9 questions about the Israel-Palestineconflict you were too embarrassedto askUpdated by Max Fisher on July 17, 2014, 7:30 a.m. ET @Max_Fisher

max@vox.commax@vox.com

A Palestinian woman walks past an Israeli soldier outside the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

Everyone has heard of the Israel-Palestine conflict

. Everyone knows

it's bad, that it's been going on for a long time, and that there is a lot

of hatred on both sides.

But you may find yourself less clear on the hows and the whys of

the conflict. Why, for example, did Israel invade the Palestinian

territory of Gaza

in July 2014, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian

civilians, many of them children? Why did the militant Palestinian

group Hamas

fire rockets into civilian neighborhoods in Israel? How did this latest

round of violence start in the first place — and why do they hate one

another at all?

What follows are the most basic answers to your most basic

questions. Giant, neon-lit disclaimer: these issues are complicated

and contentious, and this is not an exhaustive or definitive account

of Israel-Palestine's history or the conflict today. But it's a place to

(

http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/intro)

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/gaza-

basics)

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/hamas)

(BBC ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14628835))

start.

1) What are Israel and Palestine?

That sounds like a very basic question but, in a sense, it's at the

center of the conflict.

Israel is an officially Jewish country located in the Middle East.

Palestine is a set of two physically separate, ethnically Arab and

mostly Muslim territories alongside Israel: the West Bank, named

for the western shore of the Jordan River, and Gaza. Those

territories are not independent (more on this later). All together,

Israel and the Palestinian territories are about as populous as Illinois

and about half its size.

Officially, there is no internationally recognized line between Israel

and Palestine; the borders are considered to be disputed, and have

been for decades. So is the status of Palestine: some countries

consider Palestine to be an independent state, while others (like the

US) consider Palestine to be territories under Israeli occupation.

Both Israelis and Palestinians have claims to the land going back

centuries, but the present-day states are relatively new.

2) Why are Israelis and Palestinians fighting?

Israeli soldiers clash with Palestinian stone throwers at a checkpoint outside Jerusalem (AHMAD

GHARABLI/AFP/Getty Images)

This is not, despite what you may have heard, primarily about

religion. On the surface at least, it's very simple: the conflict is over

who gets what land and how it is controlled. In execution, though,

that gets into a lot of really thorny issues, like: Where are the

borders? Can Palestinian refugees return to their former homes in

present-day Israel? More on these later.

The decades-long process of resolving that conflict has

created another, overlapping conflict: managing the very unpleasant

Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, in which Israel has put the

Palestinians under suffocating military occupation and Palestinian

militant groups terrorize Israelis.

BOTH SIDES HAVE SQUANDERED PEACE ANDPERPETUATED CONFLICT, BUT PALESTINIANSTODAY BEAR MOST OF THE SUFFERING

Those two dimensions of the conflict are made even worse by the

long, bitter, violent history between these two peoples. It's not just

that there is lots of resentment and distrust; Israelis and

Palestinians have such widely divergent narratives of the last 70-

plus years, of what has happened and why, that even reconciling

their two realities is extremely difficult. All of this makes it easier for

extremists, who oppose any compromise and want to destroy or

subjugate the other side entirely, to control the conversation and

derail the peace process.

The peace process, by the way, has been going on for decades, but

it hasn't looked at all hopeful since the breakthrough 1993 and 1995

Oslo Accords produced a glimmer of hope that has since

dissipated. The conflict has settled into a terrible cycle and peace

looks less possible all the time.

Something you often hear is that "both sides" are to blame for

perpetuating the conflict, and there's plenty of truth to that. There

has always been and remains plenty of culpability to go around,

plenty of individuals and groups on both sides that squandered

peace and perpetuated conflict many times over. Still, perhaps the

most essential truth of the Israel-Palestine conflict today is that the

conflict predominantly matters for the human suffering it causes.

And while Israelis certainly suffer deeply and in great numbers, the

vast majority of the conflict's toll is incurred by Palestinian civilians (

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5816022/three-kidnapped-teens-

explain-israel-palestine-conflict). Just above, as one metric of that (

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5898581/chart-israel-palestine-

conflict-deaths), are the Israeli and Palestinian conflict-related

deaths every month since late 2000.

