the control of rival Palestinian leaderships.

Baz Ratner / Reuters

After tit-for-tat attacks on Israeli and Palestinian civilians by extremists on both sides, Israel invades the Gaza Strip. The operation, code-named Protective Edge, lasts for fifty days, killing about two thousand Gazans, sixty-six Israeli soldiers, and five Israeli civilians. Unlike the conflicts from 2008 to 2009 and in 2012, Palestinian rocket fire targets major Israeli cities. The war ends after the United States, in consultation with Egypt, Israel, and other regional powers, brokers a cease-fire .

Muhammad Hamed / Reuters

Changing long-standing U.S. policy, U.S. President Donald Trump formally recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He also pledges to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to that city, though the move is not set to occur immediately. Numerous foreign leaders, including those of Egypt, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, along with UN Secretary-General António Guterres, criticize the policy change. It also sparks protests and violence throughout East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Jordan. In January 2018, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declines to meet with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence during Pence’s trip to the region.

Carlos Barria / Reuters

The Trump administration recognizes Israeli sovereignty  over the Golan Heights, which Israel had formally annexed from Syria in 1981. The United States is the first country other than Israel to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the territory.

Trump unveils his administration’s proposed Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, crafted by U.S. and Israeli diplomats without Palestinian input. The plan calls for a two-state solution with significant economic aid to the Palestinians. Many analysts criticize the plan as being one sided, stipulating impossible requirements for Palestinian statehood and paving the way for Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Palestinian authorities reject the plan immediately. Following the plan’s announcement,  Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announces Israel’s plan to annex portions of the West Bank as outlined in Trump’s proposal.

Tom Brenner / Reuters

Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agree to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, becoming the first Arab countries to do so in over twenty-five years. In return, Israel announces the suspension of its plans to annex territory in the West Bank. Morocco and Sudan subsequently also sign on to the agreement and normalize relations with Israel.

Evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and clashes at al-Aqsa Mosque spark conflict between Israel and Hamas. Over two hundred people in Gaza and at least ten in Israel die. The Joe Biden administration helps mediate a truce and restores some U.S. aid and diplomatic contact with the Palestinians.  

Israel launches a counterterrorism operation in the West Bank in response to attacks by Palestinians against Jewish Israelis. The operation and resulting resurgence contribute to the deadliest year for both sides since 2005, an uptick in violence that only turned out to rise in 2023. 

Mohammed Salem / Reuters

Hamas launches an unprecedented surprise attack on Israel, leading to an explosion of violence.  According to the Israeli government, the attack kills approximately 1,200 people, many of them civilians. Over 200 people are also taken hostage. The attack is the deadliest in Israel’s history. Hamas military leaders justify the attack by citing Israel’s long-running blockade on Gaza and its occupation of Palestinian lands. Following the attack, Israel launches a deadly counter offensive aiming to eradicate Hamas in Gaza. International bodies, including the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, have since issued investigations into Israeli and Hamas officials for violating international law . Both parties reject these claims. Despite a growing humanitarian crisis, as well as numerous attempts to broker ceasefire deals, the warring parties remain in conflict. As of July 2024, over 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians. Over 100 Israeli hostages are still held by Hamas. 

What’s the Israel-Palestine conflict about? A simple guide

It’s killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions. And its future lies in its past. We break it down.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced many millions of people and has its roots in a colonial act carried out more than a century ago.

With Israel declaring war on the Gaza Strip after an unprecedented attack by the armed Palestinian group Hamas on Saturday, the world’s eyes are again sharply focused on what might come next.

Keep reading

From hubris to humiliation: the 10 hours that shocked israel, fears of a ground invasion of gaza grow as israel vows ‘mighty vengeance’, ‘my voice is our lifeline’: gaza journalist and family amid israel bombing.

Hamas fighters have killed more than 800 Israelis in assaults on multiple towns in southern Israel. In response, Israel has launched a bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 500 Palestinians. It has mobilised troops along the Gaza border, apparently in preparation for a ground attack. And on Monday, it announced a “total blockade” of the Gaza Strip, stopping the supply of food, fuel and other essential commodities to the already besieged enclave in an act that under international law amounts to a war crime.

But what unfolds in the coming days and weeks has its seed in history.

For decades, Western media outlets, academics, military experts and world leaders have described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as intractable, complicated and deadlocked.

Here’s a simple guide to break down one of the world’s longest-running conflicts:

What was the Balfour Declaration?

• More than 100 years ago, on November 2, 1917, Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community.
• The letter was short – just 67 words – but its contents had a seismic effect on Palestine that is still felt to this day.
• It committed the British government to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to facilitating “the achievement of this object”. The letter is known as the Balfour Declaration .
• In essence, a European power promised the Zionist movement a country where Palestinian Arab natives made up more than 90 percent of the population.
• A British Mandate was created in 1923 and lasted until 1948. During that period, the British facilitated mass Jewish immigration – many of the new residents were fleeing Nazism in Europe – and they also faced protests and strikes. Palestinians were alarmed by their country’s changing demographics and British confiscation of their lands to be handed over to Jewish settlers.

What happened during the 1930s?

• Escalating tensions eventually led to the Arab Revolt, which lasted from 1936 to 1939.
• In April 1936, the newly formed Arab National Committee called on Palestinians to launch a general strike, withhold tax payments and boycott Jewish products to protest British colonialism and growing Jewish immigration.
• The six-month strike was brutally repressed by the British, who launched a mass arrest campaign and carried out punitive home demolitions , a practice that Israel continues to implement against Palestinians today.
• The second phase of the revolt began in late 1937 and was led by the Palestinian peasant   resistance movement, which targeted British forces and colonialism.
• By the second half of 1939, Britain had massed 30,000 troops in Palestine. Villages were bombed by air, curfews imposed, homes demolished, and administrative detentions and summary killings were widespread.
• In tandem, the British collaborated with the Jewish settler community and formed armed groups and a British-led “counterinsurgency force” of Jewish fighters named the Special Night Squads.
• Within the Yishuv, the pre-state settler community, arms were secretly imported and weapons factories established to expand the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary that later became the core of the Israeli army.
• In those three years of revolt, 5,000 Palestinians were killed, 15,000 to 20,000 were wounded and 5,600 were imprisoned.

What was the UN partition plan?

• By 1947, the Jewish population had ballooned to 33 percent of Palestine, but they owned only 6 percent of the land.
• The United Nations adopted Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
• The Palestinians rejected the plan because it allotted about 55 percent of Palestine to the Jewish state, including most of the fertile coastal region.
• At the time, the Palestinians owned 94 percent of historic Palestine and comprised 67 percent of its population.

The 1948 Nakba, or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

• Even before the British Mandate expired on May 14, 1948, Zionist paramilitaries were already embarking on a military operation to destroy Palestinian towns and villages to expand the borders of the Zionist state that was to be born.
• In April 1948, more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children were killed in the village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
• That set the tone for the rest of the operation, and from 1947 to 1949, more than 500 Palestinian villages, towns and cities were destroyed in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba , or “catastrophe” in Arabic.
• An estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, including in dozens of massacres.
• The Zionist movement captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.
• An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes.
• Today their descendants live as six million refugees in 58 squalid camps throughout Palestine and in the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
• On May 15, 1948, Israel announced its establishment.
• The following day, the first Arab-Israeli war began and fighting ended in January 1949 after an armistice between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
• In December 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which calls for the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

The years after the Nakba

• At least 150,000 Palestinians remained in the newly created state of Israel and lived under a tightly controlled military occupation for almost 20 years before they were eventually granted Israeli citizenship.
• Egypt took over the Gaza Strip, and in 1950, Jordan began its administrative rule over the West Bank.
• In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed, and a year later, the Fatah political party was established.

The Naksa, or the Six-Day War and the settlements

• On June 5, 1967, Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine, including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula during the Six-Day War against a coalition of Arab armies.
• For some Palestinians, this led to a second forced displacement, or Naksa, which means “setback” in Arabic.
• In December 1967, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was formed. Over the next decade, a series of attacks and plane hijackings by leftist groups drew the world’s attention to the plight of the Palestinians.
• Settlement construction began in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. A two-tier system was created with Jewish settlers afforded all the rights and privileges of being Israeli citizens whereas Palestinians had to live under a military occupation that discriminated against them and barred any form of political or civic expression.

