Israel-Palestine issue

Israel is the world's only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean
Sea. Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now
controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by
that name on all or part of the same land. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
over who gets what land and how it's controlled.
Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a
couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th
century. Jews fleeing persecution in Europe wanted to establish a national
homeland in what was then an Arab- and Muslim-majority territory in the
British Empire. The Arabs resisted, seeing the land as rightfully theirs. An
early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel
and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory.
Today's lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in
1948 and another in 1967. The 1967 war is particularly important for today's
conflict, as it left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two
territories home to large Palestinian populations.
Today, the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and
is under Israeli occupation. This comes in the form of "settlers," Jews who
build ever-expanding communities in the West Bank that effectively deny the
land to Palestinians, and Israeli troops, who protect the settlers and enforce
Israeli security restrictions on Palestinian movement. Gaza is controlled by
Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist party, and is under Israeli blockade but
not ground troop occupation. The two Palestinian groups may have reconciled
on April 23rd, creating one shared Palestinian government for the first time
since 2007. The peace negotiations fell apart and, in July and August 2014,
the conflict escalated to a full-on war between Israel and Hamas.
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 twostate plan is clear in theory, the two sides are still deeply divided over how to
make it work in practice.
The alternative to a two-state solution is a "one-state solution," wherein all of
the land becomes either one big Israel or one big Palestine. Most observers
think this would cause more problems than it would solve, but this outcome is
becoming more likely over time for political and demographic reasons.

Background

The IsraeliPalestinian conflict has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, with the birth of major nationalist movements among the Jews and
among the Arabs, both geared towards attaining sovereignty for their people
in the Middle East. The collision between those two forces in southern Levant
and the emergence of Palestinian nationalism in the 1920s eventually
escalated into the IsraeliPalestinian conflict in 1947, and expanded into the
wider Arab-Israeli conflict later on.
With the outcome of the First World War, the relations between Zionism and
the Arab national movement seemed to be potentially friendly, and the
FaisalWeizmann Agreement created a framework for both aspirations to
coexist on former Ottoman Empire's territories. However, with the defeat and
dissolution of the Arab Kingdom of Syria in July 1920 following the FrancoSyrian War, a crisis fell upon the Damascus-based Arab national movement.
The return of several hard-line Palestinian Arab nationalists, under the
emerging leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini, from Damascus to Mandatory
Palestine marked the beginning of Palestinian Arab nationalist struggle
towards establishment of a national home for Arabs of Palestine. Amin alHusseini, the architect of the Palestinian Arab national movement,
immediately marked Jewish national movement and Jewish immigration to
Palestine as the sole enemy to his cause, initiating large-scale riots against
the Jews as early as 1920 in Jerusalem and in 1921 in Jaffa. Among the results
of the violence was the establishment of Jewish paramilitary force of
Haganah. In 1929, a series of violent anti-Jewish riots was initiated by the
Arab leadership. The riots resulted in massive Jewish casualties in Hebron and
Safed, and the evacuation of Jews from Hebron and Gaza.
In the early 1930s, the Arab national struggle in Palestine had drawn many
Arab nationalist militants from across the Middle East, most notably Sheikh
Izaddin al-Qassam from Syria, who established the Black Hand militant group
and had prepared the grounds for the 1936 Arab revolt. Following, the death
of al-Qassam at the hands of the British in late 1935, the tensions erupted in
1936 into the Arab general strike and general boycott. The strike soon
deteriorated into violence and the bloody revolt against the British and the
Jews. In the first wave of organized violence, lasting until early 1937, much of
the Arab gangs were defeated by the British and a forced expulsion of much
of the Arab leadership was performed. The revolt led to the establishment of
the Peel Commission towards partitioning of Palestine, though was
subsequently rejected by the Palestinian Arabs. The two main Jewish leaders,
Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, accepted the recommendations but
some secondary Jewish leaders did not like it.

The renewed violence, which had sporadically lasted until the beginning of
WWII, ended with around 5,000 casualties, mostly from the Arab side. With
the eruption of World War II, the situation in Mandatory Palestine calmed
down. It allowed a shift towards a more moderate stance among Palestinian
Arabs, under the leadership of the Nashashibi clan and even the
establishment of the JewishArab Palestine Regiment under British command,
fighting Germans in North Africa. The more radical exiled faction of alHusseini however tended to cooperation with Nazi Germany, and participated
in the establishment of pro-Nazi propaganda machine throughout the Arab
world. Defeat of Arab nationalists in Iraq and subsequent relocation of alHusseini to Nazi-occupied Europe tied his hands regarding field operations in
Palestine, though he regularly demanded the Italians and the Germans to
bomb Tel Aviv. By the end of World War II, a crisis over the fate of the
Holocaust survivors from Europe led to renewed tensions between the Yishuv
and the Palestinian Arab leadership. Immigration quotas were established by
the British, while on the other hand illegal immigration and Zionist insurgency
against the British was increasing.
On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted
Resolution 181(II) recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan
to partition Palestine into an Arab state, a Jewish state and the City of
Jerusalem. On the next day, Palestine was already swept by violence, with
Arab and Jewish militias executing attacks. For four months, under continuous
Arab provocation and attack, the Yishuv was usually on the defensive while
occasionally retaliating. The Arab League supported the Arab struggle by
forming the volunteer based Arab Liberation Army, supporting the Palestinian
Arab Army of the Holy War, under the leadership of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni
and Hasan Salama. On the Jewish side, the civil war was managed by the
major underground militias the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi, strengthened by
numerous Jewish veterans of World War II and foreign volunteers. By spring
1948, it was already clear that the Arab forces were nearing a total collapse,
while Yishuv forces gained more and more territory, creating a large scale
refugee problem of Palestinian Arabs. Popular support for the Palestinian
Arabs throughout the Arab world led to sporadic violence against Jewish
communities of Middle East and North Africa, creating an opposite refugee
wave.