3) How did this conflict start in the first place?

(Left map: Passia ( http://www.passia.org/palestine_facts/MAPS/images/jer_maps/UNPartition.html); center

and right maps: Philippe Rekacewicz / Le Monde Diplomatique (

http://mondediplo.com/maps/middleeast1948))

The conflict has been going on since the early 1900s, when the

mostly-Arab, mostly-Muslim region was part of the Ottoman Empire

and, starting in 1917, a "mandate" run by the British Empire.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were moving into the area, as part

of a movement called Zionism

among mostly European Jews to escape

persecution and establish their own state in their ancestral

homeland. (Later, large numbers of Middle Eastern Jews also moved

to Israel, either to escape anti-Semitic violence or because they

were forcibly expelled.)

Communal violence between Jews and Arabs in British Palestine

began spiraling out of control. In 1947, the United Nations approved

a plan to divide British Palestine

into two mostly independent countries,

one for Jews called Israel and one for Arabs called Palestine.

Jerusalem, holy city for Jews and Muslims, was to be a special

international zone.

The plan was never implemented. Arab leaders in the region saw it

as European colonial theft and, in 1948, invaded to keep Palestine

unified. The Israeli forces won the 1948 war, but they pushed well

beyond the UN-designated borders to claim land that was to have

been part of Palestine, including the western half of Jerusalem.

They also uprooted and expelled

entire

Palestinian communities, creating about 700,000 refugees, whose

descendants now number 7 million and are still considered

refugees.

The 1948 war ended with Israel roughly controlling the territory that

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/zionism)

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/1948-partition)

(

http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-palestine/nakba)

you will see marked on today's maps as "Israel"; everything except

for the West Bank and Gaza, which is where most Palestinian fled to

(many also ended up in refugee camps in neighboring countries)

and are today considered the Palestinian territories. The borders

between Israel and Palestine have been disputed and fought over

ever since. So has the status of those Palestinian refugees and the

status of Jerusalem.

That's the first major dimension of the conflict: reconciling the

division that opened in 1948. The second began in 1967, when Israel

put those two Palestinian territories under military occupation.

4) Why is Israel occupying the Palestinian territories?

A Palestinian boy next to the Israeli wall around the town of Qalqilya (David Silverman/Getty Images)

This is a hugely important part of the conflict today, especially for

Palestinians.

Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in

1967. Up to that point, Gaza had been (more or less) controlled by

Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan. But in 1967 there was another

war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, during which Israel

occupied the two Palestinian territories. (Israel also took control of

Syria's Golan Heights, which it annexed in 1981, and Egypt's Sinai

Peninsula, which it returned to Egypt in 1982.)

Israeli forces have occupied and controlled the West Bank ever

since. It withdrew its occupying troops and settlers from Gaza in

2005, but maintains a full blockade of the territory, which has

turned Gaza into what human rights organizations sometimes call (

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/11/5890283/like-coming-out-of-a-

maximum-security-prison-what-its-like-to-cross) an "open-air

prison" and has pushed the unemployment rate up to 40 percent (

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4520387,00.html).

Israel says the occupation is necessary for security given its tiny

size: to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks and to provide a

buffer from foreign invasions. But that does not explain the settlers.

Settlers are Israelis who move into the West Bank. They are widely

considered to violate international law, which forbids an occupying

force from moving its citizens into occupied territory. Many of the

500,000 settlers are just looking for cheap housing; most live within

a few miles of the Israeli border, often in the around surrounding

Jerusalem.

Others move deep into the West Bank to claim land for Jews, out of

religious fervor and/or a desire to see more or all of the West Bank

absorbed into Israel. While Israel officially forbids this and often

evicts these settlers, many are still able to take root.

In the short term, settlers of all forms make life for Palestinians even

more difficult, by forcing the Israeli government to guard them with

walls or soldiers that further constrain Palestinians. In the long term,

(Fanack ( http://fanack.com/en/countries/israel/history/the-blind-alley/jewish-settlements/))

the settlers create what are sometimes called "facts on the

ground": Israeli communities that blur the borders and expand land

that Israel could claim for itself in any eventual peace deal.