The first Intifada 1987-1993

• The first Palestinian Intifada erupted in the Gaza Strip in December 1987 after four Palestinians were killed when an Israeli truck collided with two vans carrying Palestinian workers.
• Protests spread rapidly to the West Bank with young Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli army tanks and soldiers.
• It also led to the establishment of the Hamas movement, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that engaged in armed resistance against the Israeli occupation.
• The Israeli army’s heavy-handed response was encapsulated by the “Break their Bones” policy advocated by then-Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It included summary killings, closures of universities, deportations of activists and destruction of homes.
• The Intifada was primarily carried out by young people and was directed by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, a coalition of Palestinian political factions committed to ending the Israeli occupation and establishing Palestinian independence.
• In 1988, the Arab League recognised the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
• The Intifada was characterised by popular mobilisations, mass protests, civil disobedience, well-organised strikes and communal cooperatives.
• According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, 1,070 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during the Intifada, including 237 children. More than 175,000 Palestinians were arrested.
• The Intifada also prompted the international community to search for a solution to the conflict.

The Oslo years and the Palestinian Authority

• The Intifada ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the formation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), an interim government that was granted limited self-rule in pockets of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
• The PLO recognised Israel on the basis of a two-state solution and effectively signed agreements that gave Israel control of 60 percent of the West Bank, and much of the territory’s land and water resources.
• The PA was supposed to make way for the first elected Palestinian government running an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its capital in East Jerusalem, but that has never happened.
• Critics of the PA view it as a corrupt subcontractor to the Israeli occupation that collaborates closely with the Israeli military in clamping down on dissent and political activism against Israel.
• In 1995, Israel built an electronic fence and concrete wall around the Gaza Strip, snapping interactions between the split Palestinian territories.

The second Intifada

• The second Intifada began on September 28, 2000, when Likud opposition leader Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound with thousands of security forces deployed in and around the Old City of Jerusalem.
• Clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces killed five Palestinians and injured 200 over two days.
• The incident sparked a widespread armed uprising. During the Intifada, Israel caused unprecedented damage to the Palestinian economy and infrastructure.
• Israel reoccupied areas governed by the Palestinian Authority and began construction of a separation wall that along with rampant settlement construction, destroyed Palestinian livelihoods and communities.
• Settlements are illegal under international law, but over the years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved to colonies built on stolen Palestinian land. The space for Palestinians is shrinking as settler-only roads and infrastructure slice up the occupied West Bank, forcing Palestinian cities and towns into bantustans, the isolated enclaves for Black South Africans that the country’s former apartheid regime created.
• At the time the Oslo Accords were signed, just over 110,000 Jewish settlers lived in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Today, the figure is more than 700,000 living on more than 100,000 hectares (390sq miles) of land expropriated from the Palestinians.

The Palestinian division and the Gaza blockade

• PLO leader Yasser Arafat died in 2004, and a year later, the second Intifada ended, Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip were dismantled, and Israeli soldiers and 9,000 settlers left the enclave.
• A year later, Palestinians voted in a general election for the first time.
• Hamas won a majority. However, a Fatah-Hamas civil war broke out, lasting for months, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians.
• Hamas expelled Fatah from the Gaza Strip, and Fatah – the main party of the Palestinian Authority – resumed control of parts of the West Bank.
• In June 2007, Israel imposed a land, air and naval blockade on the Gaza Strip, accusing Hamas of “terrorism”.

The wars on the Gaza Strip

• Israel has launched four protracted military assaults on Gaza: in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed, including many children , and tens of thousands of homes, schools and office buildings have been destroyed.
• Rebuilding has been next to impossible because the siege prevents construction materials, such as steel and cement, from reaching Gaza.
• The 2008 assault involved the use of internationally banned weaponry, such as phosphorus gas.
• In 2014, over a span of 50 days, Israel killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians and close to 500 children.
• During the  assault , called Operation Protective Edge by the Israelis, about 11,000 Palestinians were wounded, 20,000 homes were destroyed and half a million people displaced .

Settlements and the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Background Reading

Scholarship about Israeli settlement in occupied Palestinian territories provides historical context for recent violence in the region.

After a relatively dormant period, the Israel-Palestine conflict erupted into open war in May of 2021. Hamas in Gaza and the Israeli army engaged in the first sustained exchange of rocket fire and airstrikes in seven years. The near-term cause of the fighting was a series of disputes over the usage of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearby Wailing Wall in Jerusalem , as Israel’s national holidays conflicted with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Moreover, both the governments of Israel and the Palestinian Authority are weak in 2021, discouraging either side from compromise. At that time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to attract the necessary cohort of far-right wing politicians to form a coalition government in Israel’s parliamentary system. The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, canceled elections to avoid a potential loss. This emboldened Hamas, which broke with Abbas’ party Fatah in 2007 and has remained in sole control of Gaza since that time.

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However, the most important long-term factor has been the continuing Israeli efforts to displace Palestinian residents of the occupied Palestine territories and to settle Israeli citizens in their place. Israel occupied the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 war, which had been formerly under the administration of Egypt and Jordan, respectively. Israel has permitted hundreds of thousands of settlers to make land claims based on pre-1948 ownership in these territories, and to establish entirely new communities on land claimed by the state in the intervening decade. The UN has formally denounced this policy as a violation of international law.

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This long process also arrived at a significant turning point in early 2021, as Israel courts ordered several Palestinian families to vacate their Sheikh Jarrah homes, where many had lived for decades. Those official decrees to remove Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem near Al-Aqsa triggered Palestinian street protests and violent clashes involving Israeli police by May of 2021.

The following research available for free via the links below offers valuable insight and historical context on the topic of the Israeli settlements.

Joel Beinin, “Mixing, Separation and Violence in Urban Spaces and The Rural Frontier in Palestine,” The Arab Studies Journal , Spring 2013, Vol. 21, No. 1, TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE, pp. 14-47.

Beinin situates the phenomenon of the Israeli settlements in historical context. In the era of Ottoman Palestine and even the British mandate that followed World War I, Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities lived side-by-side in Palestine’s major cities Jerusalem and Jaffa. They socialized together and invested in each other’s business ventures as the Levant entered the industrial world. Although many early Zionist settlers, and the later Labor Zionist movement, idealized rural settlement and agriculture as the principal way of creating a Jewish homeland community, Beinin demonstrates that it was largely cities that Zionist immigrants moved to and sought to transform, both before and after the formation of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 war.

“Despite its preponderantly urban character, the post-1967 settlement project has produced a diametrically opposite model of urban life than the norms of late Ottoman Palestine—in practice and as the settlers’ ideal,” Beinin writes. “Jews exclusively inhabit all settlements—urban, suburban, or rural, ideologically or economically inspired—though Palestinians are often employed in them, even to construct them. All Jews are Israeli citizens with greater rights and subject to different laws and norms than their non-citizen neighbors.”

Janet Abu-Lughod, “Israeli Settlements in Occupied Arab Lands: Conquest to Colony,” Journal of Palestine Studies , Winter 1982, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 16-54.

Written only 15 years after the 1967 war, Abu-Lughod’s research provides valuable insight into Israel’s initial government and settlement strategies of the Palestinian territories. Although some right-wing politicians made immediate demands to annex Gaza and the West Bank, in spite of international law, most Israeli leaders realized that this would raise the question of giving citizenship to Palestinians. They then sought other means of legally expropriating land and diminishing the power of occupied Palestinians.

Indeed, Abu-Lughod argues Israel drew on the experience of urban planning inside Israel between 1948 and 1967 to diminish the concentration of Arab Israeli citizens in certain parts of the country when planning the distribution of occupied territory settlements. The justification for taking possession of this land comes “from the fiction of government succession.” The legal practice of freehold private property developed later in the Muslim world than in Europe, and much of the marginal land in the West Bank remained unregistered or in religious foundations (waqfs), which Israel claimed as state land after 1967. “While the confiscation and reassignment of ‘state land’ to Jewish settlers is inherently no more legitimate than any other form of expropriation, the Israelis have made much of this distinction between public and private ownership in their defensive arguments,” she writes.

