Eleven Days of Warfare, Eleven Centuries of Context: Making Sense of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Between May 10 and May 21, the largest crisis in recent history raged in Israel and Palestine. The region is still recovering, but the media knows that Israeli forces killed at least 285 Palestinians within this timespan. Tragically, in recent years this type of violence has become commonplace. While Israel bombed the Gaza strip, Palestinian reigning authorities responded too, by firing rockets at Jewish cities, killing 13 Jewish Israelis. 

Why did this all happen? On May 6, protests began in East Jerusalem, a territory currently controlled by Israel. Palestinian residents of Israel held a demonstration to oppose a Supreme Court ruling that would evict six Palestinian families from their home. Israeli police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse demonstrators. The governing body of Palestine issued an ultimatum to Israeli forces to vacate East Jerusalem, which went without an answer. Conflict only escalated from there. 

This struggle is not a battle over religion; it is a fight for justice and to secure safety for people’s families and future generations. This is not an issue where anyone can come to an opinion after skimming one article. The truth is, neither state has existed for long, but they have a long history which makes the question as difficult as it is. Both peoples have a justifiable claim to the region, but these claims are used to justify violent repression.

No region has faced more territorial conflict than the Levant, the area where modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestine lie. The first long-term human settlements were erected in the region before the current era, between 3500 and 2000 BCE. 

According to the Judeo-Christian scripture, King David conquered the city of Jerusalem in 1000 BCE, establishing it as the capital for a Jewish kingdom. This kingdom would become a permanent home for all Jewish people. This is important, because supporters of Israel around the world point to this period in history as a justification for this region to be a Jewish state. The Jewish people have the undisputed oldest claim to the land, but not everyone agrees that a claim’s worth should be measured by its age.

In the 6th Century BCE, the Assyrian empire laid waste to the Jewish kingdom. 200 years later, the Levant was conquered by the Babylonians, and then the Persians. These empires repressed Judaism within the region, something the Jews who had been living there for centuries resisted. The region switched hands from the Macedonians to the Romans, who destroyed the Jewish temple. The Romans exiled the Jews, who had to seek new homes, which they found across Europe and Africa.

In 637 CE, Jerusalem was conquered by the Rashudin Caliphate, an Islamic empire. At this time, what would become the Palistinian identity began to form in the region. It would not be until the beginning of the 20th century that the Levant would cease to be governed exclusively by Muslims. 

After its victory in WWI, the British Empire seized the Levant from the Ottoman Empire who ruled it, and began to reshape the area. British apathy would sow the seeds for the division: they redrew the maps of their possessions, with no care for the inhabitants. 

In 1917, the British began an initiative to create a protectorate for the Jewish People in Palestine. This was an artificial project, which forced Muslim and Christian Palestinians to move away from the coast. Pushback from the Paliestinians led the British to come up with a “two-state solution,” and thus Palestine was separated into a Jewish part and a Muslim part. At the time the Jewish population remained small, but this would change in a few decades.

Jewish people had been oppressed in Europe since the Middle Ages, when the Church considered them sinful, forbidding them from owning land. This centuries-long segregation stereotyped Jewish Europeans as malicious, shady people. 

When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, they used this prejudice to paint the Jewish People as the enemy of the nation. The Holocaust and related abuses of power orchestrated by nationalist powers in Europe were the tipping point of centuries of opression, after which Jews could no longer feel safe anywhere. 

This sentiment accelerated the rise of the Zionist movement. Zionism is the idea that there must exist somewhere on earth a Jewish-led nation for the Jewish people. While underground for a while, the crimes of the facsist regimes of Europe brought Zionism to public attention. The Jewish diaspora around the world would live in fear and danger no longer. 

Israel was proclaimed a state and nation in 1948. By the Law of Return, any person in the world that can prove Jewish ancestry can choose to emigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. Between 1945 and 1955, almost a million Jews emigrated to Israel with the help of this law. Israel would quickly grow into a regional power, and develop a powerful economy.

Today the State of Israel functions as a parliamentary democracy, with 39 registered parties, of which two consistently come out on top, the centrist coalition (Kahoi Lavan) and the conservative coalition (Likud). 

Its prime minister is Benjamin Netanyahu, a hardliner conservative from Likud, who has held the post since 2009. Netanyahu has secured his position through his strong stance on Palestine, which he asserts will become a threat to Israel if left to its own devices.

Palestine is not a country, at least not according to the United Nations. While the Palestinian government has sought international recognition for the past seven decades, Israel and the United States continue to veto its attempts at recognition. All the while, 70% of the member states of the UN recognize Palestine as a country, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and Russia. 

Palestine is governed by the Palestinian Natitional Authority (PNA), an entity which was created in 1997 through a treaty between Palestinian organizations and Israel. It is led by a Prime Minister and President, both elected positions.

Conflict between the State of Israel and Palestine began decades ago. In 1967, Israel launched a swift invasion of its Arabic neighbors, in a conflict known as The Six Day War. On the first day, the Israeli military launched a destructive surprise attack on Egypt, and in the following days captured the Sinai Peninsula. The Israeli army also seized East Jerusalem from Jordan. The operation was a success and the Palestinians living in the annexed territories were granted permanent residence in Israel, but not citizenship.

Israel has continued to annex more territory. While the United Nations forced it to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, Israel has successfully taken advantage of regional conflicts, and started some of its own, to seize chunks of its neighbors. In 1967, Israel took the Golan Heights Region from Syria, officially taking over its jurisdiction in 1981. 

Palestine has had more land seized than any other state. In these past eight decades, Palestine has lost more than 90% of its original territory. Israel has been able to justify this by strategically directing Jewish families to settle beyond the border, and then using their presence to take over the neighborhoods as rightful Jewish territory. Essentially, Israel uses gentrification across national boundaries to grow its territory.

As Palestine has lost land and its residents have grown angrier, they have elected more radical leaders. Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, is the leading political party in the PNA, and in recent times it has only gained power in unoccupied Palestine. The party is a nationalist, fundamentlist, and militant, and has carved out a spot for itself as the number one enemy of Israel.  

Israel is implicit in this arrangement. Israeli intelligence agencies financed Hamas in the ‘80s and ‘90s to create opposition to the Fatah party, who led Palestine at the time. They believed it would make the region less of a threat, but after Hamas won the election of 2006, they were able to consolidate power, and resist Israel. Hamas has been able to manufacture their own short range rockets, the same type they fired recently.

To counter Hamas, Israeli politicians have developed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The IDF serves simultaneously as a standing army, and a riot control force. Every Israeli citizen is obligated to serve a term in the IDF: men – 32 months; women – 24 months. While in service, conscripts are immersed in patriotic propaganda, which attempts to prove to them that Israel’s policies are necessary for national security.

In its short history, the IDF has employed tactics classifiable as war crimes on countless occasions. They have constructed wire fences on settled Palestinian land to encircle yet uncolonized Palestinian land and block food and medicine. They employ collective punishment, a technique outlined as a war crime at The Nuremberg Trials. The IDF uses fragmentation bullets, which have been banned from war since 1899 for their cruelty. Finally, between 2014 and 2020, their direct actions have resulted in the deaths of 352 Palestinian children. 

Despite all of this, Netanyahu’s IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, is called “the most moral army in the world” and “America’s greatest ally” by liberal and conservative outlets. To prevent American public opinion from turning against Israel, the U.S. has vetoed UN investigations into IDF chemical attacks on Palestine forty-three times.

There are victims on both sides of this conflict. Palestinians face dispossession, the forced seizure of their homes and belongings, and they face harsh repression. Jewish Israelis are endangered by those that have grown to hate them, and by those that claim to protect them. Israeli politicians, Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabal worse than anyone, have sacrificed their people in a pointless war. They utilize the horrors Jews have had to endure, and the shield of Anti-Semitism to orchestrate a genocide. The Middle East would greatly benefit with these men out of the picture.

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