CHAPTER 3
Overview
O
f all the conflicts in the contemporary world, none has proved to be as dan-
gerous to broader peace as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian
Arabs. Civil wars in Northern Ireland, Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, sub-Saharan
Africa, and other places have lasted longer or killed many more people, but the dis-
pute between the Israelis and Palestinians—over a small patch of land in what is prob-
ably the world’s most volatile region—has stubbornly resisted even the most determined
efforts at a diplomatic solution. As early as the 1920s, British authorities wrote reports
warning that Arabs and Jews would not live quietly together in the historic land of
Palestine. Events of the next eight decades proved the accuracy of their assessment.
In 1947 the newly created United Nations believed that it had solved the prob-
lem of conflicting claims to Palestine by dividing the land between the Arabs and Jews.
The war that erupted in 1948 after the declaration of Israel shattered any assumption
that the claims of history could be satisfied so easily. After the fighting, the Jews, now
calling themselves Israelis, controlled most of the land. Israel took control of the rest
of Palestine—the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem—in the June 1967 war.
Four decades later, in 2007, the Jewish state of Israel—which has more than 1 mil-
lion Arab citizens, constituting nearly one-fifth of its population—continued to dom-
inate the lives of more than 3 million stateless, increasingly frustrated Palestinians in
the territories occupied in 1967.
Although many Israelis delighted at the expansion of their country, the occupa-
tion would not be a benign experience, by and large, for either the Israelis or the Pales-
tinians. Various Palestinian nationalist groups soon began launching attacks against
Israeli institutions, and eventually against Israeli civilians, dispelling any illusions that
the Palestinians would meekly submit to Israeli authority. The Israelis improved some
public services that the Jordanian government had ignored in East Jerusalem and the
West Bank, but Israeli civilian and military authorities were stern, often unforgiving,
rulers.
As has been the case with the broader dispute between Israel and the Arab Middle
East, differing historical narratives frame the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.165