Marina Sergides, “Housing in East Jerusalem: Marina Sergides reports on a legal mission to the Occupied Palestine Territory,” Socialist Lawyer , No. 60 (February 2012), pp. 14-17.

This is a deep dive into the social and legal situations of the Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem living on land with disputed ownership. Twenty-eight refugee families with 500 people had been living in homes  they had built on land granted to them by UNRWH after fleeing from other homes inside Israel after its creation in 1948. Since 1967 and the Israeli declared annexation of East Jerusalem, the Nahalat Shimon company has brought Ottoman-era documents claiming some of the land in the neighborhood had been owned by Jewish families in the 19th century. It succeeded in forcing out four of the families in 2009.

Sergides questions of the legal proceedings of applying domestic Israeli law to Palestinians in territory recognized as occupied under international law. “Moreover, the delegation observed that there is an asymmetry in the way the Israeli courts treat the question of pre-1948 property rights,” she writes. “While the courts have been willing to uphold claims by Jewish organisations in relation to property in Sheikh Jarrah allegedly owned by Jewish families before 1948, similar claims by the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah in relation to lands which their families owned in what is now the State of Israel would not be entertained.” She concludes by highlighting the ways Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes and restriction on new construction is causing a housing crisis in East Jerusalem.

Raja Shehadeh, “From Jerusalem to the Rest of the West Bank,” Review of Middle East Studies , June 2019, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 6-19.

The most recent installment on this list, Shehadeh reviews the politics of settlement in recent decades in light of the Trump administration’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing it as Israel’s capital on Dec. 6, 2017. In particular, he highlights the failures of the two-state solution to reconcile the existence of settlements within Palestinian territory, an inherent flaw in the 1990s’ Oslo Peace Accords.

The Accords divided land in the West Bank into three areas: A) Palestinian control; B) Palestinian civil control with Israeli military control and C) Full Israeli control. The resulting map is a Swiss cheese of administrative areas. Combined with Israel’s direct annexation of East Jerusalem, it divided Palestinian settlement into a patchwork difficult to govern. Although the PLO made these compromises to win recognition from Israel, the resulting devolution of political power only heightened the distinction between settlers, who enjoy citizenship rights and state services, and the disenfranchisement of Palestinians.

Joyce Dalsheim and Assaf Harel, “Representing Settlers,” Review of Middle East Studies , Winter 2009, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 219-238.

This review essay is a cultural critique of the way religious Israeli settlers are conceived in the news media and academic works. Works in both fields, Dalsheim and Harel write, depict these Israeli settlers as religious fundamentalists that are seeking both to create socially alienated communities and to fulfill a religious commitment to reclaim what they see as land promised them in the bible, despite international law. However much this reflects the truth for some communities, they argue it does not reflect the huge diversity of people actually settling in the occupied territories. Moreover, it serves as symbolic legitimization of other brands of Zionism.

“These representations of settlers not only portray religious settlers as categorically different from ‘ordinary’ or ‘mainstream’ Israelis, they also project a sense of moral legitimacy for those writing against the settlers,” Dalsheim and Harel argue. “They reaffirm a moral high ground for Israelis by inscribing a deep division between Israel inside its internationally recognized borders and its settlements in the post-1967 occupied territories.”

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A Century of Conflict: Professor Eugene Rogan’s Historical Perspective on Israel-Palestine

Professor Eugene Rogan is a renowned scholar in Modern Middle Eastern History, serving as the Director of the Middle East Centre and a Fellow of St Antony's College at the University of Oxford. He authored The Arabs: A History —acclaimed by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly as one of the best books of 2009—and his latest work, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920 , continues to contribute significantly to the field.

You have written extensively about the Ottoman Empire in The Fall of the Ottomans and Frontiers of the State in Late Ottoman Empire as well as more generally about Arab history in The Arabs . Where do you see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fitting into this narrative?

Since 1948, and indeed well before, the conflict between the Zionist movement in Palestine and the emerging state of Israel was to define the Middle East as a zone of conflict. What was an Arab-Israeli conflict through the 1970s has, since the Camp David Accords, developed into a much more focused conflict between Israel and Palestine. There have been exceptions: Israel has fought wars in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah and has had small engagements with Syria. However, if you want to get to the heart of the unresolved, it really is Israel-Palestine. We can talk about a conflict that has endured unresolved since 1948 and continues to define the politics of the region and its place in the world.

You mention 1948—what do you see as the starting point of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and how have early events like the creation of modern Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, or the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 shaped its course?

Israel did not emerge from a vacuum in 1948. The 1917 Balfour Declaration is a really important point. Before 1917, Zionism was a very unrealistic nationalism, because the demography of the movement was in diaspora. Nationalism [is usually] based on the idea that the demography [is based] on a geography, [a] struggle for self-determination within the boundaries of a certain territory of land. Zionism was an appeal to Jews across four continents, and it took the support of a major power to take that idea from romantic and idealistic to something you could hope to act on. By gaining the direct support of the British government—not for the Zionist movement, not for the creation of a Jewish state, but at the very least for the creation of a Jewish national home—Zionism [was given] a political basis on which to begin to realize that dream of statehood.

More specifically, how did British policies and actions during the mandate period contribute to these growing tensions between Israeli and Arab populations?

I believe that Britain saw the Zionist movement as a partner for managing a new mandate and Palestine—a territory Britain had not designated as [a] desired addition to the British Empire until well into World War I. In my view, [this was] a reflection of [Britain’s] growing awareness of the vulnerability of the Suez Canal from Palestine, because Palestine was the last water source you had before the bone-dry Sinai Peninsula. Twice [during] World War I, the Ottomans had managed to strike the Suez Canal from Palestine across Sinai. It seems very clear deductively that the British came to recognize the strategic importance of Palestine but knew they would face resistance from the indigenous population to them coming in as a colonial power. They had hoped, in partnership with the Zionist movement, to have a community in Palestine that would work with their administration, and they envisaged a compact minority that [would] be dependent and reliable.

The closest [evidence] I can get to a smoking gun on that [is from] 1939. In a white paper to end the Arab Revolt of 1936 to [1939], Britain shows its head and its [willingness] to allow immigration, to allow the Jewish settlers in Palestine to increase by 75,000 over five years, reach[ing] 35 percent of the total population. Britain [then] promised six years and five years after that to grant independence to Palestine under majority rule, [which] tells you that Britain had never intended for [the Zionists] to achieve statehood. [Britain] didn't want to deal with nationalism in any form, let alone Jewish nationalism. But, [Britain was] hoping that the [Jewish community] would be for British rule in Palestine [what] the Maronite community was for French rule in Lebanon.

Britain was never really pro-Zionist. It never really felt [pro-]Arab. It was trying to secure a strategic territory for [its] empire and to manage that contested space. [The British] hoped they could do so in a partnership with a compact majority of Jews in Palestine. Britain was acting in its imperial self-interest rather than to promote the national idea of the Jewish community. In the process, [it] set in motion [the] 1937 Peel Commission, [in which] the British declared a conflict between rival and incompatible nationalisms: Jewish and Palestinian. They were not able to manage what they set in motion, [which] would lead to conflict, ultimately drive Britain from Palestine, and leave it to the Palestinian Arabs and Jews to fight for land.

Beyond Britain, how have shifting international alliances and geopolitical interests influenced the Israel-Palestine conflict from its inception to the present day?

James Barr has written a book about the interwar years and Anglo-French colonial rivalries in the Middle East called A Line in the Sand . He makes the argument that during World War II, Britain, along with Free French forces, drove the [French] Vichy out of Syria and Lebanon to deny [them] access to the Eastern Mediterranean. At that time, the Free French were willing to promise independence to Syria and Lebanon. Britain agreed to serve as [a] guarantor of that promise. All of that so far sounds congenial, but France had no more interest in leaving Syria and Lebanon than Britain did in leaving Palestine.

