ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT: A BRIEF REFRESHER

I’m still trying to sort through it all. 

I’ll never understand the death of innocent children.

For most of my life, tensions in the Middle East seemed a distant distraction by religious zealots that went back thousands and thousands of years, fodder for the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran; and then Jimmy and I toured the Holy Land. 

I’ve seen the 25-foot tall wall, dubbed the “Apartheid Wall” or “Berlin Wall” by the 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the 2 million Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.  It was chilling; and sad.  

When finished, Israel's "separation barriers" will cover over 400 miles.

It was chilling to realize that in almost seventy years a trickle of Jewish immigrants turned into a flood of epic proportions that ultimately displaced 700,000 Arabs, the then majority population; sad to consider just how much history repeats itself.  

What was really sad was acknowledging just how little I personally knew/remembered about the Israel-Palestine Conflict before my Middle East trip; and how quickly that conflict has escalated (again!) in the weeks since we’ve returned. 

If you’re a loyal blogee, though, you know how much I tend to learn (and then just have to share) when it comes to travel.   

Did you know . . . 

This conflict, ongoing for almost seventy years is over who gets what land, and how that land is controlled; it’s not about religion.  The fact that land happens to encompass thousands of years of religious history undoubtedly ups the ante, though, particularly given both sides claim holy sites in the divided city of Jerusalem, sites that are literally stacked one on top of the other.

The gold, Islamic Dome of the Rock sits atop the holiest of Jewish sites, the Temple Mount.

That land involves the Jewish state of Israel, and the two physically separate, ethnically Arab and mostly Muslim territories, officially the Palestinian Occupied Territories, alongside Israel:  Gaza, a strip of land (146 square miles with a population of 1.4 million; the 40th most densely populated urban area in the world) bordering Egypt to the south, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and Israel to the north and east; and East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a portion of the city of Jerusalem named for its location along the western shore of the Jordan River, with a population of roughly 2.4 million.  

Thanks Wikipedia; you always come through for me!

While both territories are officially Palestinian, Gaza is ruled by Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1987; the West Bank territory is ruled by the more moderate Fatah party.  Hamas is committed to terrorism and to Israel’s destruction.  Fatah favors a more peaceful, co-existence approach to negotiations.  Certainly makes for challenging peace negotiations.  Just ask U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.  

This was as close as we ever got to the Gaza Strip.

Originally a 1947 United Nations mandate awarded approximately 56% of the land once part of what was then called British Palestine to Zionist immigrants despite the fact that this originally extremist minority of the Jewish population in Europe looking to establish their own state represented only about 30% of the Palestinian population, and owned only 7% of the land.  The plan was never implemented; Arab leaders invaded in 1948; Israel forces won the war, pushing far beyond the original mandated borders.  Israelis got their state and approximately 75% of the land.  

Ninety-three percent of Israel's land is owned by state or quasi-state agencies.

Decades of violence and oppression (a full Israeli blockade of the Gaza territory and the West Bank since 1967 has led human rights organizations to call the territories “open air” prisons) have created such a sense of Palestinian hopelessness and distrust, created such widely divergent narratives from both sides, that a peaceful resolution, risky at best, appears simply another casualty of all the continued fighting.  I’m not sure peace will come in my lifetime.  

Only 25% of the households in Gaza receive running water, and then only for a few hours a day.

Officially, seven million Palestinian refugees are living in limbo, most descendants of the original 700,000 refugees that were uprooted during the war of 1948.  Any peaceful resolution would undoubtedly include some kind of justice for these refugees, possibly the chance to return to their homeland.  If Israel allowed all seven million refugees to return, the eight million Jews in Israel would become a minority. 

Without a permit, movement for Palestinians between occupied Palestinian territories is impossible.

I had no idea that largely due to special-interest lobbying the U.S. contributes $8 million per day, $3 billion a year, to support the Israelis.  There is some speculation that in today’s current political climate, our common interests in fighting jihadism makes preserving this embattled democracy in the Middle East a good investment.   

An Israeli raises the American flag during our boat ride on the Sea of Galilee.