9 questions about the Israel-Palestine

conflict you were too embarrassed

to ask
Updated by Max Fisher on July 17, 2014, 7:30 a.m. ET

@Max_Fisher

max@vox.commax@vox.com

A Palestinian woman walks past an Israeli soldier outside the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem
Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

Everyone has heard of the Israel-Palestine conflict (

http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/intro). Everyone knows
it's bad, that it's been going on for a long time, and that there is a lot
of hatred on both sides.
But you may find yourself less clear on the hows and the whys of
the conflict. Why, for example, did Israel invade the Palestinian
territory of Gaza ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/gazabasics) in July 2014, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian
civilians, many of them children? Why did the militant Palestinian
group Hamas ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/hamas)
fire rockets into civilian neighborhoods in Israel? How did this latest
round of violence start in the first place and why do they hate one
another at all?
What follows are the most basic answers to your most basic
questions. Giant, neon-lit disclaimer: these issues are complicated
and contentious, and this is not an exhaustive or definitive account
of Israel-Palestine's history or the conflict today. But it's a place to

start.

1) What are Israel and Palestine?

That sounds like a very basic question but, in a sense, it's at the
center of the conflict.

(BBC ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14628835))

Israel is an officially Jewish country located in the Middle East.

Palestine is a set of two physically separate, ethnically Arab and
mostly Muslim territories alongside Israel: the West Bank, named
for the western shore of the Jordan River, and Gaza. Those
territories are not independent (more on this later). All together,
Israel and the Palestinian territories are about as populous as Illinois
and about half its size.
Officially, there is no internationally recognized line between Israel
and Palestine; the borders are considered to be disputed, and have

been for decades. So is the status of Palestine: some countries

consider Palestine to be an independent state, while others (like the
US) consider Palestine to be territories under Israeli occupation.
Both Israelis and Palestinians have claims to the land going back
centuries, but the present-day states are relatively new.

2) Why are Israelis and Palestinians fighting?

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

militant groups terrorize Israelis.

BOTH SIDES HAVE SQUANDERED PEACE AND

PERPETUATED CONFLICT, BUT PALESTINIANS
TODAY BEAR MOST OF THE SUFFERING
Those two dimensions of the conflict are made even worse by the
long, bitter, violent history between these two peoples. It's not just
that there is lots of resentment and distrust; Israelis and
Palestinians have such widely divergent narratives of the last 70plus years, of what has happened and why, that even reconciling
their two realities is extremely difficult. All of this makes it easier for
extremists, who oppose any compromise and want to destroy or
subjugate the other side entirely, to control the conversation and
derail the peace process.
The peace process, by the way, has been going on for decades, but
it hasn't looked at all hopeful since the breakthrough 1993 and 1995
Oslo Accords produced a glimmer of hope that has since
dissipated. The conflict has settled into a terrible cycle and peace
looks less possible all the time.

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.

3) How did this conflict start in the first place?

(Left map: Passia ( http://www.passia.org/palestine_facts/MAPS/images/jer_maps/UNPartition.html); center

and right maps: Philippe Rekacewicz / Le Monde Diplomatique (

http://mondediplo.com/maps/middleeast1948))

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

you will see marked on today's maps as "Israel"; everything except

for the West Bank and Gaza, which is where most Palestinian fled to
(many also ended up in refugee camps in neighboring countries)
and are today considered the Palestinian territories. The borders
between Israel and Palestine have been disputed and fought over
ever since. So has the status of those Palestinian refugees and the
status of Jerusalem.
That's the first major dimension of the conflict: reconciling the
division that opened in 1948. The second began in 1967, when Israel
put those two Palestinian territories under military occupation.

4) Why is Israel occupying the Palestinian territories?

A Palestinian boy next to the Israeli wall around the town of Qalqilya (David Silverman/Getty Images)

This is a hugely important part of the conflict today, especially for

Palestinians.
Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in
1967. Up to that point, Gaza had been (more or less) controlled by
Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan. But in 1967 there was another

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/))

the settlers create what are sometimes called "facts on the

ground": Israeli communities that blur the borders and expand land
that Israel could claim for itself in any eventual peace deal.

The Israeli occupation (

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5816022/three-kidnapped-teensexplain-israel-palestine-conflict) of the West Bank is all-consuming
for the Palestinians who live there, constrained by Israeli
checkpoints and 20-foot walls, subject to an Israeli military justice
system ( http://www.vox.com/2014/4/21/5636486/west-bankjustice-data) in which on average two children are arrested every
day ( http://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878687/the-real-outrage-ofisraeli-forces-beating-and-arresting-a-15-year), stuck with an
economy stifled by strict Israeli border control, and countless other
indignities large and small.

5) Can we take a quick music break?

damrap

02 Mali Huriye - I Don`t Have Freedome

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."