Yet, when the Second World War came to an end, the United Nations was convening its first meeting in San Francisco, inviting nations to sign on as charter members. Lebanon and Syria wanted to be there. France actively sought to prevent them [from attending]. And when the Lebanese and Syrians called on Britain to fulfill its guarantee of their independence, [it] did. [This alienated] the French, who at that point began to support the Jewish movement in Palestine as a way to put pressure on Britain.

There was a very diabolical chess game being played by the dying European powers. Coming out of World War II, both [France and Britain] were facing a future of decolonization, a reduction from global imperial powers to compact European powers with quite a different status in the world. They weren't ready for that in the 1940s. [Besides Britain,] the only other power that was really influential in Palestine after 1945 [was] France. France’s alliance with the Yishuv [Jews living in Palestine before statehood] and with the young state of Israel would provide a great deal of Israel's advanced military hardware and provide the origin of Israel's nuclear deterrent. We often forget that this support was not a gift of the American-Israeli friendship but of the France-Israel friendship.

How do historical narratives and collective memories of events like the Nakba and the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank shape the identities and political stances of Israelis and Palestinians today?

On the one hand, there has been a tendency—since the creation of Israel and then the subsequent occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in [1967]—to try and move beyond history to find a diplomatic resolution. But in the end, no progress has ever been achieved without acknowledging the historic basis of Israeli and Palestinian claims. [How] these two parties have, in the past, undermined each other [is] usually brought up as justification for either not engaging in negotiations or trying to offer less.

From the Palestinian perspective, since the Oslo moment when [Yasser] Arafat accepted Israel within the 1949 armistice boundaries, the Palestinians felt that they had conceded all they could [while] still being able to make a viable Palestinian state in what remained. This meant a division of historic Palestine: 78 percent to Israel [and] 22 percent to Palestinian national aspirations.

In a sense, the measures taken by Israel since the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in particular have been aimed at whittling down that 22 percent in ways that the Palestinians have constantly fought against. The first measure was to annex East Jerusalem. This is not something that has been recognized by most of the international community, and Palestinians continue to demand East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Settlements followed slowly, but starting in the 1970s, particularly under a Likud government after 1977, right-wing parties in government based their aspirations to extend Israel into Judea and Samaria (as they referred to the West Bank) [on] settlement.

While we might blame the genesis of settlement on right-wing Israeli parties, we have to acknowledge that [the] Labor [Party] was as active in extending and promoting settlements as Likud ever has been, and since [the Labor Party] was [ established in 1968], the creation of settlements has only accelerated. Historians often judge that the settlement movement undid the gains of the Oslo Accords. Settlements, being a continued land grab at the expense of realizing Palestinian statehood, took away confidence on the Palestinian side that they could achieve their aims through diplomacy. This gave rise to the First and then the Second Intifada, and the memory of the violence of the Second Intifada [in particular] fuels the Israeli narrative that there is no partner in peace, that the Palestinians will never accept [them], and that the history of violence demonstrates that [Palestinians] will not stop until they've reclaimed all of Palestine.

Therefore, history gets weaponized in these ways, and you can see how both Palestinians and Israelis argue that, because of the actions of the other—whether it's settlements extending Jewish presence into territories where Palestinians aspire to create their state or Israelis saying that the violence [extends] into the very heartlands of Israel inside the Green Line—each blames the other for recent history that has denied a peaceful resolution of this, the oldest conflict in the Middle East.

Looking at these histories and contemporary realities, what potential pathways do you see for resolving the conflicts?

When I go to Israel, I don't drop into Palestine while I'm in the neighborhood. I only go to Palestine when I go to Palestine. My experience when I go to Israel is [that] I stay in Israel. If you're in Tel Aviv, you see what Israel could be in terms of a liberal, diverse, modern, cultured society without conflict. You go to Jerusalem, and you just feel the tensions [surrounding] the contested nature of holy spaces in that city with another layer of Christian pilgrims who don't have a dog in the Palestinian-Israeli fight but add to the sense of religious excitement that makes Jerusalem a very stressful place to be in. When you go into Palestine, beyond East Jerusalem, into Ramallah or to Nablus, you are every inch of the way through that landscape confronted by the occupation. What I come away with after every visit to Palestine is [that] the occupation is unsustainable. There is no way any free person would ever agree to live [under] those conditions. I come away with a violent sense of how unsustainable life under that occupation would be.

That's the West Bank. The Gaza Strip, from which Hamas broke out on [October 7, 2023], is surrounded by a high-tech fence right around the whole perimeter, with motion-activated machine guns to shoot anybody [who comes] to the fence. [A] person who lives in [a society like the United States or European Union] can imagine a situation [in which] we find motion-activated lights a little intrusive.

If you want to know a way forward for peace between Palestine and Israel, I don't see any other way besides [two states]. I've heard all the arguments [for a] great binational state. I agree that [it] would be an ideal resolution, one land for two peoples. [But] nationalism will always get in the way. That [formula] will only result in blood. I am a two-stater, and I can see two states. By working with facts on the ground, you don't need to change [the boundaries] because most of the international community recognizes the Green Line of [June 5, 1967]. So [the] Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, [and the] West Bank [are] Palestinian sovereign territory.

Instead of [boundaries] being defined by partition walls, by barbed wire fences, by motion-activated machine guns, [they should] be defined by the rule of law. If you cross the boundary, from here to that side, you go from Israeli to Palestinian jurisdiction the same way as when you cross the Washington Bridge, you go from New York to New Jersey jurisdiction. It's not violent. You can imagine that [in] Europe; it's Benelux, you know—Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg. And then from that, you can begin to address everything. All Palestinians will be citizens of Palestine, but refugees in Lebanon and Syria who [have] been excluded from both Palestine and Israel since 1948 [must also] be part of the solution.

The settlements—what do you do with them? If [you withdrew] all of [the] Israeli soldiers from the West Bank out of respect for the sovereignty of Palestine, [you would] start empowering the worst of the abuses of the settler communities who know they can literally get away with murder under the protection of the [Israel Defense Forces] (IDF). No IDF [means that] under Palestinian law, settlers would have to behave very differently. Or if they [were to break] the law, [it would] be a Palestinian cop [who arrests] them. They [would] sit in [a] Palestinian jail, [and] they [would] go before a Palestinian judge. This [would be] a terrible disincentive for the kinds of settler violence that [have] become all too regular in recent years, particularly since [the] latest Israeli government with its strong settler movement. And I think that for every Israeli settler who chooses to be an expatriate in Palestine, there should be a right of return for Palestinians inside Israel, which [would] be a real deterrent to the Israeli government [against encouraging] settlers. If you don't want to absorb [300,000] or 400,000 Palestinians in Israel proper, then don't encourage [300,000] or 400,000 Israelis to be in settlements, and as Israelis vacate those settlements, preferring to live in Israel, you'll have houses to accommodate more Palestinians. There is a way one can imagine providing a peaceful, better future for Israelis and Palestinians to live together in this very small geography. Even today, as we speak, Palestinian Arabs—whether they are citizens of Israel or in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, or East Jerusalem—[number] about 7 million, and Israeli Jews [number] about 7 million. They are more or less at parity.

If anything positive can come from the horror of the atrocious attacks of [October 7, 2023] and of this murderous war in Gaza, it will be the recognition that this will not be resolved by killing each other; it will be resolved by living with each other, and there is a way to do it.

Black spoke with Rogan on June 21st, 2024. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sydney Black

Sydney Black is the Solicits Chair for the Harvard International Review. Her interests include international development, environmental policy, and European politics.

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What's the Israel-Palestinian conflict about and how did it start?

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WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT?

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9 questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict you were too embarrassed to ask

by Max Fisher

Editor’s note, October 9, 2023: This story was last updated on July 17, 2014, and some information in it may no longer be accurate. For all of Vox’s latest coverage on Israel and Palestine, see our storystream .

Everyone has heard of the Israel-Palestine conflict . Everyone knows it’s bad, that it’s been going on for a long time, and that there is a lot of hatred on both sides.

