The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Why are They Fighting?
Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs both lay centuries-old claims on the same land, leading to a current conflict that began around the early 20th century. We look back at how the conflict first started.
As of last week, tensions have escalated to a cross-firing of rockets between Israel and Gaza. Issues have been building up since the start of Ramzan in mid-April, when Israeli police set up barricades at the Damascus Gate outside the occupied old city of Jerusalem, preventing Palestinians from gathering there. As the world calls for a ceasefire of this bloody military conflict, one that is claiming the lives of innocents, we look back to understand the historical causes that have led to the current issue today.
How did the Israel-Palestine conflict start?
Israel is the world's only Jewish state, located east of the Mediterranian sea. Palestinians are the Arab population of the land that Israel now controls, and they refer to this territory as Palestine. Historically, Palestinian Arabs want to establish an eponymous state on parts, or all of this land. This is the crux of the conflict: Who gets what land and how they control it.
Image Courtesy: India Today
According to historians, both Jews and Arabs date their claims to this land back a couple of thousand years. The current political conflict we see today began around the early 20th century. Jews who were fleeing persecutions and atrocities in Europe wanted to establish a country for themselves. The land that they historically identified as their homeland is what was then a majorly Arab and Muslim territory, part of the Ottoman and later British Empire. Arabs resisted this, seeing the land as rightfully theirs. This led to a failed United Nations plan to give both groups a part of the land, followed by several wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab Nations. The lines we see on today's maps are largely the outcome of the two wars waged in 1948 and 1967.
The 1967 war left Israel in control of two territories home to large Palestinian populations: The West Bank and The Gaza Strip. Today, the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is under Israeli occupation. Israeli troops enforce restrictions on Palestinian movements and activities, and Israeli settlers are building ever-expanding communities, effectively denying Palestinians their land. Gaza is under the control of Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist party, and faces an Israeli blockade, but no ground-troop occupation. Watch the video below for a detailed history of events.
What is the solution?
According to experts, the primary approach to solving the conflict today is a so-called “two-state solution” that would establish Palestine as an independent state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, leaving the rest of the land to Israel. Though the two-state plan is clear in theory, the two sides are still deeply divided over how to make it work, and some extremists are outright against it.
The alternative that some propose is a two-state solution is a “one-state solution,” wherein the land becomes either one big Israel or one big Palestine. While many leading thinkers feel that this would cause more problems than it would solve, political and demographic experts point towards this being the eventual likely outcome.