The British Mandate. During World War I. Jewish Immigration to Palestine. The Mahane Yehuda Police Station. Nebi Samwil Photos. The Safed City Police Station. Special Session of GA on Palestine.
Under Ottoman Rule. Ottoman Rule. Primary Source Documents. Proposes Temporary Trusteeship. Martin Buber's Open Letter to Gandhi. Robert Kennedy's Reports from Palestine. Roosevelt-King Saud Correspondence. Support of Zionists. Convention Between the U. Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence. The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. The Weizmann-Faisal Agreement. Zionist Organization Statement on Palestine. Important Figures.
Ruth Aliav Kluger. David Ben-Gurion. Menachem Begin. Winston Churchill. Theodor Herzl. Haj Amin al-Husseini. Ze'ev Vladimir Jabotinsky. While Israelis who live in the country's south are well aware of the rockets fired from Gaza into their communities, most Israelis live physically separated from the conflict, and that is the perspective Americans are more familiar with. Tel Aviv feels like a peaceful, prosperous Mediterranean beach city, which it is.
But less than an hour drive away are Palestinian towns in the West Bank where the conflict is absolutely palpable even in periods of "calm. In the West Bank, beyond the daily humiliations of Israeli military checkpoints, the occupation has severely constricted movement and trade. The stifled economy is the easiest thing to measure, but many other aspects of Palestinian life suffer, as well. Periodically the situation will escalate so rapidly, with such relatively slight provocation, and to such a level of severity that the rest of us can't ignore what every Palestinian and many Israelis already know: the conflict may be quieter some days than it is on others, but it is still active, still destroying lives and communities, and still scarring these two societies every day.
The status quo of the Israel-Palestine conflict is bad for everyone, but it is especially bad for Palestinians, who are under a suffocating blockade in Gaza and military occupation in the West Bank. They do not have a state or full rights, while Israelis have both. And the longer the conflict drags on, the tougher it will be to change that. So you can see why some might think that all Israelis want this to happen and want the conflict to drag on forever or to end it by permanently expelling or subjugating Palestinians — but when you look at how Israel makes decisions, and what Israeli voters want, it becomes pretty clear that this is not the case.
As is true of any country, especially a parliamentary democracy, Israel's actions are less the result of a single calculated strategy than they are about messy internal politics, short-term thinking, and strategic drift.
Take, as a micro example, Israel's approach to Gaza since Hamas took over in Israel has invaded or launched extended bombing campaigns in Gaza every few years; this costs many Israeli lives, in addition to the much higher Palestinian death toll, and it never actually solves the underlying problems. Clearly Israel does not have long-term strategy here at all, much less a nefarious secret plan. That lack of a strategy is bad and helps perpetuate the cycle of violence, but it is a cycle that's painful for Israelis, as well.
Israeli policy has changed over time; just like American politics, it has been different depending on who is leading the government. In the early s, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a peace deal with the Palestinians, even though Israel's concessions for the deal were so unpopular among Israelis that a far-right extremist assassinated Rabin.
There were valid reasons the offer failed Nathan Thrall has written a good history of what happened , but the point is that Israel would not have offered this plan if it secretly desired the permanent occupation of the West Bank. There are certainly extremists in Israeli politics — sometimes quite prominent extremists — who want to permanently annex the West Bank and make Palestinians second-class citizens, or to systemically expel Palestinians from their land en masse in an act of 21st-century ethnic cleansing.
And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has at times indulged these extremists in a cynical ploy to keep himself in power. But there are also prominent Israeli politicians who want and push publicly for a two-state peace deal that would grant Palestinians independence and full rights. There are other political factions involved in this, as well; they fight all the time, and very publicly, pushing and pulling Israeli government policy in one direction or another.
When you watch that happening, and watch Israel's short-term thinking on problems like Gaza, it becomes clearer that Israeli policy on the conflict is often formed day to day and week to week by a messy process.
To be clear, none of that is to absolve Israel of responsibility for its actions, only to honestly assess how those actions come to be. It is also not to absolve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is clearly not a peacenik. But he has often seemed more interested in managing internal Israeli politics, keeping his parliamentary coalition together, catering to Israeli public opinion, and delivering short-term security, all over taking difficult steps toward long-term peace.
