The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is sometimes described as ancient, rooted in irresolvable enmities stretching back to the foundations of the monotheistic religions. It is not. It is a modern conflict, born of the specific conditions of the late nineteenth century — the rise of nationalism as the dominant idiom of political life, the decline of the Ottoman Empire that had administered the region for four centuries, and the particular crisis of European Jewry in an era of resurgent anti-Semitism. It emerged from decisions taken by specific people at specific moments in history, and while its depths are now genuinely profound — the accumulated grievances, the dead, the dispossession, the decades of failed negotiation — the starting point was contingent in ways that matter for understanding why resolution has proved so intractable and what a resolution might require.
Zionism — the political movement that sought the establishment of a Jewish national home in the land of historical Israel — was founded in the 1880s and given its most influential formulation by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, whose 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat argued that the Jewish people would never be safe in diaspora Europe, that anti-Semitism was not a temporary aberration but a permanent condition of European civilisation, and that the only solution was a sovereign state of their own. The location of that state was not immediately determined — Herzl considered Argentina; the British later proposed Uganda — but the gravitational pull of the land historically associated with Jewish civilisation was strong, and the movement settled on Palestine. Palestine in the late nineteenth century was part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by a predominantly Arab Muslim population, a smaller Arab Christian minority, and a small Jewish community, mostly resident in the ancient cities. It was not empty, a fact that the Zionist movement’s internal debates acknowledged even when its public rhetoric obscured it.
The British Mandate and the Two Promises
The modern conflict’s legal and political framework was created by British decisions taken during and after the First World War in circumstances of strategic calculation and mutual contradiction. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild expressing the British government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” was a document whose ambiguity was deliberate. It promised support for a Jewish national home while also promising that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” — an assurance whose compatibility with the first promise was never worked out, because the British government had never seriously thought through what the two commitments required of each other.
The British Mandate over Palestine, which the League of Nations granted Britain in 1920 incorporating the Balfour Declaration’s terms, lasted until 1948 and was a period of escalating communal conflict driven by accelerating Jewish immigration. The immigration’s pace and character changed dramatically with the rise of Nazism in Germany: Jews who might otherwise have chosen to remain in Europe had that choice closed to them, and the numbers arriving in Palestine in the 1930s generated a demographic transformation that the Arab population experienced as displacement and the British authorities struggled to manage. The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 — a sustained uprising against both British rule and continued Jewish immigration — was suppressed by the British at the cost of several thousand Arab deaths and the destruction of much of the Palestinian Arab leadership structure. The British responded with the 1939 White Paper, which severely restricted Jewish immigration at precisely the moment when the Nazi genocide was making that immigration a matter of life and death for the Jews of Europe.
The Holocaust — in which six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators — transformed the political calculus of Zionism in ways that made any solution other than a Jewish state with the capacity to control its own borders appear to most Jews as simply unacceptable. The survivors of the camps who reached Palestine after the war, and the hundreds of thousands more attempting the journey while the British enforced immigration restrictions, were the embodiment of the argument that Herzl had made half a century earlier: that the Jews of Europe could not rely on any government or any international body for their safety. The British, exhausted by the war and unable to manage the escalating violence from both Jewish paramilitary organisations and the Arab population, referred the question to the United Nations and announced their intention to withdraw.
1948: Two Narratives of the Same Events
The United Nations Partition Plan of November 1947 — Resolution 181, which proposed dividing Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration — was accepted by the Jewish Agency and rejected by the Arab League and the Palestinian Arab leadership. The subsequent war, which began with the end of the British Mandate on 14 May 1948 and the immediate declaration of the State of Israel, ended with Israel controlling considerably more territory than the Partition Plan had allocated to it, with a Palestinian state never having been established, and with approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs having fled or been expelled from their homes and villages.
In Israeli memory and historiography, the 1948 War of Independence was a desperate struggle for survival by a newly declared state against the combined armies of five Arab nations, won against the odds by a people who had nowhere to retreat to. In Palestinian memory and historiography, the same events are the Nakba — the catastrophe — in which more than half of the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine was displaced and 400 to 600 villages were destroyed, creating the refugee crisis whose political consequences still define the conflict. Both of these accounts are factually accurate. They describe the same events from the perspective of different participants, and the impossibility of reconciling them without acknowledging the full weight of both is one measure of the conflict’s depth.
The Palestinian refugees were not permitted to return. The newly established State of Israel did not allow the refugees back. The Arab states that had fought the war did not integrate the refugees into their own societies, maintaining them instead in camps that institutionalised their displaced status across generations. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, established in 1949, became the primary provider of education, health care, and basic services to the refugee population — a role it continued to play, across seventy years, to a refugee population that had grown by the early twenty-first century to more than five million registered individuals.