The Israeli occupation (

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5816022/three-kidnapped-teens-

explain-israel-palestine-conflict) of the West Bank is all-consuming

for the Palestinians who live there, constrained by Israeli

checkpoints and 20-foot walls, subject to an Israeli military justice

system ( http://www.vox.com/2014/4/21/5636486/west-bank-

justice-data) in which on average two children are arrested every

day ( http://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878687/the-real-outrage-of-

israeli-forces-beating-and-arresting-a-15-year), stuck with an

economy stifled by strict Israeli border control, and countless other

indignities large and small.

5) Can we take a quick music break?

Music breaks like this are usually an opportunity to step back and

appreciate the aspects of a people and culture beyond the conflict

that has put them in the news. And it's true that there is much more

to Israelis and Palestinians than their conflict. But music has also

been a really important medium by which Israelis and Palestinians

deal with and think about the conflict. The degree to which the

conflict has seeped into Israel-Palestinian music is a sign of how

deeply and pervasively it effects Israelis and Palestinians.

Above, from the wealth of Palestinian hip-hop is the group DAM (

https://myspace.com/damrap/music/songs), whose name is both

an acronym for Da Arabian MCs and the Arabic verb for "to last

damrap 02  Mali  Huriye  -­  I  Don`t  Have  Freedome

Política de Cookies

forever." The group has been around since the late 1990s and are

from the Israeli city of Lod, Israeli citizens who are part of the

country's Arab minority. The Arab Israeli experience, typically one of

solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and a sense

that Arab-Israelis are far from equal in the Jewish state, comes

through in their music, which is highly political and deals with

themes of disenfranchisement and dispossession in the great

tradition of American hip-hop.

Christiane Amanpour interviewed DAM about their music last year (

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iioCyIKbEpI). Above is their

song "I Don't Have Freedom," full English lyrics of which are here (

http://www.damrap.com/album/mali-huriye-i-don%E2%80%99t-

have-freedom/77), from their 2007 album Dedication. Sample

line: "We've been like this more than 50 years / Living as prisoners

behind the bars of paragraphs /Of agreements that change nothing."

Now here is a sample of Israel's wonderful jazz scene, one of the

best in the world, from the bassist and band leader Avishai Cohen (

http://www.avishaimusic.com/). Cohen is best known in the US for

his celebrated 2006 instrumental album Continuo, but let's instead

listen to the song "El Hatzipor" from 2009's Aurora.

The lyrics are from an 1892 poem of the same name, meaning "To

the Bird," by the Ukrainian Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. The

poem (translated here ( http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?

song=elhatzipor)) expresses the hopeful yearning among early

European Zionists like Bialik to escape persecution in Europe and

find salvation in the holy land; that it still resonates among Israelis

over 100 years later is a reminder of both the tremendous hopes

invested in the dream of a Jewish state, and perhaps the sense that

this dream is still not secure.

6) Why is there fighting today between Israel and Gaza?

On the surface, this is just the latest round of fighting in 27 years of

war between Israel and Hamas

, a Palestinian militant group that formed in 1987

seeks Israel's destruction and is internationally recognized as a

terrorist organization for its attacks targeting civilians — and which

since 2006 has ruled Gaza. Israeli forces periodically attack Hamas

and other militant groups in Gaza, typically with air strikes but in

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/hamas)

2006 and 2009 with ground invasions.

ONLY HAMAS DELIBERATELY TARGETSCIVILIANS, BUT MOST ARE STILL PALESTINIANSKILLED BY ISRAELI STRIKES

The latest round of fighting

was sparked when members of

Hamas in the West Bank murdered three Israeli youths who were

studying there on June 10. Though the Hamas members appear to

have acted without approval from their leadership, which

nonetheless praised the attack, Israel responded by arresting large

numbers of Hamas personnel in the West Bank and with air strikes

against the group in Gaza.

After some Israeli extremists murdered a Palestinian youth in

Jerusalem and Israeli security forces cracked down on protests,

compounding Palestinian outrage, Hamas and other Gaza groups

launched dozens of rockets into Israel, which responded with many

more air strikes. So far the fighting has killed one Israeli and 230

Palestinians (

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/toll-

israel-gaza-conflict.html); two UN agencies have separately

estimated that 70-plus percent (

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/13/5894689/these-harrowing-tweets-

show-what-life-is-like-in-gaza-under-israeli) of the fatalities are

civilians. On Thursday, July 17, Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza,

which Israel says is to shut down tunnels that Hamas could use to

cross into Israel.

