Arab Israeli Conflict
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Claudio Erazo
Review Article Project
Clarification of the Problem
No other aspect of Middle Eastern politics has received the attention that has been devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict. International news coverage has portrayed the gruesome violence of war and suicide bombings directly related to the Arab-Israeli conflict for half a century now. Strangely enough, even close observers have often failed to understand this important issue. For some, the conflict is so emotionally charged that they are unable to analyze it rationally and objectively. For all, it is extremely complex, involving actors and interactions at and between three different levels.
At the core of the dispute is competition between two peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, to control the same piece of land, known to the former as Israel and to the latter as Palestine. To Zionists, those who believe that Jews have a right to a national home in historic Palestine, the claim to this land is based on the existence of a Jewish nation there some two thousand years ago. It is further justified by perceptions of enduring anti-Semitism, by the trauma of the Holocaust, by claims that Jews have "made the desert bloom," by the relatively democratic nature of the state, and by the assertion that Palestinian claimants to the land are Arabs and thus should be accommodated elsewhere by one or more of the many Arab states in the region.
Palestinian counterclaims rest on their ownership and occupation of the land for centuries, on the fact that they played no part in the Holocaust and their denial that they harbor anti-Semitic beliefs (both Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages), on the argument that Western powers implanted Israel in the region without the permission of its residents, and on the basis that Palestinian national and civil rights are denied by the presence of a state that unites such rights exclusively or primarily to Jews. Since the beginning of Zionist settlement in Palestine in the late nineteenth century, each side has considered the other a mortal threat to its existence, an enemy with whom compromise may be more dangerous than unyielding resistance...