Gaza strip
Gaza is a densely populated strip of land that is mostly surrounded by Israel
and peopled almost exclusively by Palestinians. Israel used to have a military

presence, but withdrew unilaterally in 2005. It's currently under Israeli

blockade.
The sporadic rocket fire that's hit Israel from there since its pullback has
strengthened Israeli hawks' political position, as they have long argued that
any Palestinian state would end up serving as a launching pad for attacks on
Israel.
Egypt controlled Gaza until 1967, when Israel occupied it (along with the
West Bank) in the Six Day War. Until 2005, Israeli military authorities
controlled Gaza in the same way they control the West Bank, and Jews were
permitted to settle there. In 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
pulled out Israeli troops and settlers unilaterally.
Gaza is governed by the Islamist group Hamas, which formed in 1987 as a
militant "resistance" group against Israel and won political power in a 2006
U.S.-based election. Hamas' takeover of Gaza prompted an Israeli blockade of
the flow of commercial goods into Gaza, on the grounds that Hamas could
use those goods to make weapons to be used against Israel. Israel has eased
the blockade over time, but the cutoff of basic supplies like fuel still does
significant humanitarian harm by cutting off access to electricity, food, and
medicine.
Hamas and other Gaza-based militants have fired thousands of rockets from
the territory at Israeli targets. Israel has launched a number of military
operations in Gaza, most recently a 2008 air strike campaign that culminated
in a ground invasion and a series of air strikes again in 2012.

Religion in the current crisis

Although the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is largely a conflict over land and
can be resolved through the application of international law, religious groups
do play several important roles in the ongoing crisis. Fanatical religious
groups use their religions to perpetuate the conflict, while peaceful religious
groups use the teachings of their religions to call for peace.
Although the American media is rife with articles on the dangers of Islamic
fundamentalism, it is important to be aware of the role of two other
fanaticisms Jewish and Christian in this conflict.
According to the late Israeli professor Israel Shahak, Israel denies Palestinian
Christians and Muslims their basic human rights due in large part to a virulent
strain of Jewish chauvinism. Shahak states that, The State of Israel officially

discriminates in favour of Jews and against non-Jews in many domains of life,

of which I regard three as being the most important: residency rights, the
right to work and the right to equality before the law. This discrimination is
arguably the largest blockage to peace between the two parties.
The Israeli settler movement, in particular, which is responsible for stealing a
huge portion of Palestinian land, is primarily based on this chauvinism.
Particularly disturbing is the description of their land theft as redeeming the
land transfering holy land from non-Jewish ownership to Jewish hands.
Shahak explains that, [t]he logical conclusion of such an ideology is the
expulsion, called transfer, of all non-Jews from the area of land which has to
be redeemed.
In recent years there has been a bizarre marriage of fanaticisms. Some
prominent members of the American Christian Right have joined with Jewish
Zionists in their discrimination against non-Jews (primarily Christian and
Muslim Palestinians) in the land that is holy to all three religions. Some of
these Christian Zionists adhere to a previously rare theology called
Dispensationalism, in which select scriptures from the Old Testament are
interpreted to predict a series of violent events that will lead to the second
coming of Christ. This Dispensationalist belief calls for all Jews to return to
Israel/Palestine, which will then bring a cataclysmic rapture, in which
120,000 Jews will convert to Christianity and the millions remaining will be
killed in a cruel and bloody battle, which will then, in turn, bring the return to
earth of Jesus Christ.
Most Christians consider such violence the antithesis of the teaching of Jesus
Christ. Even groups who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible largely
believe that the Second Coming will happen in Gods way and in Gods
time, not through human intervention, and emphasize New Testament
teachings of love and compassion. Nevertheless, the Dispensationalist
interpretation is being promoted on numerous religious radio stations and
elsewhere, appears well-financed, and is a significant factor.
Among the Jewish religious community there is a similar split, with religious
opposition to Zionism found across the spectrum of Jewish belief. In fact,
originally Zionism was a minority position among the Jewish population
worldwide, only attaining its present large proportions after World War II and
the Nazi atrocities. Today, a growing number of Jewish organizations and
individuals consider Zionism deeply contrary to Judaism. For example,
members of Neturei Karta believe that Jews are a people in exile due to
Divine decree, and that their banishment from the Holy Land will end
miraculously at a time when all mankind will unite in the brotherly service of
the Creator. These many groups feel that Israels violent policies are not only
counterproductive but contrary to the ethical traditions they view as the core

of Judaism.