Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist party, and is under Israeli blockade but not ground troop occupation. Though the two-state plan is clear in theory, the two sides are still deeply divided over how to make it work in practice. 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.
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Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. What are Israel and Palestine? Why are they fighting? Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. There is a common view in the United States, on both the right and the left, that the US government gives Israel so much support because it loves and supports Israel's role in the conflict.
On the right, the view is that this policy is correct; on the left, the view is that it is a mistake and a result of pro-Israel lobbying or other distorting forces. Both sides are wrong: the US position has long been and remains that supporting Israel is the only way to nudge the Israelis to the negotiating table, and to make democratically elected Israeli leaders feel politically secure enough that they will take the necessary risks for peace.
This is the same reason the US gives heavy financial and political support to the Palestinian Authority. There is a valid case to be made that the high level of American support for Israel does, to some extent, enable its policies in the conflict. There is also a valid case, though, that withdrawing American support would make Israelis and their leaders feel more threatened and isolated, thus empowering anti-peace politics and making peace that much less likely.
Either way, it is not the case that American support for Israel is so overwhelmingly decisive that switching it off would end the conflict. There's a popular view among Americans that Palestinians have rejected nonviolent resistance, and that if only they took up the lessons of nonviolent Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, then that would bring the conflict to an end.
Logically, this is a confusing argument. It assumes that Israel is driving the conflict, as the British did by colonizing India, while simultaneously putting the onus for ending it on Palestinians. It also conveniently overlooks, as Westerners often do, the fact that Gandhi was an outlier.
Most colonial-era independence leaders to some extent endorsed violence, including South Africa's Nelson Mandela. More fundamentally, though, this is wrong because there are lots of Palestinians who have used, and continue to use, nonviolence to organize against the Israeli occupation. They consistently fail, because they are ignored, because they're put down by Israeli security forces, or because they lose momentum against the overwhelming force of the occupation itself.
Don't take my word for it: watch a nonviolent Palestinian campaign unfold, and mostly fail, right before your eyes in the award-winning documentary Five Broken Cameras , filmed by a Palestinian man as his village tried to stop Israel from building a wall that would cut off villagers from their olive groves.
Palestinians attempted nonviolence en masse in the late s and early '90s, during which the first intifada uprising challenged the occupation using protests, strikes, and other mass demonstrations. The first intifada did also include Palestinian violence against Israelis, though, and in the early s Palestinians launched the second intifada, which was defined by widespread violence, including terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.
A common variation of this argument is to acknowledge that some Palestinians are nonviolent but point out that other Palestinians are violent, and conclude that Palestinian nonviolence won't be effective until all Palestinians adopt it.
There is a degree of merit to this — Hamas is indeed a large and very violent Palestinian movement, among others, and violence speaks much more loudly than the nonviolence it can drown out — but it makes some fundamental mistakes. First of all, British India had violent independence movements as well as Gandhi's nonviolence, so clearly violence does not cancel out nonviolence. Second, were all Palestinian violence suddenly to cease, there is no indication that the conflict would magically resolve.
Observers often point out that Gazan leaders chose violence, and they got a full Israeli withdrawal in , but West Bank leaders have chosen peaceful compromise, and their reward has been ever-expanding settlements and occupation.
None of this, to be clear, is to argue that Palestinian violent resistance works or is commendable. It does not and is not. The Gaza-based militant group Hamas, by launching rockets and other attacks at Israelis, has only deepened the isolation and suffering of Gazans. The second intifada left Palestinians much worse off than they were before it began.
The point is that nonviolent resistance is certainly commendable and important, but no matter how many Palestinian Gandhis emerge, that is not enough on its own to end the conflict. There is a pleasant fiction in the United States and parts of Israel that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists in a sort of suspended animation, on pause and simply awaiting diplomatic resolution.
But the truth is that the conflict never really goes away for most of the 12 million people in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Part of this misconception, Duss says, is that there are "only so many stories to write about, 'occupation now entering 17,th day, remains horrible way to live.
Another factor is that after the second intifada of the early s, Israel built up huge walls around Gaza and West Bank communities, physically separating Palestinians from Israelis.
While Israelis who live in the country's south are well aware of the rockets fired from Gaza into their communities, most Israelis live physically separated from the conflict, and that is the perspective Americans are more familiar with. Tel Aviv feels like a peaceful, prosperous Mediterranean beach city, which it is. But less than an hour drive away are Palestinian towns in the West Bank where the conflict is absolutely palpable even in periods of "calm.
In the West Bank, beyond the daily humiliations of Israeli military checkpoints, the occupation has severely constricted movement and trade. The stifled economy is the easiest thing to measure, but many other aspects of Palestinian life suffer, as well.
Periodically the situation will escalate so rapidly, with such relatively slight provocation, and to such a level of severity that the rest of us can't ignore what every Palestinian and many Israelis already know: the conflict may be quieter some days than it is on others, but it is still active, still destroying lives and communities, and still scarring these two societies every day.
The status quo of the Israel-Palestine conflict is bad for everyone, but it is especially bad for Palestinians, who are under a suffocating blockade in Gaza and military occupation in the West Bank. They do not have a state or full rights, while Israelis have both. And the longer the conflict drags on, the tougher it will be to change that. So you can see why some might think that all Israelis want this to happen and want the conflict to drag on forever or to end it by permanently expelling or subjugating Palestinians — but when you look at how Israel makes decisions, and what Israeli voters want, it becomes pretty clear that this is not the case.
