Israel-Palastine conflict

WHAT

• Britain took control of the area known as Palestine after the ruler of that part of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, was defeated in World War One.

• The land was inhabited by a Jewish minority and Arab majority.

• Tensions between the two peoples grew when the international community gave Britain the task of establishing a "national home" in Palestine for Jewish people.

• For Jews it was their ancestral home, but Palestinian Arabs also claimed the land and opposed the move.

• Between the 1920s and 1940s, the number of Jews arriving there grew, with many fleeing from persecution in Europe and seeking a homeland after the Holocaust of World War Two.

• Violence between Jews and Arabs, and against British rule, also grew.

• In 1947, the UN voted for Palestine to be split into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem becoming an international city.

• That plan was accepted by Jewish leaders but rejected by the Arab side and never implemented.

• In 1948, unable to solve the problem, British rulers left and Jewish leaders declared the creation of the state of Israel.

• Many Palestinians objected and a war followed. Troops from neighbouring Arab countries invaded.

• Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes in what they call Al Nakba, or the "Catastrophe".

• By the time the fighting ended in a ceasefire the following year, Israel controlled most of the territory.

• Jordan occupied land which became known as the West Bank, and Egypt occupied Gaza.

• Jerusalem was divided between Israeli forces in the West, and Jordanian forces in the East.

Because there was never a peace agreement - with each side blaming the other - there were more wars and fighting in the following decades.

WHO 

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs both want the same land. And a compromise has proven difficult to find.

Hamas

Hamas is the largest of several Palestinian militant Islamist groups.

Its name is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, originating as it did in 1988 after the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Under its charter, it is committed to the destruction of Israel.

Hamas originally had a dual purpose of carrying out an armed struggle against Israel - led by its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades - and delivering social welfare programmes.

Hamas is regarded as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian Authority's legislative elections. It ejected Fatah from Gaza in 2007, splitting the Palestinian movement geographically, as well.

Palestinian Authority 

Created by the 1993 Olso Accords, it is the official governing body of the Palestinian people, led by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah faction. Hobbled by corruption and by political infighting, the PA has failed to become the stable negotiating partner its creators had hoped.

Fatah

Founded by the late Yasir Arafat in the 1950s, Fatah is the largest Palestinian political faction. Unlike Hamas, Fatah is a secular movement, has nominally recognized Israel, and has actively participated in the peace process.

WHEN

In another war in 1967, Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as most of the Syrian Golan Heights, Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai peninsula.

Most Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in neighbouring Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Neither they nor their descendants have been allowed by Israel to return to their homes - Israel says this would overwhelm the country and threaten its existence as a Jewish state.

Israel still occupies the West Bank, and although it pulled out of Gaza the UN still regards that piece of land as occupied territory.

WHERE

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:

Today, the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is under Israeli occupation. This comes in the form of Israeli troops, who enforce Israeli security restrictions on Palestinian movement and activities, and Israeli “settlers,” Jews who build ever-expanding communities in the West Bank that effectively deny the land to Palestinians. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist party, and is under Israeli blockade but not ground troop occupation.

The Territorial Puzzle

West Bank: The West Bank is sandwiched between Israel and Jordan. One of its major cities is Ramallah, the de facto administrative capital of Palestine. Israel took control of it in the 1967 war and has over the years established settlements there.

Gaza: The Gaza Strip located between Israel and Egypt. Israel occupied the strip after 1967, but relinquished control of Gaza City and day-to-day administration in most of the territory during the Oslo peace process. In 2005, Israel unilaterally removed Jewish settlements from the territory, though it continues to control international access to it.

Golan Heights: The Golan Heights is a strategic plateau that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war. Israel effectively annexed the territory in 1981. Recently, the USA has officially recognized Jerusalem and Golan Heights a part of Israel.

WHY

Israel claims the whole of Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The US is one of only a handful of countries to recognise the city as Israel's capital.

In the past 50 years Israel has built settlements in these areas, where more than 600,000 Jews now live.

Palestinians say these are illegal under international law and are obstacles to peace, but Israel denies this.

The threatened eviction of some Palestinian families in East Jerusalem has also caused rising anger.

There are a number of issues which Israel and the Palestinians cannot agree on.

These include: what should happen to Palestinian refugees; whether Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank should stay or be removed; whether the two sides should share Jerusalem; and - perhaps most tricky of all - whether a Palestinian state should be created alongside Israel.

Peace talks have been taking place on and off for more than 25 years, but so far have not solved the conflict.

HOW

The seeds of the conflict were laid in 1917 when the then British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour expressed official support of Britain for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine under the Balfour Declaration. The lack of concern for the "rights of existing non-Jewish communities" i.e. the Arabs led to prolonged violence.

Unable to contain Arab and Jewish violence, Britain withdrew its forces from Palestine in 1948, leaving responsibility for resolving the competing claims to the newly created United Nations. The UN presented a partition plan to create independent Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. Most Jews in Palestine accepted the partition but most Arabs did not.

Way Forward

The primary approach to solving the conflict today is a so-called “two-state solution” that would establish Palestine as an independent state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, leaving the rest of the land to Israel. Though the two-state plan is clear in theory, the two sides are still deeply divided over how to make it work in practice.

The alternative to a two-state solution is a “one-state solution,” wherein all of the land becomes either one big Israel or one big Palestine. Most observers think this would cause more problems than it would solve, but this outcome is becoming more likely over time for political and demographic reasons.