Now here is a sample of Israel's wonderful jazz scene, one of the

best in the world, from the bassist and band leader Avishai Cohen (
http://www.avishaimusic.com/). Cohen is best known in the US for

his celebrated 2006 instrumental album Continuo, but let's instead

listen to the song "El Hatzipor" from 2009's Aurora.
The lyrics are from an 1892 poem of the same name, meaning "To
the Bird," by the Ukrainian Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. The
poem (translated here ( http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?
song=elhatzipor)) expresses the hopeful yearning among early
European Zionists like Bialik to escape persecution in Europe and
find salvation in the holy land; that it still resonates among Israelis
over 100 years later is a reminder of both the tremendous hopes
invested in the dream of a Jewish state, and perhaps the sense that
this dream is still not secure.

6) Why is there fighting today between Israel and Gaza?

On the surface, this is just the latest round of fighting in 27 years of

war between Israel and Hamas ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/hamas), a Palestinian militant group that formed in 1987
seeks Israel's destruction and is internationally recognized as a
terrorist organization for its attacks targeting civilians and which
since 2006 has ruled Gaza. Israeli forces periodically attack Hamas
and other militant groups in Gaza, typically with air strikes but in

2006 and 2009 with ground invasions.

ONLY HAMAS DELIBERATELY TARGETS

CIVILIANS, BUT MOST ARE STILL PALESTINIANS
KILLED BY ISRAELI STRIKES
The latest round of fighting ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/gaza-israel-hamas-2104) was sparked when members of
Hamas in the West Bank murdered three Israeli youths who were
studying there on June 10. Though the Hamas members appear to
have acted without approval from their leadership, which
nonetheless praised the attack, Israel responded by arresting large
numbers of Hamas personnel in the West Bank and with air strikes
against the group in Gaza.
After some Israeli extremists murdered a Palestinian youth in
Jerusalem and Israeli security forces cracked down on protests,
compounding Palestinian outrage, Hamas and other Gaza groups
launched dozens of rockets into Israel, which responded with many
more air strikes. So far the fighting has killed one Israeli and 230
Palestinians (
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/tollisrael-gaza-conflict.html); two UN agencies have separately
estimated that 70-plus percent (
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/13/5894689/these-harrowing-tweetsshow-what-life-is-like-in-gaza-under-israeli) of the fatalities are
civilians. On Thursday, July 17, Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza,
which Israel says is to shut down tunnels that Hamas could use to
cross into Israel.
That get backs to that essential truth about the conflict today:
Palestinian civilians endure the brunt of it. While Israel targets

militants and Hamas targets civilians, Israel's disproportionate

military strength and its willingness to target militants based in
dense urban communities means that Palestinians civilians are far
more likely to be killed than any other group.
But those are just the surface reasons; there's a lot more going on
here as well.

7) Why does this violence keep happening?

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

produces little more than Palestinian civilian deaths. Israel's

blockade on Gaza, which strangles economic life there and
punishes civilians, helps produce a climate that is hospitable to
extremism, and allows Hamas to nurture a belief that even if Hamas
may never win, at least refusing to put down their weapons is a form
of liberation.
Many Palestinians in Gaza naturally compare Hamas to Palestinian
leaders in the West Bank, who have emphasized peace and
compromise and negotiations only to have been rewarded with
an Israeli military occupation that shows no sign of ending and everexpanding settlements. This is not to endorse that logic, but it is not
difficult to see why some Palestinians might conclude that violent
"resistance" is preferable.
That sense of Palestinian hopelessness and distrust in Israel and
the peace process has been a major contributor to violence in
recent years. In the early 2000s, there was also a lot of fighting
between Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. This was called
the Second Intifada ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/intifadas) (uprising), and followed a less-violent
Palestinian uprising against the occupation in the late 1980s. In the
Second Intifada, which was the culmination of Palestinian
frustration with the failure of the 1990s peace process, Palestinian
militants adopted suicide bombings of Israeli buses and other forms
of terror. Israel responded with a severe military crack-down. The
fighting killed approximately 3,200 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis.

A 2002 Palestinian bus bombing that killed 18 in Jerusalem (Getty Images)

It's not just Palestinians, though: many Israelis also increasingly

distrust Palestinians and their leaders and see them as innately
hostile to peace. In the parlance of Israel-Palestine, the expression
for this attitude is, "We don't have a partner for peace." That feeling
became especially deep after the Second Intifada; months of bus
bombings and cafe bombings made many Israelis less supportive of
peace efforts and more willing to accept or simply ignore the
occupation's effects on Palestinians.
This sense of apathy (
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/11/5880707/price-tag-israeli-settlers)
has been further enabled by Israel's increasingly successful security
programs, such as the Iron Dome system that shoots down Gazan
rockets, which insulates many Israelis from the conflict and makes it
easier to ignore. Public support for a peace deal that would grant
Palestine independence, once high among Israelis, has dropped (
http://972mag.com/polls-two-states-was-a-casualty-even-beforethe-war/93418/). Meanwhile, a fringe movement of right-wing Israeli
extremists has become increasingly violent, particularly in the West

Bank where many live as settlers, further pulling Israeli politics away
from peace and thus allowing the conflict to drift.

