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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. How did Israel become a country in the first place? Third, while the US does provide Israel with an awful lot of military, financial, and diplomatic support, Israel has proven over and over again that this aid does not buy much real leverage on Israel-Palestine conflict issues.
Fourth, when the US has overtly pressured Israel on the conflict, as Obama did during his first term, Israel's response has often been to defy the US by doing the opposite of what is asked. There is a common view in the United States, on both the right and the left, that the US government gives Israel so much support because it loves and supports Israel's role in the conflict.
On the right, the view is that this policy is correct; on the left, the view is that it is a mistake and a result of pro-Israel lobbying or other distorting forces. Both sides are wrong: the US position has long been and remains that supporting Israel is the only way to nudge the Israelis to the negotiating table, and to make democratically elected Israeli leaders feel politically secure enough that they will take the necessary risks for peace.
This is the same reason the US gives heavy financial and political support to the Palestinian Authority. There is a valid case to be made that the high level of American support for Israel does, to some extent, enable its policies in the conflict. There is also a valid case, though, that withdrawing American support would make Israelis and their leaders feel more threatened and isolated, thus empowering anti-peace politics and making peace that much less likely. Either way, it is not the case that American support for Israel is so overwhelmingly decisive that switching it off would end the conflict.
There's a popular view among Americans that Palestinians have rejected nonviolent resistance, and that if only they took up the lessons of nonviolent Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, then that would bring the conflict to an end. Logically, this is a confusing argument. It assumes that Israel is driving the conflict, as the British did by colonizing India, while simultaneously putting the onus for ending it on Palestinians. It also conveniently overlooks, as Westerners often do, the fact that Gandhi was an outlier.
Most colonial-era independence leaders to some extent endorsed violence, including South Africa's Nelson Mandela. More fundamentally, though, this is wrong because there are lots of Palestinians who have used, and continue to use, nonviolence to organize against the Israeli occupation.
They consistently fail, because they are ignored, because they're put down by Israeli security forces, or because they lose momentum against the overwhelming force of the occupation itself. Don't take my word for it: watch a nonviolent Palestinian campaign unfold, and mostly fail, right before your eyes in the award-winning documentary Five Broken Cameras , filmed by a Palestinian man as his village tried to stop Israel from building a wall that would cut off villagers from their olive groves.
Palestinians attempted nonviolence en masse in the late s and early '90s, during which the first intifada uprising challenged the occupation using protests, strikes, and other mass demonstrations. The first intifada did also include Palestinian violence against Israelis, though, and in the early s Palestinians launched the second intifada, which was defined by widespread violence, including terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.
A common variation of this argument is to acknowledge that some Palestinians are nonviolent but point out that other Palestinians are violent, and conclude that Palestinian nonviolence won't be effective until all Palestinians adopt it.
There is a degree of merit to this — Hamas is indeed a large and very violent Palestinian movement, among others, and violence speaks much more loudly than the nonviolence it can drown out — but it makes some fundamental mistakes. First of all, British India had violent independence movements as well as Gandhi's nonviolence, so clearly violence does not cancel out nonviolence.
Second, were all Palestinian violence suddenly to cease, there is no indication that the conflict would magically resolve. Observers often point out that Gazan leaders chose violence, and they got a full Israeli withdrawal in , but West Bank leaders have chosen peaceful compromise, and their reward has been ever-expanding settlements and occupation. None of this, to be clear, is to argue that Palestinian violent resistance works or is commendable. It does not and is not. The Gaza-based militant group Hamas, by launching rockets and other attacks at Israelis, has only deepened the isolation and suffering of Gazans.
The second intifada left Palestinians much worse off than they were before it began. The point is that nonviolent resistance is certainly commendable and important, but no matter how many Palestinian Gandhis emerge, that is not enough on its own to end the conflict.
There is a pleasant fiction in the United States and parts of Israel that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists in a sort of suspended animation, on pause and simply awaiting diplomatic resolution. But the truth is that the conflict never really goes away for most of the 12 million people in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Part of this misconception, Duss says, is that there are "only so many stories to write about, 'occupation now entering 17,th day, remains horrible way to live.
Another factor is that after the second intifada of the early s, Israel built up huge walls around Gaza and West Bank communities, physically separating Palestinians from Israelis. While Israelis who live in the country's south are well aware of the rockets fired from Gaza into their communities, most Israelis live physically separated from the conflict, and that is the perspective Americans are more familiar with.
Tel Aviv feels like a peaceful, prosperous Mediterranean beach city, which it is. But less than an hour drive away are Palestinian towns in the West Bank where the conflict is absolutely palpable even in periods of "calm.
In the West Bank, beyond the daily humiliations of Israeli military checkpoints, the occupation has severely constricted movement and trade. The stifled economy is the easiest thing to measure, but many other aspects of Palestinian life suffer, as well.
Periodically the situation will escalate so rapidly, with such relatively slight provocation, and to such a level of severity that the rest of us can't ignore what every Palestinian and many Israelis already know: the conflict may be quieter some days than it is on others, but it is still active, still destroying lives and communities, and still scarring these two societies every day.
