Israel-Palestine Conflict

Introduction

There are a number of complicated and complex political and social reasons propelling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the Middle East today. The commitment and struggle of the Jewish people to have land to call their own has a long history over many centuries. The current manifestation of this is the widely-publicized Jewish establishment of a sovereign homeland in territory occupied by the Palestinian people. This struggle, which has pitted the West-backed Israel against the Palestinian people and their Islamic Middle Eastern supporters, has caused much bloodshed. The Zionist movement and its strongly touted belief that Israel is the land which God promised them only serves to add fuel to this fire. This divisive conflict is inflamed by the broad spectrum of political standpoints taken by the world's governments on whether or not the territory Israel occupies is entitled to be owned and governed by it.

The founding of Israel

The Jewish State of Israel was founded in 1947 after the United Nations decided to partition a region on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea called Palestine. On May 14, 1948 David Ben-Gurion, who was the president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the head of the World Zionist Organization at the time, declared the nation of Israel to be an independent and sovereign state separate from the regions of Palestine administered by the British government on behalf of the League of Nations. Israel is currently the only sovereign Jewish state in the world.

Zionism

The political movement to establish a sovereign Jewish homeland is called Zionism. This belief is underscored by passages in the Jewish Bible which indicated to many Zionists that Israel was their promised land. Zionism was founded in the late 19th century by Jews who were appalled and afraid of the enormity of antisemitism in Europe and the Middle East. Historically, there was a slow movement of Jews into Palestine beginning in the fourteenth century who were dedicated to establishing a homeland for themselves. Zionists were somewhat of a fringe Jewish group until after World War II when the atrocities suffered by the Jewish people during the Holocaust caused widespread interest in the establishment of a sovereign Jewish nation where they could put down roots and determine their own fate.

Informational resources on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

B'Tselem - An Israeli-run human rights website focusing on Israeli abuses of Palestinians.

ProCon - A non-partisan history of the conflict.