By Heillie Santana,12th grade
“Hamas, Israel, Palestine, zionist,” these are some buzzwords you’ve most likely heard online since October. Following a bunch of celebrities and influencers either supporting Israel or Palestine. This war might seem out of nowhere, but it’s not. The Israel-Palestine conflict has been one of the most long-running and controversial conflicts in the world. That is very complicated, and you would need quite a lot of context when discussing the current war. Allow me to catch you up to speed if you don’t know much about it.
Back To The Beginning
Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. It sits east of the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians are an arab population that derives from the land that Israel now controls. They refer to it as Palestine and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the land. At its core, the Israelis and Palestinians want land and who gets control of it.
The beginning of this conflict has been happening since the early 20th century. Before, the eastern Mediterranean was under Ottoman rule for centuries. It had been peaceful and religiously diverse with most Muslim or Christian people (with a few Jews). This started to change around the early 1900s when people started to get the sense of them not being only ethnic Arabs but, more specifically, a national identity, Palestinians.
At the same time, in Europe, there was a rising belief in Zionism. Zionism is the belief that Judaism is both a nationality and a religion and that Jews deserve their own state. At the time, many Jews were facing prosecution and believed that a state in the Middle East was their only hope of being safe. Thus, thousands of Jews fled to the Middle East.
By the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, leaving the British and French empires to split the Middle East. The British had called its region “The British Mandate for Palestine”. At first, they had allowed Jewish immigration. Most of them had resided in the rural farming communities, but tensions between the Arabs and Jews began to grow as more Jewish immigration increased. Arabs had resisted and believed that the land was rightfully theirs. It was resulting in acts of violence by both sides.
By the 1930s, the British Empire had begun to limit Jewish immigration. In retaliation, Jewish militias were formed not only to resist British rule but also to attack local Arabs.
After the holocaust had started, The British Mandate for Palestine (Mandatory Palestine) had become a sanction for 18,000 Jews who were fleeing from Europe.
In 1947, as violence between Arabs and Jews grew, the United Nations decided on a plan to divide British Palestine into two separate states called Un Proposal. One was a Jewish state, Israel, and the other was an Arab State, Palestine. There was one zone, however, that had holy sites for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. It was an international zone.
The plan, in theory, was supposed to give Jews their state and Arabs their independence and to end the sectarian violence that was getting out of control for the British.
The Jews had agreed to this plan and declared independence as Israel, but the Arabs were not so keen on this plan. The Arabs had seen the UN plan as just another way for European Colonialism. In response, many Arab states that had just gained independence had declared war on Israel to establish a unified Arab State where British Palestine had been. This is known as the Yom Kippur War.
In the end, the state of Israel had won the war but had pushed well past its borders than what had been initially agreed on in the UN plan. Taking much of Palestinian land and expelling huge numbers of Palestinians from their homes. Causing a massive refugee crisis that still carries on to this day.
By the end of the war, Israel controlled all of the territories except for Gaza ( which is controlled by Egypt) and the West Bank ( its name derives from it being west of the Jordan River), which Jordan controlled. Thus officially beginning the decades-long conflict of Arab-Issralli conflict. Many Jews who had inhabited Arab-majority countries had fled or had been expelled
This now leads us to the Six-Day War.
The Six-Day War
On June 5th, 1967, Isareal staged a primitive air assault that destroyed more than 90% of Egypt’s air force. Then, a similar attack happened to Syria’s air force as well. Eygpt was left vulnerable to attack, and within three days, Israel had gained victory over the land. Capturing the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula up to the east bank of the Suez Canal.
On the same day, June 5th, an eastern front was opened when King Hussein of Jordan ignored Israel’s warning to stay out of the conflict, and Jordanian forces started bombarding West Jerusalem, only to be met with a devastating Israeli counterattack. Israeli forces expelled Jordanian forces from much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem on June 7.
When the UN Security called for a cease-fire on June 7th, Israel and Jordan accepted, with Eygpt accepting the following day. However, Syria still held out and continued to shell villages in northern Israel. Until June 9th, Israel had launched an assault on the fortified Golan Heights. Finally, Syria had accepted a cease-fire the following day.
When the war ended, Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and both Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Now, Israel was occupying and governing Palestinian land and its people.