That get backs to that essential truth about the conflict today:

Palestinian civilians endure the brunt of it. While Israel targets

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/gaza-israel-hamas-2104)

militants and Hamas targets civilians, Israel's disproportionate

military strength and its willingness to target militants based in

dense urban communities means that Palestinians civilians are far

more likely to be killed than any other group.

But those are just the surface reasons; there's a lot more going on

here as well.

7) Why does this violence keep happening?

Palestinian youth throw stones at an Israeli tank in 2003. (SAIF DAHLAH/AFP/Getty Images)

The simple version is that violence has become the status quo and

that trying for peace is risky, so leaders on both ends seem to

believe that managing the violence is preferable, while the Israeli

and Palestinian publics show less and less interest in pressuring

their leaders to take risks for peace.

Hamas's commitment to terrorism and to Israel's destruction lock

Gazans into a conflict with Israel that can never be won and that

produces little more than Palestinian civilian deaths. Israel's

blockade on Gaza, which strangles economic life there and

punishes civilians, helps produce a climate that is hospitable to

extremism, and allows Hamas to nurture a belief that even if Hamas

may never win, at least refusing to put down their weapons is a form

of liberation.

Many Palestinians in Gaza naturally compare Hamas to Palestinian

leaders in the West Bank, who have emphasized peace and

compromise and negotiations — only to have been rewarded with

an Israeli military occupation that shows no sign of ending and ever-

expanding settlements. This is not to endorse that logic, but it is not

difficult to see why some Palestinians might conclude that violent

"resistance" is preferable.

That sense of Palestinian hopelessness and distrust in Israel and

the peace process has been a major contributor to violence in

recent years. In the early 2000s, there was also a lot of fighting

between Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. This was called

the Second Intifada

(uprising), and followed a less-violent

Palestinian uprising against the occupation in the late 1980s. In the

Second Intifada, which was the culmination of Palestinian

frustration with the failure of the 1990s peace process, Palestinian

militants adopted suicide bombings of Israeli buses and other forms

of terror. Israel responded with a severe military crack-down. The

fighting killed approximately 3,200 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis.

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/intifadas)

A 2002 Palestinian bus bombing that killed 18 in Jerusalem (Getty Images)

It's not just Palestinians, though: many Israelis also increasingly

distrust Palestinians and their leaders and see them as innately

hostile to peace. In the parlance of Israel-Palestine, the expression

for this attitude is, "We don't have a partner for peace." That feeling

became especially deep after the Second Intifada; months of bus

bombings and cafe bombings made many Israelis less supportive of

peace efforts and more willing to accept or simply ignore the

occupation's effects on Palestinians.

This sense of apathy (

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/11/5880707/price-tag-israeli-settlers)

has been further enabled by Israel's increasingly successful security

programs, such as the Iron Dome system that shoots down Gazan

rockets, which insulates many Israelis from the conflict and makes it

easier to ignore. Public support for a peace deal that would grant

Palestine independence, once high among Israelis, has dropped (

http://972mag.com/polls-two-states-was-a-casualty-even-before-

the-war/93418/). Meanwhile, a fringe movement of right-wing Israeli

extremists has become increasingly violent, particularly in the West

Bank where many live as settlers, further pulling Israeli politics away

from peace and thus allowing the conflict to drift.

8) How is the conflict going to end?

The Dome of the Rock (at left with gold dome) is one of the holiest sites in Islam and sits atop the ancient

Temple Mount ruins, the Western Wall of which (at right) is the holiest site in Jerusalem. You can see how this

would create logistical problems. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

There are three ways the conflict could end. Only one of them is

both viable and peaceful — the two-state solution — but it is also

extremely difficult, and the more time goes on the harder it gets.

One-state solution: The first is to erase the borders and put

Israelis and Palestinians together into one equal, pluralistic state,

called the "one-state solution." Very few people think this could be

viable for the simple reason of demographics; Arabs would very

soon outnumber Jews. After generations of feeling disenfranchised

and persecuted by Israel, the Arab majority would almost certainly

vote to dismantle everything that makes Israel a Jewish state.

