PALESTINE-ISRAEL CONFLICT

Palestine-Israel Conflict



Palestine-Israel Conflict

Introduction

In 1948 the country of Israel was established, and it almost immediately went to war with neighboring Arab countries who did not recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish nation. (Arabs are people who speak the Arabic language or who live in countries in which Arabic is the dominant language.) During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, many Palestinians (an Arab people whose ancestors lived in the historical region of Palestine, comprising parts of present-day Israel and Jordan, and who continue to lay claim to that land) who were living on the land that became Israel became refugees. (Refugees are people who flee their country to escape violence or persecution.) More than twenty years later, Israel went to war with its Arab neighbors again in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, this time seizing land from some of those neighbors. The Israelis began establishing Jewish settlements (communities established and inhabited in order to claim land) on the lands they now occupied. This paper discusses the Palestinians as a Stateless People and why there is no Two-State Solution for Palestine-Israel conflict.

Thesis Statement

Why there is not a two state solution for Palestinians?

Discussion

The Palestinians not only felt that their homes and livelihoods had been stolen from them by the Israelis, but they also felt increasingly abandoned by the Arab nations that had once promised to protect them. They wanted to fight against the Israeli occupation of their lands, but unlike Israel, they were poor and unorganized and had few resources to build any kind of defense force. The Palestinians eventually organized and began to fight the large and powerful military forces of Israel with whatever means they could find, from throwing stones to guerrilla warfare (combat tactics used by a smaller, less equipped fighting force against a more powerful foe) and terrorist acts, such as hijacking planes and kidnapping people. They also gathered in peaceful protest movements and waged campaigns to alert the world of their plight. Despite grave disagreements and frequent incidents of violence, the Israelis and the Palestinians began a slow movement toward peace by the end of the twentieth century. In the early twenty-first century, however, relations deteriorated, and the effect was a chain of aggressive rebellions and small wars, with little or no progress toward a peaceful solution. [1]

Many people have now started to believe that there is not a two state solution for Palestinians because of the issue of Jerusalem and interests of outside actors (especially, Arab and western countries). These outside actors have always used Palestinians in the middle east.

Isreal's Right To Exist

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians who lived in the area of conflict either fled from the violence or were forced out of their habitats by the dominant Jewish militias. (A militia is an armed civilian military force.) Entire villages were emptied. The Palestinians referred to the war and the refugee crisis that followed as al-Nakba (an Arab word meaning “the catastrophe”). Most of the refugees went to the Gaza in the ...