But you may find yourself less clear on the hows and the whys of the conflict. Why, for example, did Israel invade the Palestinian territory of Gaza in July 2014, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, many of them children? Why did the militant Palestinian group Hamas fire rockets into civilian neighborhoods in Israel? How did this latest round of violence start in the first place — and why do they hate one another at all?

What follows are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. Giant, neon-lit disclaimer: these issues are complicated and contentious, and this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of Israel-Palestine’s history or the conflict today. But it’s a place to start.

1) What are Israel and Palestine?

That sounds like a very basic question but, in a sense, it’s at the center of the conflict.

Israel is an officially Jewish country located in the Middle East. Palestine is a set of two physically separate, ethnically Arab and mostly Muslim territories alongside Israel: the West Bank, named for the western shore of the Jordan River, and Gaza. Those territories are not independent (more on this later). All together, Israel and the Palestinian territories are about as populous as Illinois and about half its size.

Officially, there is no internationally recognized line between Israel and Palestine; the borders are considered to be disputed, and have been for decades. So is the status of Palestine: some countries consider Palestine to be an independent state, while others (like the US) consider Palestine to be territories under Israeli occupation. Both Israelis and Palestinians have claims to the land going back centuries, but the present-day states are relatively new.

2) Why are Israelis and Palestinians fighting?

Israeli soldiers clash with Palestinian stone throwers at a checkpoint outside Jerusalem (AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty Images)

This is not, despite what you may have heard, primarily about religion. On the surface at least, it’s very simple: the conflict is over who gets what land and how it is controlled. In execution, though, that gets into a lot of really thorny issues, like: Where are the borders? Can Palestinian refugees return to their former homes in present-day Israel? More on these later.

The decades-long process of resolving that conflict has created another, overlapping conflict: managing the very unpleasant Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, in which Israel has put the Palestinians under suffocating military occupation and Palestinian militant groups terrorize Israelis.

Both sides have squandered peace and perpetuated conflict, but palestinians today bear most of the suffering

Those two dimensions of the conflict are made even worse by the long, bitter, violent history between these two peoples. It’s not just that there is lots of resentment and distrust; Israelis and Palestinians have such widely divergent narratives of the last 70-plus years, of what has happened and why, that even reconciling their two realities is extremely difficult. All of this makes it easier for extremists, who oppose any compromise and want to destroy or subjugate the other side entirely, to control the conversation and derail the peace process.

The peace process, by the way, has been going on for decades, but it hasn’t looked at all hopeful since the breakthrough 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords produced a glimmer of hope that has since dissipated. The conflict has settled into a terrible cycle and peace looks less possible all the time.

Something you often hear is that “both sides” are to blame for perpetuating the conflict, and there’s plenty of truth to that. There has always been and remains plenty of culpability to go around, plenty of individuals and groups on both sides that squandered peace and perpetuated conflict many times over. Still, perhaps the most essential truth of the Israel-Palestine conflict today is that the conflict predominantly matters for the human suffering it causes. And while Israelis certainly suffer deeply and in great numbers, the vast majority of the conflict’s toll is incurred by Palestinian civilians . Just above, as one metric of that , are the Israeli and Palestinian conflict-related deaths every month since late 2000.

3) How did this conflict start in the first place?

(Left map: Passia ; center and right maps: Philippe Rekacewicz / Le Monde Diplomatique )

The conflict has been going on since the early 1900s, when the mostly-Arab, mostly-Muslim region was part of the Ottoman Empire and, starting in 1917, a "mandate" run by the British Empire. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were moving into the area, as part of a movement called Zionism among mostly European Jews to escape persecution and establish their own state in their ancestral homeland. (Later, large numbers of Middle Eastern Jews also moved to Israel, either to escape anti-Semitic violence or because they were forcibly expelled.)

Communal violence between Jews and Arabs in British Palestine began spiraling out of control. In 1947, the United Nations approved a plan to divide British Palestine into two mostly independent countries, one for Jews called Israel and one for Arabs called Palestine. Jerusalem, holy city for Jews and Muslims, was to be a special international zone.

The plan was never implemented. Arab leaders in the region saw it as European colonial theft and, in 1948, invaded to keep Palestine unified. The Israeli forces won the 1948 war, but they pushed well beyond the UN-designated borders to claim land that was to have been part of Palestine, including the western half of Jerusalem. They also uprooted and expelled entire Palestinian communities, creating about 700,000 refugees, whose descendants now number 7 million and are still considered refugees.

The 1948 war ended with Israel roughly controlling the territory that you will see marked on today’s maps as “Israel”; everything except for the West Bank and Gaza, which is where most Palestinian fled to (many also ended up in refugee camps in neighboring countries) and are today considered the Palestinian territories. The borders between Israel and Palestine have been disputed and fought over ever since. So has the status of those Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.

That’s the first major dimension of the conflict: reconciling the division that opened in 1948. The second began in 1967, when Israel put those two Palestinian territories under military occupation.

4) Why is Israel occupying the Palestinian territories?

A Palestinian boy next to the Israeli wall around the town of Qalqilya (David Silverman/Getty Images)

This is a hugely important part of the conflict today, especially for Palestinians.

Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967. Up to that point, Gaza had been (more or less) controlled by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan. But in 1967 there was another war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, during which Israel occupied the two Palestinian territories. (Israel also took control of Syria’s Golan Heights, which it annexed in 1981, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which it returned to Egypt in 1982.)

Israeli forces have occupied and controlled the West Bank ever since. It withdrew its occupying troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but maintains a full blockade of the territory, which has turned Gaza into what human rights organizations sometimes call an “open-air prison” and has pushed the unemployment rate up to 40 percent .

Israel says the occupation is necessary for security given its tiny size: to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks and to provide a buffer from foreign invasions. But that does not explain the settlers.

Settlers are Israelis who move into the West Bank. They are widely considered to violate international law, which forbids an occupying force from moving its citizens into occupied territory. Many of the 500,000 settlers are just looking for cheap housing; most live within a few miles of the Israeli border, often in the around surrounding Jerusalem.

Others move deep into the West Bank to claim land for Jews, out of religious fervor and/or a desire to see more or all of the West Bank absorbed into Israel. While Israel officially forbids this and often evicts these settlers, many are still able to take root.

In the short term, settlers of all forms make life for Palestinians even more difficult, by forcing the Israeli government to guard them with walls or soldiers that further constrain Palestinians. In the long term, the settlers create what are sometimes called “facts on the ground”: Israeli communities that blur the borders and expand land that Israel could claim for itself in any eventual peace deal.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is all-consuming for the Palestinians who live there, constrained by Israeli checkpoints and 20-foot walls, subject to an Israeli military justice system in which on average two children are arrested every day , stuck with an economy stifled by strict Israeli border control, and countless other indignities large and small.

5) Can we take a quick music break?

Music breaks like this are usually an opportunity to step back and appreciate the aspects of a people and culture beyond the conflict that has put them in the news. And it’s true that there is much more to Israelis and Palestinians than their conflict. But music has also been a really important medium by which Israelis and Palestinians deal with and think about the conflict. The degree to which the conflict has seeped into Israel-Palestinian music is a sign of how deeply and pervasively it effects Israelis and Palestinians.

Above, from the wealth of Palestinian hip-hop is the group DAM , whose name is both an acronym for Da Arabian MCs and the Arabic verb for “to last forever.” The group has been around since the late 1990s and are from the Israeli city of Lod, Israeli citizens who are part of the country’s Arab minority. The Arab Israeli experience, typically one of solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and a sense that Arab-Israelis are far from equal in the Jewish state, comes through in their music, which is highly political and deals with themes of disenfranchisement and dispossession in the great tradition of American hip-hop.

Christiane Amanpour interviewed DAM about their music last year . Above is their song “I Don’t Have Freedom,” full English lyrics of which are here , from their 2007 album Dedication. Sample line: “We’ve been like this more than 50 years / Living as prisoners behind the bars of paragraphs /Of agreements that change nothing.”