8) How is the conflict going to end?

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

population they see as hostile.

Destruction of one side: The second way this could end is with
one side outright vanquishing the other, in what would certainly be a
catastrophic abuse of human rights. This is the option preferred by
extremists such as Hamas and far-right Israeli settlers. In the
Palestinian extremist version, Israel is abolished and replaced with a
single Palestinian state; Jews become a minority, most likely
replacing today's conflict with an inverse conflict. In the Israeli
extremist version, Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza entirely,
either turning Palestinians into second-class citizens in the manner
of apartheid South Africa or expelling them en masse.
Two-state solution: The third option is for both Israelis and
Palestinians to have their own independent states; that's called the
"two-state solution" and it's advocated by most everyone as the
only option that would create long-term peace. But it requires
working out lots of details so thorny and difficult that it's not clear if
it will, or can, happen. Eventually, the conflict will have dragged on
for so long that this solution will become impossible.

9) Why is it so hard to make peace?

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)

The one-state solution is hard because there is no viable, realistic

version that both sides would accept. In theory, the two-state
solution is great. But it poses some very difficult questions. Here
are the four big ones and why they're so tough to solve. To be clear,
these aren't abstract concepts but real, heavily debated issues that
have sunk peace talks before:
Jerusalem ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/jerusalem): Both sides claim Jerusalem as their capital;
it's also a center of Jewish and Muslim (and Christian) holy sites that
are literally located physically on top of one another, in the antiquityera walled Old City that is not at all well shaped to be divided into
two countries. Making the division even tougher, Israeli
communities have been building up more and more in and around
the city.
West Bank borders ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/west-bank): There's no clear agreement on where

precisely to draw the borders, which roughly follow the armistice

line of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, especially since hundreds of
thousands of Israeli settlers have built up suburban-style
communities just on the Palestinian side of the line. This one is not
actually impossible Israel could give Palestine some land as part
of "land swaps" in exchange for settler-occupied territory but it's
still hard. The more time goes on, the more settlements expand, the
harder it becomes to create a viable Palestinian state.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM OF ALL MAY BE TIME:

IT'S RUNNING OUT
Refugees ( http://www.vox.com/cards/israelpalestine/nakba): This one is really hard. There are, officially, seven
million Palestinian refugees, who are designated as such because
their descendants fled or were expelled from what is today Israel;
places like Ramla and Jaffa. Palestinians frequently ask for what
they call the "right of return": permission to return to their land and
live with full rights. That sounds like a no-brainer, but Israel's
objection is that if they absorb seven million Palestinian returnees,
then Jews will become a minority, which for the reasons explained
above Israelis will never accept. There are ideas to work around the
problem, like financial restitution, but no agreement on them.
Security: This is another big one. For Palestinians, security needs
are simple: a sovereign Palestinian state. For Israelis, it's a bit more
complicated: Israelis fear that an independent Palestine could turn
hostile and ally with other Middle East states to launch the sort of
invasion Israel barely survived in 1973. Maybe more plausibly, Israelis
worry that Hamas would take over an independent West Bank and
use it to launch attacks on Israelis, as they've done with Gaza. Any
compromise would likely involve Palestinians giving up some

sovereignty, for example promising permanent de-militarization or

allowing an international peacekeeping force, and after years of
feeling heavily abused by strong-handed Israeli forces, Palestinians
are not eager about the idea of Israel having veto power over their
sovereignty and security.
Those are all very difficult problems. But here's the thing: time is
running out. The more that the conflict drags on, the more difficult it
will be to solve any of these issues, much less all of them. That will
make it harder and harder for Israel to justify keeping Gaza under
blockade and the West Bank under occupation; eventually it will
have to unilaterally withdraw, which the current leadership opposes,
or it will have to annex the territories and become either an
apartheid-style state that denies full rights to those new Palestinian
citizens or abandon its Jewish state.
Meanwhile, extremism and apathy and distrust are rising on both
sides. The violence of the conflict is becoming status quo, a
regularly recurring event that is replacing the peace process itself
as the way by which the conflict advances. It is making things worse
for Israelis and Palestinians alike all the time, and unless they can
break from the hatred and violence long enough to make peace,
that will continue.

Was this article helpful?

In this StoryStream
The crisis in Israel-Palestine

MAY 19

Israel and Gaza's best-known chefs discuss food and identity in Israel-Palestine

JUL 17

9 questions about the Israel-Palestine conict you were too embarrassed to ask

JUL 16

FXs Tyrant and USAs Dig change plans due to Israel-Gaza violence

48 updates

Next Up
Israel's Gaza invasion is all about tunnels
Report: Israeli incursion into Gaza has already killed 'dozens'

Three big reasons war is going away

Why Israel is invading Gaza

Yes, Gaza militants hide rockets in schools
These harrowing tweets show what life is like in Gaza under Israeli bombing right now