Israelis, after everything they've done to finally achieve a Jewish

state after thousands of years of their own persecution, would

never surrender that state and willingly become a minority among a

population they see as hostile.

Destruction of one side: The second way this could end is with

one side outright vanquishing the other, in what would certainly be a

catastrophic abuse of human rights. This is the option preferred by

extremists such as Hamas and far-right Israeli settlers. In the

Palestinian extremist version, Israel is abolished and replaced with a

single Palestinian state; Jews become a minority, most likely

replacing today's conflict with an inverse conflict. In the Israeli

extremist version, Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza entirely,

either turning Palestinians into second-class citizens in the manner

of apartheid South Africa or expelling them en masse.

Two-state solution: The third option is for both Israelis and

Palestinians to have their own independent states; that's called the

"two-state solution" and it's advocated by most everyone as the

only option that would create long-term peace. But it requires

working out lots of details so thorny and difficult that it's not clear if

it will, or can, happen. Eventually, the conflict will have dragged on

for so long that this solution will become impossible.

9) Why is it so hard to make peace?

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin hold

Nobel Peace Prizes won in 1994 for their 1993 Oslo Accords. A follow-on agreement in 1995 was the last major

Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. (Photo by Yaakov Saar/GPO via Getty Images)

The one-state solution is hard because there is no viable, realistic

version that both sides would accept. In theory, the two-state

solution is great. But it poses some very difficult questions. Here

are the four big ones and why they're so tough to solve. To be clear,

these aren't abstract concepts but real, heavily debated issues that

have sunk peace talks before:

Jerusalem

: Both sides claim Jerusalem 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 walled Old City that is not at all well shaped to be divided into

two countries. Making the division even tougher, Israeli

communities have been building up more and more in and around

the city.

West Bank borders

: There's no clear agreement on where

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/jerusalem)

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/west-bank)

precisely to draw the borders, which roughly follow the armistice

line of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, especially since hundreds of

thousands of Israeli settlers have built up suburban-style

communities just on the Palestinian side of the line. This one is not

actually impossible — Israel could give Palestine some land as part

of "land swaps" in exchange for settler-occupied territory — but it's

still hard. The more time goes on, the more settlements expand, the

harder it becomes to create a viable Palestinian state.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM OF ALL MAY BE TIME:IT'S RUNNING OUT

Refugees

: This one is really hard. There are, officially, seven

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 they absorb seven million Palestinian returnees,

then Jews will become a minority, which for the reasons explained

above Israelis will never accept. There are ideas to work around the

problem, like financial restitution, but no agreement on them.

Security: This is another big one. For Palestinians, security needs

are simple: a sovereign Palestinian state. For Israelis, it's a bit more

complicated: Israelis fear that an independent Palestine could turn

hostile and ally with other Middle East states to launch the sort of

invasion Israel barely survived in 1973. Maybe more plausibly, Israelis

worry that Hamas would take over an independent West Bank and

use it to launch attacks on Israelis, as they've done with Gaza. Any

compromise would likely involve Palestinians giving up some

( http://www.vox.com/cards/israel-

palestine/nakba)

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sovereignty, for example promising permanent de-militarization or

allowing an international peacekeeping force, and after years of

feeling heavily abused by strong-handed Israeli forces, Palestinians

are not eager about the idea of Israel having veto power over their

sovereignty and security.

Those are all very difficult problems. But here's the thing: time is

running out. The more that the conflict drags on, the more difficult it

will be to solve any of these issues, much less all of them. That will

make it harder and harder for Israel to justify keeping Gaza under

blockade and the West Bank under occupation; eventually it will

have to unilaterally withdraw, which the current leadership opposes,

or it will have to annex the territories and become either an

apartheid-style state that denies full rights to those new Palestinian

citizens or abandon its Jewish state.

Meanwhile, extremism and apathy and distrust are rising on both

sides. The violence of the conflict is becoming status quo, a

regularly recurring event that is replacing the peace process itself

as the way by which the conflict advances. It is making things worse

for Israelis and Palestinians alike all the time, and unless they can

break from the hatred and violence long enough to make peace,

that will continue.

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