Now here is a sample of Israel’s wonderful jazz scene, one of the best in the world, from the bassist and band leader Avishai Cohen . Cohen is best known in the US for his celebrated 2006 instrumental album Continuo, but let’s instead listen to the song “El Hatzipor” from 2009’s Aurora.

The lyrics are from an 1892 poem of the same name, meaning “To the Bird,” by the Ukrainian Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. The poem ( translated here ) expresses the hopeful yearning among early European Zionists like Bialik to escape persecution in Europe and find salvation in the holy land; that it still resonates among Israelis over 100 years later is a reminder of both the tremendous hopes invested in the dream of a Jewish state, and perhaps the sense that this dream is still not secure.

6) Why is there fighting today between Israel and Gaza?

On the surface, this is just the latest round of fighting in 27 years of war between Israel and Hamas , a Palestinian militant group that formed in 1987 seeks Israel’s destruction and is internationally recognized as a terrorist organization for its attacks targeting civilians — and which since 2006 has ruled Gaza. Israeli forces periodically attack Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, typically with air strikes but in 2006 and 2009 with ground invasions.

only hamas deliberately targets civilians, but most are still palestinians killed by israeli strikes

The latest round of fighting was sparked when members of Hamas in the West Bank murdered three Israeli youths who were studying there on June 10. Though the Hamas members appear to have acted without approval from their leadership, which nonetheless praised the attack, Israel responded by arresting large numbers of Hamas personnel in the West Bank and with air strikes against the group in Gaza.

After some Israeli extremists murdered a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem and Israeli security forces cracked down on protests, compounding Palestinian outrage, Hamas and other Gaza groups launched dozens of rockets into Israel, which responded with many more air strikes. So far the fighting has killed one Israeli and 230 Palestinians ; two UN agencies have separately estimated that 70-plus percent of the fatalities are civilians. On Thursday, July 17, Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza, which Israel says is to shut down tunnels that Hamas could use to cross into Israel.

That get backs to that essential truth about the conflict today: Palestinian civilians endure the brunt of it. While Israel targets militants and Hamas targets civilians, Israel’s disproportionate military strength and its willingness to target militants based in dense urban communities means that Palestinians civilians are far more likely to be killed than any other group.

But those are just the surface reasons; there’s a lot more going on here as well.

7) Why does this violence keep happening?

Palestinian youth throw stones at an Israeli tank in 2003. (SAIF DAHLAH/AFP/Getty Images)

The simple version is that violence has become the status quo and that trying for peace is risky, so leaders on both ends seem to believe that managing the violence is preferable, while the Israeli and Palestinian publics show less and less interest in pressuring their leaders to take risks for peace.

Hamas’s commitment to terrorism and to Israel’s destruction lock Gazans into a conflict with Israel that can never be won and that produces little more than Palestinian civilian deaths. Israel’s blockade on Gaza, which strangles economic life there and punishes civilians, helps produce a climate that is hospitable to extremism, and allows Hamas to nurture a belief that even if Hamas may never win, at least refusing to put down their weapons is a form of liberation.

Many Palestinians in Gaza naturally compare Hamas to Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have emphasized peace and compromise and negotiations — only to have been rewarded with an Israeli military occupation that shows no sign of ending and ever-expanding settlements. This is not to endorse that logic, but it is not difficult to see why some Palestinians might conclude that violent “resistance” is preferable.

That sense of Palestinian hopelessness and distrust in Israel and the peace process has been a major contributor to violence in recent years. In the early 2000s, there was also a lot of fighting between Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. This was called the Second Intifada (uprising), and followed a less-violent Palestinian uprising against the occupation in the late 1980s. In the Second Intifada, which was the culmination of Palestinian frustration with the failure of the 1990s peace process, Palestinian militants adopted suicide bombings of Israeli buses and other forms of terror. Israel responded with a severe military crack-down. The fighting killed approximately 3,200 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis.

A 2002 Palestinian bus bombing that killed 18 in Jerusalem (Getty Images)

It’s not just Palestinians, though: many Israelis also increasingly distrust Palestinians and their leaders and see them as innately hostile to peace. In the parlance of Israel-Palestine, the expression for this attitude is, “We don’t have a partner for peace.” That feeling became especially deep after the Second Intifada; months of bus bombings and cafe bombings made many Israelis less supportive of peace efforts and more willing to accept or simply ignore the occupation’s effects on Palestinians.

This sense of apathy has been further enabled by Israel's increasingly successful security programs, such as the Iron Dome system that shoots down Gazan rockets, which insulates many Israelis from the conflict and makes it easier to ignore. Public support for a peace deal that would grant Palestine independence, once high among Israelis, has dropped . Meanwhile, a fringe movement of right-wing Israeli extremists has become increasingly violent, particularly in the West Bank where many live as settlers, further pulling Israeli politics away from peace and thus allowing the conflict to drift.

8) How is the conflict going to end?

The Dome of the Rock (at left with gold dome) is one of the holiest sites in Islam and sits atop the ancient Temple Mount ruins, the Western Wall of which (at right) is the holiest site in Jerusalem. You can see how this would create logistical problems. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

There are three ways the conflict could end. Only one of them is both viable and peaceful — the two-state solution — but it is also extremely difficult, and the more time goes on the harder it gets.

One-state solution: The first is to erase the borders and put Israelis and Palestinians together into one equal, pluralistic state, called the “one-state solution.” Very few people think this could be viable for the simple reason of demographics; Arabs would very soon outnumber Jews. After generations of feeling disenfranchised and persecuted by Israel, the Arab majority would almost certainly vote to dismantle everything that makes Israel a Jewish state. Israelis, after everything they’ve done to finally achieve a Jewish state after thousands of years of their own persecution, would never surrender that state and willingly become a minority among a population they see as hostile.

Destruction of one side: The second way this could end is with one side outright vanquishing the other, in what would certainly be a catastrophic abuse of human rights. This is the option preferred by extremists such as Hamas and far-right Israeli settlers. In the Palestinian extremist version, Israel is abolished and replaced with a single Palestinian state; Jews become a minority, most likely replacing today’s conflict with an inverse conflict. In the Israeli extremist version, Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza entirely, either turning Palestinians into second-class citizens in the manner of apartheid South Africa or expelling them en masse.

Two-state solution: The third option is for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own independent states; that’s called the “two-state solution” and it’s advocated by most everyone as the only option that would create long-term peace. But it requires working out lots of details so thorny and difficult that it’s not clear if it will, or can, happen. Eventually, the conflict will have dragged on for so long that this solution will become impossible.

9) Why is it so hard to make peace?

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin hold Nobel Peace Prizes won in 1994 for their 1993 Oslo Accords. A follow-on agreement in 1995 was the last major Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. (Photo by Yaakov Saar/GPO via Getty Images)

The one-state solution is hard because there is no viable, realistic version that both sides would accept. In theory, the two-state solution is great. But it poses some very difficult questions. Here are the four big ones and why they’re so tough to solve. To be clear, these aren’t abstract concepts but real, heavily debated issues that have sunk peace talks before:

Jerusalem : Both sides claim Jerusalem as their capital; it's also a center of Jewish and Muslim (and Christian) holy sites that are literally located physically on top of one another, in the antiquity-era walled Old City that is not at all well shaped to be divided into two countries. Making the division even tougher, Israeli communities have been building up more and more in and around the city.

West Bank borders : There's no clear agreement on where precisely to draw the borders, which roughly follow the armistice line of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, especially since hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers have built up suburban-style communities just on the Palestinian side of the line. This one is not actually impossible — Israel could give Palestine some land as part of "land swaps" in exchange for settler-occupied territory — but it's still hard. The more time goes on, the more settlements expand, the harder it becomes to create a viable Palestinian state.

the biggest problem of all may be time: it's running out

Refugees : This one is really hard. There are, officially, seven million Palestinian refugees, who are designated as such because their descendants fled or were expelled from what is today Israel; places like Ramla and Jaffa. Palestinians frequently ask for what they call the "right of return": permission to return to their land and live with full rights. That sounds like a no-brainer, but Israel's objection is that if they absorb seven million Palestinian returnees, then Jews will become a minority, which for the reasons explained above Israelis will never accept. There are ideas to work around the problem, like financial restitution, but no agreement on them.

