Everyone has heard of the Israel-Palestine
conflict. 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 begin invading the
Palestinian territory of Gaza on Thursday, after
10 days of air strikes that killed at least 235
Palestinians, many of them civilians? Why is
the militant Palestinian group Hamas firing
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.
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?

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 70-plus 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 site
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. Just above, as one
metric of that, are the Israeli and Palestinian
conflict-related deaths every month since late
2000.

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

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 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 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 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?

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 an
"open-air prison" and has pushed the
unemployment rate up to 40 percent.
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, 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 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 in which on average two children are arrested every day, 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?
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, 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. Above is their song "I
Don't Have Freedom, 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.
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 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 , 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 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; two UN agencies have separately estimated that 70-plus percent 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.

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