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A Palestinian woman walks past an Israeli soldier outside the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem
Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
start.
(BBC ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14628835))
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
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 (
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5816022/three-kidnapped-teensexplain-israel-palestine-conflict). Just above, as one metric of that (
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5898581/chart-israel-palestineconflict-deaths), are the Israeli and Palestinian conflict-related
deaths every month since late 2000.
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 ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/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 ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/1948-partition) 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 (
http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/nakba) 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
A Palestinian boy next to the Israeli wall around the town of Qalqilya (David Silverman/Getty Images)
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 (
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/11/5890283/like-coming-out-of-amaximum-security-prison-what-its-like-to-cross) an "open-air
prison" and has pushed the unemployment rate up to 40 percent (
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4520387,00.html).
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,
(Fanack ( http://fanack.com/en/countries/israel/history/the-blind-alley/jewish-settlements/))
Poltica de Cookies
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 (
https://myspace.com/damrap/music/songs), 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 (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iioCyIKbEpI). Above is their
song "I Don't Have Freedom," full English lyrics of which are here (
http://www.damrap.com/album/mali-huriye-i-don%E2%80%99thave-freedom/77), 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."
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
Bank where many live as settlers, further pulling Israeli politics away
from peace and thus allowing the conflict to drift.
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
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)
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