The conflict in the Middle East is explained simply: that is why the Palestinians attack Israel

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The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians has a history that goes back thousands of years. We explain to you the context of the conflict in the Middle East.

To understand the conflict in the Middle East, you have to turn back the clock 3,000 years. The Jewish religion developed in the area of ​​Palestine more than 1,000 years before the beginning of our era. In 70 after the birth of Christ, the Romans destroyed and plundered the Temple in Jerusalem, after which the Jews spread throughout the world in the ‘diaspora’ (Ancient Greek for dispersion).

In the 16th century, Jews began to migrate back to their ‘promised land’, where mainly Muslims, but also Christians, had now settled. The region of Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1516 to 1918.

After the end of the 19th century, waves of Jewish immigration took place in the region of Palestine. During the Holocaust in World War II, approximately 300,000 Jews in this area sought safety from the Nazis.

Britain, which governed Palestine from 1920, transferred its mandate to the United Nations, which voted in November 1947 to create two states – one Jewish and one Arab – after violence between the population groups flared up. On May 14, 1948, the day the British Mandate was resigned, the leader of the Zionist-Socialist Workers’ Party, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), proclaimed the State of Israel.

The neighboring Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria responded to the proclamation with an attack on Israel. During the war, Israel was able to expand its territory and conquer the western part of Jerusalem. Many Arab residents fled to neighboring countries, where many of them and their descendants still live in refugee camps. Conversely, many Jews from Arab countries fled to Israel.

This Palestinian war of 1948/49 was followed by other wars. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Israel demonstrated its military superiority, during the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel bombed the Egyptian Air Force within a few hours, the war of attrition against Egypt from 1968 to 1970 ended in a draw, and Egypt and Syria were also not in state of Israel during the surprisingly launched Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Israel’s conquest of new territories exacerbated the conflict with the Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of people came under Israeli occupation and military rule in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

The focus is on the two-state solution, which corresponds to the 1947 UN partition plan and is also supported by Switzerland. The plan: an independent Palestine should be established alongside Israel. At the start of the new millennium, this concept gained increasing support on both sides, until hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu (73) came to power in Israel and angered the other side by building settlements in the West Bank.

The one-state solution stipulates that a unified state will be formed from the territories of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The three-state solution envisions ceding control of the Gaza Strip to Egypt and control of part of the West Bank to Jordan, or creating two separate Palestinian states from these two parts.

Source: Blick