The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an ongoing military and political conflict in the Levant that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced many millions of people. The conflict pits Israeli demands for security in what it has long regarded as a hostile region against Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own. Israel is the worlds only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea, while Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land. The conflict is over who gets what land and how it’s controlled.
The roots of the conflict date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the birth of major nationalist movements among the Jews and among the Arabs, both geared towards attaining sovereignty for their people in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. In 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which sought to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was created, sparking the first Arab-Israeli War. The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory, but 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and the territory was divided into three parts.
Today’s lines largely reflect the outcomes of two wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967. The 1967 war is particularly important for today’s conflict, as it left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories home to large Palestinian populations. Currently, Israel is at war with Hamas, a conflict following a horrific rampage on October 7, 2023, in which militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another extremist group, launched attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took more than 240 hostage. Israel has responded with widespread bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground incursion, killing and injuring tens of thousands of Palestinians.
The internationally supported political solution to the broader conflict, endorsed in the past by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, is a so-called “two-state solution” . That would establish Palestine as an independent state in Gaza a...