As is true of any country, especially a parliamentary democracy, Israel's actions are less the result of a single calculated strategy than they are about messy internal politics, short-term thinking, and strategic drift. Take, as a micro example, Israel's approach to Gaza since Hamas took over in Israel has invaded or launched extended bombing campaigns in Gaza every few years; this costs many Israeli lives, in addition to the much higher Palestinian death toll, and it never actually solves the underlying problems.
Clearly Israel does not have long-term strategy here at all, much less a nefarious secret plan. That lack of a strategy is bad and helps perpetuate the cycle of violence, but it is a cycle that's painful for Israelis, as well. Israeli policy has changed over time; just like American politics, it has been different depending on who is leading the government. In the early s, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a peace deal with the Palestinians, even though Israel's concessions for the deal were so unpopular among Israelis that a far-right extremist assassinated Rabin.
There were valid reasons the offer failed Nathan Thrall has written a good history of what happened , but the point is that Israel would not have offered this plan if it secretly desired the permanent occupation of the West Bank. There are certainly extremists in Israeli politics — sometimes quite prominent extremists — who want to permanently annex the West Bank and make Palestinians second-class citizens, or to systemically expel Palestinians from their land en masse in an act of 21st-century ethnic cleansing.
And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has at times indulged these extremists in a cynical ploy to keep himself in power. But there are also prominent Israeli politicians who want and push publicly for a two-state peace deal that would grant Palestinians independence and full rights. There are other political factions involved in this, as well; they fight all the time, and very publicly, pushing and pulling Israeli government policy in one direction or another.
When you watch that happening, and watch Israel's short-term thinking on problems like Gaza, it becomes clearer that Israeli policy on the conflict is often formed day to day and week to week by a messy process.
To be clear, none of that is to absolve Israel of responsibility for its actions, only to honestly assess how those actions come to be. It is also not to absolve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is clearly not a peacenik.
But he has often seemed more interested in managing internal Israeli politics, keeping his parliamentary coalition together, catering to Israeli public opinion, and delivering short-term security, all over taking difficult steps toward long-term peace. That is a massive failure in its own right, and it has contributed to the perpetuation of the conflict regardless of his motive, but it is also not the same thing as a deliberate, continuous Israeli strategy to achieve the destruction of the Palestinian identity — even if it may one day be the effect.
When Middle East experts talk about how to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, they often say that everyone broadly agrees on the terms of a peace deal, and the challenge is just getting everyone to trust one another long enough to see it through. If only this were true. It is true that the main parties have at least publicly endorsed the idea of a two-state solution, which means that Israel and Palestine would form two separate, independent states very roughly along the armistice lines set after the war, plus what are called "land swaps" in which Israel would claim some West Bank land that is dominated by Israeli settlers, and in exchange Palestine would get some land from Israel.
In execution, though, there are a few extremely thorny details that would make this really difficult to see through. Here are, just to give you a sense of how difficult finding peace is, two of the toughest:.
Jerusalem : How would Jerusalem be divided between Israel and Palestine? Both claim the city as their capital; it's also a center of Jewish and Muslim and Christian holy sites that are literally located physically on top of one another, in the antiquity-era Old City that is not at all well-shaped to be divided across two countries. It used to be formally divided between East and West Jerusalem, but in Israel annexed about 27 square miles of East Jerusalem.
Making the division even tougher, Israeli communities have been building up more and more in and around the city and around Jerusalem suburbs. Refugees : There are, officially, 7 million Palestinian refugees, who are designated as such because their descendants fled or were expelled from what is today Israel, places like Ramla and Jaffa. Palestinians frequently ask for what they call the "right of return": permission to return to their land and live with full rights. That sounds like a no-brainer, but Israel's objection is that if it absorbs 7 million Palestinian returnees, then Jews will become a minority; Israelis, after everything they've done to finally achieve a Jewish state after centuries of their own persecution, would never surrender that state and willingly become a minority among a population they see as hostile.
Palestinians, for their part, could not accept a peace deal that does not address the millions of Palestinians living as refugees around the Middle East. There are ideas to work around the problem, like financial restitution, but no agreement on them.
And there are even more issues. How can Israel guarantee that an independent West Bank would not, like Gaza, be taken over by a hostile anti-Israeli militant group that will use the territory to launch rockets at Israeli neighborhoods? How could Palestinians accept a peace deal that required them to curb their own sovereignty by giving Israel, for example, control over Palestinian airspace?
And on and on. To be clear, this does not mean that a two-state peace deal is impossible. It just means finding a deal that simultaneously addresses the most fundamental needs of Israelis and Palestinians, much less convinces leaders on both sides to make the painful concessions necessary to see it through, is really, really hard.
View our Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions organizing page to start a campaign or connect with local activists. Pinkwashing is an explicit strategy taken up in recent years by the government of Israel to portray Israel as a leader in gay rights and a gay tourism destination to improve its human rights image while deflecting attention away from the extreme violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Watch their story — our story — here.
End the Deadly Exchange. When US law enforcement trade tactics with the Israeli police and military, Israel deepens its military occupation and the US heightens its violence of policing. Days ago, Booking. Senators: Investigate Israeli Violence! No one should be killed for taking part in a peaceful protest.
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