The status quo of the Israel-Palestine conflict is bad for everyone, but it is especially bad for Palestinians, who are under a suffocating blockade in Gaza and military occupation in the West Bank. They do not have a state or full rights, while Israelis have both.
And the longer the conflict drags on, the tougher it will be to change that. So you can see why some might think that all Israelis want this to happen and want the conflict to drag on forever or to end it by permanently expelling or subjugating Palestinians — but when you look at how Israel makes decisions, and what Israeli voters want, it becomes pretty clear that this is not the case. As is true of any country, especially a parliamentary democracy, Israel's actions are less the result of a single calculated strategy than they are about messy internal politics, short-term thinking, and strategic drift.
Take, as a micro example, Israel's approach to Gaza since Hamas took over in Israel has invaded or launched extended bombing campaigns in Gaza every few years; this costs many Israeli lives, in addition to the much higher Palestinian death toll, and it never actually solves the underlying problems.
Clearly Israel does not have long-term strategy here at all, much less a nefarious secret plan. That lack of a strategy is bad and helps perpetuate the cycle of violence, but it is a cycle that's painful for Israelis, as well. Israeli policy has changed over time; just like American politics, it has been different depending on who is leading the government.
In the early s, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a peace deal with the Palestinians, even though Israel's concessions for the deal were so unpopular among Israelis that a far-right extremist assassinated Rabin.
There were valid reasons the offer failed Nathan Thrall has written a good history of what happened , but the point is that Israel would not have offered this plan if it secretly desired the permanent occupation of the West Bank. There are certainly extremists in Israeli politics — sometimes quite prominent extremists — who want to permanently annex the West Bank and make Palestinians second-class citizens, or to systemically expel Palestinians from their land en masse in an act of 21st-century ethnic cleansing.
And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has at times indulged these extremists in a cynical ploy to keep himself in power. But there are also prominent Israeli politicians who want and push publicly for a two-state peace deal that would grant Palestinians independence and full rights.
There are other political factions involved in this, as well; they fight all the time, and very publicly, pushing and pulling Israeli government policy in one direction or another. When you watch that happening, and watch Israel's short-term thinking on problems like Gaza, it becomes clearer that Israeli policy on the conflict is often formed day to day and week to week by a messy process.
To be clear, none of that is to absolve Israel of responsibility for its actions, only to honestly assess how those actions come to be. It is also not to absolve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is clearly not a peacenik. The Oslo Accords were a landmark moment in the pursuit of peace in the Middle East.
Actually a set of two separate agreements signed by the government of Israel and the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization PLO —the militant organization established in to Over time, the PLO has embraced a broader role, claiming to Syria is home to one of the oldest civilizations in the world, with a rich artistic and cultural heritage.
From its ancient roots to its recent political instability and the Syrian Civil War, the country has a complex and, at times, tumultuous history. Ancient Syria Its history is marked by many important inventions that changed the world, including the concept Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Much of the conflict in recent years has centered around who is occupying the following areas: Gaza Strip: A piece of land located between Egypt and modern-day Israel. Golan Heights: A rocky plateau between Syria and modern-day Israel.
West Bank: A territory that divides part of modern-day Israel and Jordan. The Zionism Movement In the late 19th and early 20th century, an organized religious and political movement known as Zionism emerged among Jews. Some of these include: Suez Crisis : Relations between Israel and Egypt were rocky in the years following the war.
Recommended for you. How the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Began. Palestine Palestine is a small region of land that has played a prominent role in the ancient and modern history of the Middle East. Zionism Zionism is a religious and political effort that brought thousands of Jews from around the world back to their ancient homeland in the Middle East and reestablished Israel as the central location for Jewish identity.
The rule of Israelites in the land of Israel started with the conquests and settlement of 12 tribes under the leadership of Joshua ca. From this year onwards, the region was ruled or controlled by a succession of superpower empires of the time in the following order: Babylonian, Persian, Greek Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Empires, Islamic and Christian crusaders, Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire.
In the Diaspora scattered outside of the Land of Israel , they established rich cultural and economic lives and contributed significantly to the societies where they lived.
Yet, they continued their national culture and prayed to return to Israel through the centuries. In the first half of the 20th century, there were major waves of immigration of Jews back to Israel from Arab countries and Europe. Despite the Balfour Declaration , the British severely restricted the entry of Jews into Palestine, and those living in Palestine were subject to violence and massacres by Arabs mobs.
Despite all the hardships, the Jewish community prepared itself for independence openly and in clandestine. On May 14, , the day that the last British forces left Israel, the Jewish community leader, David Ben-Gurion, declared independence, establishing the modern State of Israel see the Declaration of independence. Arab states have jointly waged four full-scale wars against Israel:. Despite the numerical superiority of the Arab armies, Israel defended itself each time and won.
After each war, Israeli army withdrew from most of the areas it captured see maps.
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