That is a massive failure in its own right, and it has contributed to the perpetuation of the conflict regardless of his motive, but it is also not the same thing as a deliberate, continuous Israeli strategy to achieve the destruction of the Palestinian identity — even if it may one day be the effect.
When Middle East experts talk about how to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, they often say that everyone broadly agrees on the terms of a peace deal, and the challenge is just getting everyone to trust one another long enough to see it through. If only this were true. It is true that the main parties have at least publicly endorsed the idea of a two-state solution, which means that Israel and Palestine would form two separate, independent states very roughly along the armistice lines set after the war, plus what are called "land swaps" in which Israel would claim some West Bank land that is dominated by Israeli settlers, and in exchange Palestine would get some land from Israel.
In execution, though, there are a few extremely thorny details that would make this really difficult to see through. Here are, just to give you a sense of how difficult finding peace is, two of the toughest:. Jerusalem : How would Jerusalem be divided between Israel and Palestine?
Both claim the city 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 antiquity-era Old City that is not at all well-shaped to be divided across two countries.
It used to be formally divided between East and West Jerusalem, but in Israel annexed about 27 square miles of East Jerusalem. Making the division even tougher, Israeli communities have been building up more and more in and around the city and around Jerusalem suburbs. Refugees : There are, officially, 7 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 it absorbs 7 million Palestinian returnees, then Jews will become a minority; Israelis, after everything they've done to finally achieve a Jewish state after centuries of their own persecution, would never surrender that state and willingly become a minority among a population they see as hostile.
Palestinians, for their part, could not accept a peace deal that does not address the millions of Palestinians living as refugees around the Middle East. There are ideas to work around the problem, like financial restitution, but no agreement on them.
And there are even more issues. How can Israel guarantee that an independent West Bank would not, like Gaza, be taken over by a hostile anti-Israeli militant group that will use the territory to launch rockets at Israeli neighborhoods?
How could Palestinians accept a peace deal that required them to curb their own sovereignty by giving Israel, for example, control over Palestinian airspace? And on and on. To be clear, this does not mean that a two-state peace deal is impossible. It just means finding a deal that simultaneously addresses the most fundamental needs of Israelis and Palestinians, much less convinces leaders on both sides to make the painful concessions necessary to see it through, is really, really hard.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Myth 1: The conflict is too complex to possibly understand This is, in many ways, the Israel-Palestine misconception from which all other Israel-Palestine misconceptions flow: that the conflict is an impossibly complicated mess so far beyond human untangling or comprehension that we should not really try.
Myth 2: The conflict is all about religion It is true that Israelis are mostly Jewish and Palestinians are mostly Muslim, but religion is pretty low on the list of direct drivers of the conflict. Myth 3: They've been fighting for centuries This is by far the most common, and the most clearly wrong, of the Israel-Palestine misconceptions. Israeli police walk though Jerusalem's Old City in Myth 4: Europe created Israel to apologize for the Holocaust There are actually two misconceptions behind the idea that Europe created Israel to apologize for the Holocaust.
During my first two years I lived with my parents in another camp, in Bavaria. My parents, who lost their parents in the Nazi genocide, wanted to steal into France or, alternatively, immigrate to the United States. All the gates were closed, however, and they were compelled to go to the young country of Israel, the only place that agreed to accept them. Zionism, which succeeded in forging a new nation, is not prepared to recognize its political-cultural-linguistic creation, nor even the specific national rights which that process conferred on it.
But Gans, ultimately, is right. From Meir Kahane to Meretz, all Zionists continue to view the state we live in not as a democratic republic belonging to all its Israeli citizens — who definitely have a right to self-determination — but as a political entity that belongs to the Jews of the world, who like their forebears have no wish to come here or to define themselves as Israelis.
What remains for me, then, is to go on being a-Zionist or post-Zionist while doing what I can to help rescue the place I live in from an ever-intensifying racism, due, among other reasons, to the teaching of a false historical past, fear of assimilation with the Other, revulsion of the indigenous culture and so on. Shlomo Sand is a historian and professor emeritus of Tel Aviv University. Shlomo Sand Nov. Updated: Nov. Now therefore, heed the voice of the words of the LORD.
Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. Now it is very easy to cherry-pick quotes from scripture permitting or enjoining violence. Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush.
But if they repent, and establish prayer and pay the alms, then leave their way free. God is Forgiving, Merciful. Al-Tawbah, I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
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