In 1978, after Israel and Eygpt had signed the US-brokered Camp David Accords, Israel had given Sinai back to Egypt as part of a peace treaty. This was considered extremely controversial and led to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Over the next few decades, Israel gradually formed peace with Arab states despite never signing peace treaties. However, Israel still occupied Palestinian land, which fueled the Isareli-Palestien struggle.
The Palestine Liberation Organization
Formed in the 1960s, The Palestinian Liberation Organization fought against Israel, which had included acts of terrorism. The PLO had initially claimed all of what used to be British Palestine. Meaning that it wanted to get rid of the state of Israel entirely.
The conflict between the PLO and Israel had gone on for years. In 1982, an Israeli invasion of Lebanon had occurred as a way to kick the group out of Beruit. Later on, however, the PLO said they would be willing to accept dividing the land between Israel and Palestine, but this did not end the conflict.
While the conflict was happening, Israelis were now moving into the Israel-occupied Palestine territories. These people are called settlers. Some had moved for religious reasons. Others had moved to claim the land for Israel, and some had moved just for cheap housing. Whatever the reason was, Palestinians were not happy.
Israeli soldiers follow settlers to guard them, and the growing settlements force the Palestinians off their land and cause division. Not only was this painful for Palestinians, but it also made it incredibly difficult for Palestinians ever to have an independent state.
In the late 1980s, frustration from the Palestinians erupted into the intifada (means uprising in Arabic). Initially, it had only been boycotts and protests, but became violent. Israel responded to this with heavy force. In the first intifada, a couple hundred Israelis and thousands of Palestinians had died.
At the same time as the first intifada, a group of Palestinians in Gaza, who had considered the PLO too secular and too compromise-minded, had created Hamas. An Islamic militant group that the United States had designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.
Oslo Accords
In 1993, leaders from both sides signed the Oslo Accords, believing that this would be a big step towards Palestine gaining independence from Israel. The Oslo Accords established Palestinian authority and allowed a small grant of Palestinian self-governing in some areas.
However, this was met with controversy. Hard-liners on both sides had opposed the Oslo Accords, with members of Hammas committing suicide bombings to try to sabotage the process. Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had been called a traitor and a nazi by Isreal rights protesters. After Rabin had signed the second round of the Oslo Accords, he was shot and killed by a far-right Israeli.
This conflict by violent extremists on both sides had caused negotiations to hammer out for years. After the big Camp David summit came up empty during the summer of 2000, Palestinians believed peace was not coming.
Leading to the second intifada, this time being much more violent than the last. It had calmed down in the latter years, which resulted in the deaths of 1,000 Israelis and 3,200 Palestinians.
The second intifada had led many Israelis to believe that Palestinians would never accept peace or that it wasn’t even worth trying. In contrast, the Palestinians are left to feel that neither negotiation nor violence and have no hope for a future for their people. Israel had built walls and checkpoints to control Palestinians’ movements.
In the West Bank, settlements continued to smother Palestinians out, which had caused protests and sometimes cases of violence, though most just wanted to have normal lives. In Gaza, Hamas and other violent groups have periodic wars with Israel that result in the overwhelming deaths of Palestinians, including civilians.
The Current War
Which brings us to the present situation we are facing.
On October 7th, Hamas-led Palestinian militants launched an invasion of the Gaza-Israel barrier, launching a surprise attack with rockets while approximately 3,000 militants breached the barrier. This surprise attack resulted in the deaths of at least 846 Israeli citizens and soldiers, with an estimated 240 hostages taken.
Since October 7th, Israel has launched thousands of air bombardments on Gaza, resulting in the deaths of more than 28,000 people, including women and children. These air bombardments have struck places such as hospitals, schools, and regular civilian homes.
Recently, Israel has begun bombing Rafah, a city in North Sinai near Egypt’s eastern border with the Gaza Strip. While Israel has rescued two hostages from Rafah, approximately 120 hostages remain in the Gaza Strip.
Both Israel and Hamas are demanding the release of each other’s respective hostages, with neither side seemingly willing to surrender them all. The longer they keep their hostages, the longer the war will continue.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Elazar , 2023
The Bulldogs' Journal 
A fair coverage of the situation. So what happens now?
LikeLike