Security: This is another big one. For Palestinians, security needs are simple: a sovereign Palestinian state. For Israelis, it’s a bit more complicated: Israelis fear that an independent Palestine could turn hostile and ally with other Middle East states to launch the sort of invasion Israel barely survived in 1973. Maybe more plausibly, Israelis worry that Hamas would take over an independent West Bank and use it to launch attacks on Israelis, as they’ve done with Gaza. Any compromise would likely involve Palestinians giving up some sovereignty, for example promising permanent de-militarization or allowing an international peacekeeping force, and after years of feeling heavily abused by strong-handed Israeli forces, Palestinians are not eager about the idea of Israel having veto power over their sovereignty and security.

Those are all very difficult problems. But here’s the thing: time is running out. The more that the conflict drags on, the more difficult it will be to solve any of these issues, much less all of them. That will make it harder and harder for Israel to justify keeping Gaza under blockade and the West Bank under occupation; eventually it will have to unilaterally withdraw, which the current leadership opposes, or it will have to annex the territories and become either an apartheid-style state that denies full rights to those new Palestinian citizens or abandon its Jewish state.

Meanwhile, extremism and apathy and distrust are rising on both sides. The violence of the conflict is becoming status quo, a regularly recurring event that is replacing the peace process itself as the way by which the conflict advances. It is making things worse for Israelis and Palestinians alike all the time, and unless they can break from the hatred and violence long enough to make peace, that will continue.

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Theory and Analysis Essay

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Narrative of the Historical Case

The theoretical framework guiding the study is based on the negotiation theory. The use of this theory concerning the researched issue is discussed in relevant scholarly studies. Korobkin and Zasloff (2005) note that in the bargaining zone between Israel and Palestine, there can be two possible negotiation outcomes: impasse or agreement. In the present case, the agreement would require “the assent of both parties” (Korobkin & Zasloff, 2005, p. 6).

The minimum assemblage of conditions needed for a party to choose agreement over impasse is called the “reservation point” (Korobkin & Zasloff, 2005, p. 6). Both for Israel and Palestine, the reservation point upon negotiations would be the land-for-peace agreement.

One of the most viable options available for Israel and Palestine under the negotiation theory is “delegating authority to a third party” (Korobkin & Zasloff, 2005, p. 41). However, under such circumstances, some difficulties could arise.

Firstly, the two negotiating parties would need to agree upon the rules by which their arbitrator would be governed. Secondly, they would need to decide on the arbitrator, which means that they both should trust the decisions made by the settler of the dispute and apply the established rules conscientiously. In their analysis of applying the negotiation theory to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kteily, Saguy, Sidanius, and Taylor (2013) note that the role of such an arbitrator should be allocated to an international community.

Not all of the researchers feel optimistic about the likelihood of negotiations to bring a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. For instance, Pilecki and Hammack (2014) consider that the reconciliation between the two parties is unlikely. However, other scholars feel more hopeful about the situation between Palestine and Israel and offer their perspectives on a positive solution. In particular, Coleman and Lowe (2007) remark that to reach an effective solution, such an aspect of the negotiation theory as negotiating collective identity needs to be taken into consideration.

The theoretical framework allows identifying the following set of hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may end in case a more successful negotiation theory is applied. The second hypothesis is that the combination of authenticity, optimism, and an independent arbitrator can lead to a reasonable solution for the Arab-Israeli disagreement.

The main actors of this historical case are Israel and Palestine. The conflict between these two parties began in the middle of the twentieth century (Harms, 2008). However, the roots of this rivalry go back to several centuries before that, when Zionism was established. Briefly stated, Jewish people were encouraged to fight for their national homeland after having endured much harm from Russia in the eighteenth century (Harms, 2008).

Historians distinguish between several major phases of the conflict: 1947-1967 (partition, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War), the 1970s-1982 (the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the 1973 War, the Camp David accords, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon), 1987-1995 (the Intifada, the Gulf Crisis, and the Peace Process) (Harms, 2008). However, the conflict has been an ongoing process until modern times despite some years having more prominence than others.

The most significant problem with the historical case is that of the territorial disagreement. For instance, according to Chapman and Benson (2015), during all the negotiations between Israel and Palestine regarding Jerusalem, the status of this city that is historically extremely important for both Muslims and Jews remains controversial.

The problem is that the Palestinian side insists on returning to the borders before 1967, recognizing the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the territory of the Palestinian state. As the negotiations of 2000 showed, such a proposal could suit Israel; however, until 1967 Jerusalem was not completely Israeli (Chapman & Benson, 2015). The authorities are not ready to give Palestinians the right to even half of the holy city, which, in turn, aggravates the confrontation.

At the same time, Israel wants to return the land that used to belong to it historically. Meanwhile, this process leads to restrictions of Palestinians’ freedom of movement and the right to return of refugees (Levine, 2009). In the course of the conflict, a large number of international conferences have been held in an attempt to protect human rights and resolve security issues (Morris, 2009). Unfortunately, the mentioned facts indicate that the two conflicting sides have not been able to arrive at a peaceful conclusion so far.

The facts of the case tend to support the hypotheses specified in the theory section. In particular, hypothesis one is related to the fact that no viable solution has been found yet. Thus, the hypothesis of employing a more optimal negotiation theory may be successful in explaining the seemingly inexplicable aspects of the historical case. The second hypothesis is also supported by historical facts. Namely, engaging an independent arbitrator sounds like an optimal decision for the resolution of the conflict existing between Israel and Palestine.

The concepts and ideas discussed in the theory section play a crucial role in the analysis of the situation. For instance, the idea of the reservation point, mentioned in Korobkin and Zasloff’s (2005) study, is necessary to come up with a viable resolution. The concept of delegating authority to a third party, explained by Korobkin and Zasloff (2005), can also be useful to support the hypotheses. However, at the same time, scholars identify barriers to the negotiated solution in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the major one being that none of them wants to give up the territory in question.

The analysis of the confrontation proves that engaging additional forces and resources aimed at forcible influence may have serious consequences in the case of aggressive militaristic approaches. Kteily et al. (2013) argue that “the willingness to negotiate has much real-world importance,” and the lack of agreement between the opposing sides is fraught with not only local but also global conflicts (p. 979).

The consequences of this confrontation from political science include the involvement of third parties interested in a particular outcome and the significance of peace accords increases due to the value of maintaining balance. This factor proves the relevance of utilizing the negotiation theory in the context of the complex relationship between Israel and Palestine and is a weighty argument in support of applying for all the available resources aimed at stimulating a productive dialogue between the states.

At the same time, the history of the relationships between Palestine and Israel proves that many years of controversy can be based on different backgrounds. As Korobkin and Zasloff (2005) note, when there is more than one agreement within the bargaining zone, and the negotiating parties cannot agree upon a fair resolution, “an alternative course of action is for the parties to attempt to agree on a process from which a specific set of terms can unfold” (p. 40). Therefore, it is crucial to perform a more thorough examination of the identified concepts to support hypotheses.

Chapman, C., & Benson, K. (2015). Whose promised land: The continuing conflict over Israel and Palestine . Oxford, UK: Lion Books.

Coleman, P. T., & Lowe, J. K. (2007). Conflict, identity, and resilience: Negotiating collective identities within the Israeli and Palestinian diasporas. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 24 (4), 377-412.

Harms, G. (2008). The Palestine-Israel conflict: A basic introduction (2nd ed.). London, England: Pluto Press.

Korobkin, R., & Zasloff, J. (2005). Roadblocks to the road map: A negotiation theory perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after Yasser Arafat. Yale Journal of International Law, 30 (1), 1-80.

Kteily, N., Saguy, T., Sidanius, J., & Taylor, D. M. (2013). Negotiating power: Agenda ordering and the willingness to negotiate in asymmetric intergroup conflicts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105 (6), 978-995.

Levine, M. (2009). Impossible peace: Israel/Palestine since 1989 . Black Point, Canada: Fernwood Publishing.

