Israel-Palestine Conflict

Israel-Palestine Conflict
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Highlights

Israel is the world\'s only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land.  

Israel is the world's only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land.

Between 1896 and 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled from Europe to what was then British-controlled Palestine, including large numbers forced out of Europe during the Holocaust. Israeli forces defeated the Palestinian militias and Arab armies.

The UN partition promised 56 per cent of British Palestine for the Jewish state; by the end of the war, Israel possessed 77 percent — everything except the West Bank and the eastern quarter of Jerusalem (controlled by Jordan), as well as the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt). It left Israelis with a state, but not Palestinians.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is the national representative of the Palestinian people. It runs the Palestinian National Authority (PA), the semi-autonomous government tasked with managing the Palestinian territories until it makes a deal with Israel.

Fatah, the secular nationalist political party that's dominated Palestinian politics for decades, controls the PLO and PA. In practice, the PLO runs the government in the West Bank but not in Gaza, which is governed by Hamas. It also conducts peace talks on behalf of the Palestinians, but its authority to implement those deals has in the past been hampered by poor relations with Hamas.

Hamas is a Palestinian Islamist political organization and militant group that governs Gaza independently of the Palestinian Authority. Sometimes called "Oslo" after the 1993 Oslo Accords that kicked it off, the peace process goal is a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank in exchange for Palestinians agreeing to permanently end attacks on Israeli targets — a formula often called "land for peace."

The "two-state solution" would create an independent Israel and Palestine, and is the mainstream approach to resolving the conflict. Most polling suggests that both Israelis and Palestinians prefer a two-state solution. There is a fear that if the sides cannot negotiate a two-state solution, a de facto one-state outcome will be inevitable. (Courtesy: www.vox.com; for more details, visit https://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/hamas)

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