Occupation and the Question of Borders
The 1967 Six-Day War transformed the conflict’s geography and political structure in ways from which it has never recovered. Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in June 1967, responding to what its government assessed as an imminent military threat, produced in six days the conquest of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River (including East Jerusalem), and the Golan Heights. The West Bank and Gaza were home to approximately one million Palestinians, who found themselves under Israeli military administration without Israeli citizenship. The occupation — which the Israeli government initially presented as temporary, a bargaining chip in negotiations for a comprehensive peace — proved durable. UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed unanimously in November 1967, called for Israeli withdrawal from “territories occupied in the recent conflict” and for recognition of the right of all states in the region to live within “secure and recognised boundaries.” It provided no mechanism for implementation and was never implemented.
The settlement project — the construction of Israeli civilian settlements in the occupied West Bank — began almost immediately after 1967, justified on security, religious, and nationalist grounds, and continued with variations in pace and political emphasis under every subsequent Israeli government. By 2020, the settler population in the West Bank had grown to approximately 450,000, distributed across more than 130 officially recognised settlements and 100 additional outposts that the Israeli government itself classified as illegal under its own law. The physical presence of the settlements — connected to Israel proper by roads that Palestinians were not permitted to use, secured by military installations, fragmenting the territorial continuity of any future Palestinian state — created facts on the ground that progressively narrowed the space within which a two-state solution was physically possible.
The PLO, Oslo, and the Collapse of the Peace Process
The Palestine Liberation Organisation, founded in 1964 and taken over by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement after 1967, pursued Palestinian national aspirations through a combination of political diplomacy and armed operations. The PLO’s international recognition grew through the 1970s — Arafat’s address to the UN General Assembly in 1974, when he said he had come “bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” was the signal moment of this recognition — even as its attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets generated implacable Israeli hostility.
The First Intifada, which began in December 1987 and continued until 1993, was a popular Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories — primarily sustained civil disobedience, stone-throwing, and general strikes rather than organised armed operations — that changed the political dynamics of the conflict by making the costs of occupation visible to Israeli and international publics in new ways. The Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn in September 1993 in a handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin witnessed by President Clinton, were the high-water mark of the peace process: a mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, a framework for Palestinian self-governance in the occupied territories, and a staged process intended to lead to permanent status negotiations on the most difficult issues — borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements.
What followed was a process of progressive deterioration. The permanent status negotiations never resolved the core issues. Settlement construction continued and accelerated, undermining the Palestinian Authority’s ability to present Oslo as delivering concrete benefits. The assassination of Rabin by a Jewish extremist in November 1995 removed the Israeli leader most committed to the process. The Camp David Summit of 2000 — at which Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak presented what they described as a far-reaching offer and Arafat declined it — produced a fierce dispute about what had actually been offered and why it was rejected. The Second Intifada, which began in September 2000 and lasted until approximately 2005, was more violent than the first: suicide bombings in Israeli cities, Israeli military operations in Palestinian towns, the construction of the separation barrier, approximately 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli dead. It produced a mutual exhaustion that hardened positions rather than creating space for compromise.
Gaza, Hamas, and the Present Impasse
Hamas — the Islamic Resistance Movement, founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood — had built its support in Gaza on a combination of social services, religious authority, and uncompromising opposition to any accommodation with Israel. Its electoral victory in the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006, which international observers certified as free and fair, was followed by a brief civil war with Fatah and the effective partition of Palestinian governance: the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Hamas in Gaza. Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza that restricted the movement of goods and people with severe humanitarian consequences. Hamas continued to fire rockets into southern Israel; Israel conducted periodic military operations in Gaza of increasing intensity.
The two-state solution — the framework supported by most international actors and most peace plans — had by the early 2020s been rendered, in the assessment of many analysts, structurally very difficult to implement by the combination of settlement expansion in the West Bank, the division of Palestinian governance, and the political strengthening of forces on both sides committed to positions incompatible with compromise. The Israeli political system had moved to the right over the preceding two decades, and the Palestinian political system remained divided between the secular nationalism of Fatah and the religious nationalism of Hamas.
The conflict endured as the defining unresolved question of Middle Eastern politics, generating consequences that extended far beyond the territory it was fought over: shaping the politics of the Arab world, inflecting the foreign policies of every major power, and providing a reference point for debates about nationalism, self-determination, displacement, and the relationship between historical claim and present justice that no other modern conflict had approached in symbolic weight. Its resolution, when commentators allowed themselves to imagine it, required concessions from both sides that their current leaderships showed no willingness to make and their current political cultures showed little capacity to support. The cost of its continuation, meanwhile, was paid primarily and disproportionately by the Palestinian civilians whose lives were shaped by occupation, blockade, and the perpetual deferral of statehood — and by the Israeli civilians who lived within range of rockets fired by an organisation committed to their state’s destruction.
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