Morris, B. (2009). One state, two states: Resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Pilecki, A., & Hammack, P. L. (2014). Negotiating the past, imagining the future: Israeli and Palestinian narratives in intergroup dialog. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 43 , 100-113.

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism and the One-State Solution

• © 2008
• Raja Halwani 0 ,
• Tomis Kapitan 1

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An Epilogue—Or Epitaph?—For Freedom, Liberation, Revolution

Marx: Freeing Ourselves from Ourselves

Beyond Anti-humanism: Alienation, Praxis, and the Dialectics of Liberation

• self-determination

Table of contents (5 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

• Tomis Kapitan, Raja Halwani

Self-Determination

Tomis Kapitan

The Right of Return

Raja Halwani

The One-State Solution

Back matter, authors and affiliations, about the authors, bibliographic information.

Book Title : The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Book Subtitle : Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism and the One-State Solution

Authors : Raja Halwani, Tomis Kapitan

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599710

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages : Palgrave Religion & Philosophy Collection , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008

Hardcover ISBN : 978-0-230-53537-4 Published: 14 December 2007

eBook ISBN : 978-0-230-59971-0 Published: 14 December 2007

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVI, 285

Topics : Political Philosophy , Social Philosophy , Middle Eastern Culture , Terrorism and Political Violence

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• DOI: 10.21608/jwadi.2024.371764
• Corpus ID: 272163353

International Political Stances towards the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Linguistic Analysis of Stancetaking

• Rania Mohammed Abdel Meguid Abdel Kader
• Published in مجلة وادی النیل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانیة والاجتماعیة والتربویه 1 July 2024
• Political Science, Linguistics

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Grammar in spoken and written english.

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The stance triangle

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University Language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers

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My Demoralizing but Not Surprising Cancellation

About an hour before my first book event, I heard from my publicist that the bookstore had “concerns” about my conversation partner, Rabbi Andy Bachman, because he was a “Zionist.”

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Last Tuesday, I was supposed to have launched my first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life , with an event at a bookstore in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo—a conversation between me and the well-known Reform rabbi Andy Bachman.

The event didn’t happen. About an hour before the intended start, I heard from my publicist that the bookstore had “concerns” about Rabbi Bachman because he was a “Zionist.” I received another call while in a car on the way to the store: The manager was now refusing to host the conversation with the rabbi. When I arrived, I asked her why she would not permit the event to go forward as planned. Her response: “We don’t want a Zionist onstage.”

I was taken aback. Rabbi Bachman is an outspoken social-justice advocate and a supporter of the establishment of a Palestinian state (and my former teacher). My book is a history of American Jewish life in the second half of the 20th century, and deals critically with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Because of my analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as my reporting about and public opposition to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, I had feared that synagogues would be reluctant (and surely some still are) to host events. I did not anticipate that the trouble would come from a bookstore in Brooklyn.

Adam Kirsch: The false narrative of settler colonialism

Then again, perhaps I should not have been surprised at all. Since October 7, the public discourse on Israel and Palestine has curdled. Some right-wing supporters of Israel have become cheerleaders for violence. In certain spaces that call themselves progressive, intolerance has become endemic and conspiratorial thinking is on the rise. The result across the board: Nuance has evaporated, and humanity is in short supply.

My would-be book launch also exemplified the bind that many progressive American Jews face. We are caught between parts of an activist left demanding that we disavow our communities, even our families, as an entrance ticket, and a mainstream Jewish institutional world that has long marginalized critics of Israeli policy. Indeed, Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.

On the one hand, we can no more renounce our families, friends, and communities than we can ourselves, and the demand that we do so is wrong. It is straightforwardly anti-Semitic to ask, as the bookstore manager did with her blanket ban on Zionists, that Jews support Israel’s dismantling as a criterion for participation in intellectual life. This is a condition that most Jews, who when surveyed describe strong attachment to Israel, could not meet. And it is a kind of litmus test that should not be asked (and generally is not) of any other group of people.

On the other hand, we cannot ignore Israel’s devastation of the Gaza Strip, and should be fearful of shifting attention away from the human catastrophe unfolding in the territory. Friends on the left have warned me that making too much of last week’s deplatforming has already had this effect. I worry about bolstering tribalist thinking, which is precisely the mentality that for decades has blinded so many in mainstream Jewish institutions to the grinding, daily injustices of the occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza—and, more recently, inured them to the horrific fact that this war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians .

But silence about the pitfalls of the left carries its own risks—including risks to the left itself. My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder. Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction. Rhetorical extremism and dogmatism make it easier for right-wing Israel supporters to dismiss what should be legitimate demands—for instance, conditions on U.S. military aid—as beyond the pale.

The new left-wing norm that insists on one-state maximalism is not only a moral mistake. It is also a strategic one. If there is one thing that the past year of cease-fire activism has illustrated, it is that changing U.S. policy on Israel requires a broad coalition. That big tent must have room for those who believe in Jewish self-determination and are committed to Israel’s existence, even as they work to end its domination over Palestinians.

Many on the right, not just the far left, scoff at the possibility of such a coalition. For the past several days, my inbox has been filled with hateful crowing that the cancellation of my book launch is the bitter fruit that I and other left-wing Jews deserve. What did I expect? Hadn’t I written more than 100 articles documenting Israeli human-rights abuses and the occupation’s quotidian cruelty? Didn’t I advocate for policies, including boycotts, that would pressure Israel to change its policies? So how could I now complain that similar tactics were being used against me? The ejection of Zionists and Israelis from polite society was on my hands.

To these critics I must insist on a difference between boycotts of entire groups of people based on their identity or the ideas they are assumed to hold, and boycotts of goods produced in unlawfully occupied territories. The former are antithetical to democratic public life—as the owner of the bookstore argued in his statement apologizing for the cancellation. The latter, by contrast, are a staple of nonviolent resistance, crucial tools for achieving genuine democracy.

Arash Azizi: Is a new Palestinian movement being born?

No doubt, I regret certain sentences and even articles I’ve written about Israel in the past, which today I would phrase differently. The October 7 attacks painfully resensitized me to the reality of Israeli Jewish vulnerability, which exists despite the massive power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians. I was too often willing to overlook this fact. Opening one’s eyes to the dehumanization of Palestinians does not require closing one’s eyes to the dehumanization of Israelis, and vice versa. If Rabbi Bachman and I had been able to have our conversation last week, we could have discussed what might be the one immutable truth about Israel and Palestine these days: Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere, and both peoples have the right to equality, dignity, and self-determination. No movement that ignores this reality has any hope of success.

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3 Israeli Police Officers Killed as West Bank Violence Spirals

The officers were shot and killed in what the Israeli police said was a terrorist attack. The incident followed a rise in Palestinian and Israeli violence, as Israel’s military raids Palestinian cities.

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By Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman

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• Sept. 1, 2024 Updated 10:10 a.m. ET

Gunmen killed three Israeli police officers on Sunday morning as they drove through the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the latest episode in the spiral of violence in the territory that includes attacks by Palestinian and Israeli extremists, as well as ongoing raids by the Israeli military in Palestinian cities.

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One of the officers was the father of a police officer who was killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7 raid on southern Israel that started the war in Gaza, according to the police.

The episode followed two attacks on Friday night by Palestinian militants, one of whom attempted to detonate a car bomb at a busy intersection in the southern West Bank, according to the Israeli military. In the second attack, a Palestinian drove into a nearby Israeli settlement, prompting a car chase and a shootout that caused an explosion in the Palestinian’s car, the military said.

The Israeli military raided three major cities in the northern West Bank last week, killing at least 22 people, according to the Palestinian health authorities. The military said the operation was aimed at quelling armed Palestinian groups, but critics warned that the death and destruction caused by the raids risked encouraging the same violence that they aimed to reduce.

Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 after capturing it from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli war that year. Israel has since built hundreds of settlements in the territory, which are considered illegal by most of the world. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis now live under military protection in the West Bank, interspersed among roughly three million Palestinians who generally want the territory to form the backbone of a future Palestinian state.

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