Many Israelis believe that they have a God-given right to Palestine that cannot be
denied and that this overrides all other considerations. Even some Israelis who dismiss
such theological claims believe that Jews deserve to rule over all or most of Palestine
because of their historical sufferings, the democracy they have built amid the region’s
autocracies, and their success over the Arabs in war. Moreover, the official Israeli
mythology asserts that Israel always has been the party offering reconciliation and the
Palestinians (and other Arabs) the ones who nearly always spurn it, choosing instead
to respond with terrorism and war.
The Palestinian narrative also has roots in perceived historical injustices, beginning
with the British decision in 1917 to create a “national home” for the Jews in Pales-
tine, continuing through the United Nations’ efforts at partition three decades later,
and culminating in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967. Palestinians
view the Israelis as the ones refusing to compromise for peace, subjugating them with
their economic and military power, and wanting to gain permanent control over the
territories occupied in 1967.
Some Israelis and Palestinians have acknowledged the misrepresentations in their
own side’s narrative and have recognized elements of the other side’s grievances, but
those with such views have rarely held positions of power. Most often, true believers—
or leaders afraid of the true believers—have been the decision makers.
The central events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the establishment of Israel
in 1948, along with the resulting war that preserved the state, and the June 1967 War,
in which Israel captured parts of Palestine that had remained under Arab control.
These events made Israeli Jews the overseers of Palestinian Arabs who believed the land
rightfully theirs. This was, and continues to form, the essence of their conflict.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a classic war between occupiers and the
occupied, in some respects similar to the struggle the Jews waged against the British
when they controlled Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. As a people without a
state, the Palestinians have not fought conventional battles against Israel or even had
an army to defend or seize territory. Even so, the history of the conflict is one of vio-
lence, by both sides. Israel, with the strongest and most technologically advanced army
in the Middle East, has caused vastly more casualties than have the Palestinians, whose
weapons have included airplane hijackings, suicide bombs, car bombs, improvised
rockets, and even stones. In the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada (1987–1993), and
the second uprising, called the al-Aqsa intifada (2000–early 2005), about three times
as many Palestinians died as did Israelis. Israel’s frequent military occupation of Pales-
tinian cities, the army’s strict control of travel by Palestinians, the assassination of fac-
tion leaders, and other tactics may dampen violence on occasion, but they never stop
it entirely and also add to Palestinian grievances against Israel. By 2004 Prime Min-
ister Ariel Sharon, over the years one of Israel’s chief advocates of using military power
against the Palestinians, seized upon “disengagement”—the physical separation of
Israelis and Palestinians—by withdrawing from Gaza and building a fence in and
around the West Bank, in part as a way to solve the problem of violence. The long-
term success of such measures remains in doubt, as evidenced by Palestinians’ resort
to rocket fire that crosses fences and borders.
Despite their respective narratives blaming each other, each side has missed or
ignored opportunities for a peaceful solution to their conflict. Several such opportu-
nities arose during the quarter-century after the June 1967 War, but the wounds from
166 ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS