A Comprehensive History of the Israeli‑Palestinian Conflict

Name: What If BOTH Israelis & Palestinians Are Right? | Unpacked
Uploaded: 2026-01-20T07:19:08.731167+00:00
Channel: Unpacked
Description: A Comprehensive History of the Israeli‑Palestinian Conflict Early Roots Jews and Muslims have lived on the land known as Palestine for millennia.

Unpacked

Jan 20, 2026

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4 min read

YouTube video ID: gFHUot8A40c

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Early Roots

Jews and Muslims have lived on the land known as Palestine for millennia.
Modern conflict traces back to the late 1800s when the Ottoman‑ruled province saw increased Jewish immigration driven by Zionist ideals and Eastern‑European pogroms.

Zionism and the British Mandate (1880s‑1945)

Zionism: Founded by Theodor Herzl, aimed to create a Jewish state in historic Israel.
Jewish immigrants legally purchased land, but Arab residents viewed them as colonial intruders.
After WWI the Ottoman Empire collapsed; Britain took control under the British Mandate for Palestine.
Arab nationalism grew, opposing Zionism on political and religious grounds.
Key flashpoints:
1929 Arab massacre of Jews, fueled by false rumors about temple rebuilding.
1936‑1939 Arab Revolt against British rule; Britain responded with harsh repression and limited Jewish immigration.

World War II and the Holocaust

The Holocaust killed six million Jews, intensifying global support for a Jewish homeland.
Jewish paramilitary groups (e.g., the Stern Gang) attacked British targets to secure immigration.

UN Partition and the 1948 War of Independence

UN Resolution 181 (Nov 29 1947): Proposed separate Jewish and Arab states; Jerusalem under international administration.
Jews accepted the plan; Arab leaders rejected it, calling for a "war of extermination."
May 14 1948: David Ben Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel.
Within 24 hours, armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq invaded.
Israel survived, expanded beyond UN borders, and secured a fragile truce.

The Nakba (1948‑1949)

Approximately 700,000 Palestinians became refugees; over 400 villages were destroyed.
Many fled to the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, or remained under Israeli martial law.

The Six‑Day War and Occupation (1967)

Tensions with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria led to a pre‑emptive Israeli strike that destroyed the Egyptian Air Force.
In six days Israel captured:
East Jerusalem
Gaza Strip
Sinai Peninsula
West Bank
Golan Heights
The occupation introduced a large Palestinian population under Israeli military rule.

Settlements and the Rise of the PLO

Israel built settlements in strategic West Bank locations as security outposts and symbols of historic return.
Palestinians organized under the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, pursuing armed struggle for a state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

The Yom Kippur War and Peace with Egypt (1973‑1979)

Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Yom Kippur, inflicting heavy Israeli losses.
The war paved the way for the 1979 Camp David Accords, the first Arab‑Israeli peace treaty, shifting the broader conflict toward a narrower Israeli‑Palestinian focus.

Oslo Accords and the Two Intifadas (1993‑2005)

Oslo I (1993) & Oslo II (1995): Mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO; creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA); division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, C.
Core issues remained unresolved:
Right of Return for 1948 refugees.
Status of Jerusalem.
Future of settlements.
First Intifada (1987‑1993): Grassroots uprising; emergence of Hamas, a militant Islamist group.
Second Intifada (2000‑2005): Triggered by failed Camp David summit; resulted in ~1,000 Israeli and ~4,000 Palestinian deaths; Israel erected a security barrier.

Gaza Disengagement and Hamas Rule (2005‑present)

2005: Israel unilaterally withdrew settlers and troops from Gaza.
2006 elections gave Hamas a parliamentary majority; internal Palestinian conflict led Hamas to seize Gaza in 2007.
Hamas launched thousands of rockets; Israel responded with airstrikes and occasional ground incursions.
The West Bank saw continued settlement expansion and periodic terror attacks.

Recent Conflict – October 7 2023

Hamas launched a coordinated assault, killing >1,100 Israelis and taking ~250 hostages.
Israel responded with a massive bombardment of Gaza; casualties in Gaza reached tens of thousands, with most of the 2 million population displaced.
The war deepened mutual trauma and hardened narratives on both sides.

Current Challenges and Prospects

Narratives: Israelis view Palestinians as existential threat; Palestinians see Israeli actions as genocidal.
Key obstacles:
Settlement expansion and the legal status of occupied territories.
Palestinian political split between Hamas (Gaza) and the PA (West Bank).
Security concerns versus humanitarian needs.
Path to peace: Requires both peoples to move beyond entrenched stories, acknowledge each other's suffering, and negotiate mutually acceptable solutions.

This article condenses decades of complex history into a single narrative, aiming to give readers a clear understanding without needing to watch the original video.

Understanding the Israeli‑Palestinian conflict demands recognizing the deep‑rooted historical grievances, competing national narratives, and the series of wars, uprisings, and diplomatic attempts that have shaped the region; only by confronting these realities can any lasting peace become possible.

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invaded. - Israel survived, expanded beyond UN borders, and secured

fragile truce.

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Full Transcript YouTube

- The Israeli/Palestinian conflict
is one of the most misunderstood
clashes in modern history,
largely because both Israelis
and Palestinians live
within their own narratives.
Both sides see themselves
as indigenous to the land,
but that's where the similarity ends.
For Israelis, it's a
story of an exiled people
returning to their homeland
and controlling their own destiny.
For Palestinians, it's
a story of outsiders
taking over their land,
displacement, erasure,
and an ongoing occupation.
So what is the real history
of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?
Jews and Muslims have both
lived on this tiny strip of land
for millennia, but the modern
Israeli/Palestinian conflict
has its roots In the late 1800s,
back when the region called
Palestine was a small province
within the greater Ottoman Empire.
A steady trickle of Jews had
migrated here for centuries,
fulfilling an enduring yearning
for the biblical land of Israel.
In the 1880s, this migration accelerated
when Jews living in Eastern Europe
began fleeing deadly
rampages called pogroms.
Some crossed the Atlantic or
went to other parts of Europe,
but others were driven by growing idealism
to return to their ancient Jewish homeland
and build a new Jewish
society for the modern world.
This idealism was the early expression
of a new movement called Zionism.
The leader of this
movement was Theodor Herzl,
influenced by the creation
of New nation states
across Europe
and fed up with entrenched antisemitism,
Herzl dreamed of establishing a state
where Jews would control
their own destiny.
He and his supporters
envisioned this new state
in Palestine, the site of
the ancient Jewish homeland.
But as support for Zionism grew,
and more and more European Jewish refugees
immigrated to Palestine,
the local Arab population
became increasingly resentful.
The Arabs viewed the Jews
as unwanted colonialists,
even though these Jewish
immigrants had legally purchased
the land they were settling.
The friction between
Jews and Arabs increased
after World War I when the
Ottoman Empire dissolved
and the British temporarily took control,
establishing the British
Mandate for Palestine.
Some Arabs had hoped to form
a unified pan Arab state
that would include the
region of Ottoman Palestine,
but with territorial lines
across the Middle East
drawn by the French and the English,
the hope of a greater Arab state faded.
Many of mandatory Palestine's
Arabs began to rally
around a distinct form of
Palestinian nationalism
that directly clashed with Zionism
and resisted British rule.
Arab opposition to Zionism
also had a religious dimension.
Jewish immigration threatened
a core Islamic principle,
that non-Muslims couldn't possess land
once controlled by Muslims.
Jews and Arabs were now on a political
and religious collision course.
Two events in the following
years were especially pivotal
to the growing struggle, and
they foreshadowed the long
and bloody conflict to come.
The first was a deadly Arab massacre
of Palestine's Jews in 1929.
The massacre was sparked
by a propaganda campaign falsely claiming
that Jews were desecrating
holy Muslim sites
and trying to rebuild the Jewish temple.
The second was a three year
Arab revolt against the British,
starting in 1936.
By 1939, the British had
managed to suppress the uprising
with the assistance of
Palestine's Jewish population.
But the harsh British response
had devastating
consequences for the Arabs.
The lucky ones were able to flee.
The unlucky were imprisoned or worse.
However, the Arab rebellion
was successful in one respect,
to appease the Arabs,
the British placed several
quotas on the number of Jews
permitted to emigrate to Palestine.
The Jews of Palestine were livid.
They helped the British
quash the Arab Rebellion,
and now they felt betrayed.
Worse, they knew that Jews
in Europe were desperate
to escape the growing Nazi threat.
So some Jewish paramilitary
groups turned their sights
on the British initiating
a deadly campaign
to end British domination in Palestine
and allow immigration of
Jews fleeing Nazi Europe.
- Haifa Harbor, Palestine.
An oil fire admittedly
started by terrorists,
the so-called Stern Gang,
rages along a quarter mile of waterfront.
The timing of the explosions was allegedly
to divert British attention
away from a refugee ship
making for port under cover of darkness.
- But it wasn't enough
to save European Jewry.
6 million Jews,
one third of the world's Jewish
population went up in smoke,
lost in the horrors of the Holocaust.
As the survivors emerged from the wreckage
and the full scale of the
Nazi atrocities became clear,
Jews around the world
became even more convinced
of the necessity of a Jewish state
where Jews could protect themselves.
A Jewish state
probably wouldn't have
prevented the atrocities,
but it might have
minimized the deadly toll.
After World War II, the British were done,
tired of nearly 30
failed years of mediating
between Jews and Arabs,
so they handed the responsibility
of what should happen next
to the United Nations.
On November 29th, 1947,
the UN General Assembly approved a plan
to divide the British
Mandate for Palestine
into a Jewish state of Israel
and an Arab state of Palestine.
- The resolution of the
adopt Committee for Palestine
was adopted by 33 votes,
13 against 10 abstentions.
- The city of Jerusalem,
holy to Jews, Muslims
and Christians would remain
under international control
for 10 years.
According to the plan, by mid-May 1948,
the British would be out
and the two new countries
would exist side by side.
For Jews, this plan was imperfect
but better than nothing.
But for Arabs, it was a non-starter.
They didn't accept the
UN's right to give away
what they thought of as their land,
and they categorically rejected the idea
of a Jewish state at
all, threatening, quote,
"a war of extermination."
Within days of the UN vote,
Arabs in mandatory Palestine
attacked Jewish communities,
sparking a war between the Arabs
and Jews while the British looked on.
On May 14th, 1948,
the day before the British
mandate officially ended,
Zionist leader, David Ben Gurion,
announced Israel's independence.
(David speaking foreign language)
- Within 24 hours,
Arab armies from five countries invaded,
hoping to overwhelm the new
Jewish state's military force
and conquered the land.
The Jews were outmanned,
but they had one thing
the Arabs didn't, unity.
And after a year of bitter fighting,
the Jewish state had
repelled the Arab armies,
establishing a fragile truce.
At the end of the hostilities,
1% of Israel's Jewish
population lay in graves.
The Arab fatality count,
including Palestinians,
was unknown, but some Palestinian
leaders claimed it was
as high as 12,000 people.
Still, Israel's war of
independence was a huge victory
for the tiny Jewish state.
Now, Israel not only held the
territory the UN had allocated
for a Jewish state,
but it also captured extra land,
most notably the western
neighborhoods of Jerusalem
where most of the city's Jews lived.
And here's where the
conflicts' narratives diverge.
For the Palestinians, the
outcome was an absolute disaster.
The events of 1947 to 1949
became known as the Nakba,
Arabic for catastrophe.
Thousands had lost their lives.
Over 400 Arab villages were
left in utter shambles,
destroyed, and in many cases, depopulated.
An estimated 700,000
Arabs were now homeless.
Many had fled the fighting
while others were forcibly
expelled by Israeli troops.
Some fled to other Arab countries,
most ended up in the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip,
territories that were part of
the UN's proposed Arab state,
but which were now under
Jordanian and Egyptian control.
And some stayed within
the Israeli borders,
in theory, as equal citizens,
but in practice forced
by Israel's government
to live under martial law.
For the next two decades,
Arab countries tried to squeeze Israel
by cutting off its
access to fuel and water.
Palestinian guerillas called fedayeen,
infiltrated Israel's
borders dozens of times,
taking hundreds of Israeli lives.
And in 1967,
the Arab state's simmering
pressure campaign
boiled over into a crisis, Egypt, Jordan,
and Syria massed tens
of thousands of troops
on Israel's borders.
Outnumbered,
and on the brink of annihilation,
Israel shocked the
world by destroying most
of the Egyptian Air Force
in a surprise aerial attack.
The outcome of this war
would change the entire
trajectory of the Middle East.
Within six days, Israel had
defeated the Arab armies
and captured the Arab-held
areas of Jerusalem,
as well as the Gaza Strip,
the Sinai Peninsula,
the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
But the West Bank and
Gaza were already home
to 1.2 million Palestinians,
many of whom are refugees from 1948.
Overnight, Israel was suddenly in charge
of this huge and unfriendly population,
and because Israel had acquired
these territories by force,
their status was an open question.
So the UN tried to mediate.
If Israel returned all the territories,
the Arab block had to acknowledge
Israel's right to exist,
except that Arab countries
had zero intention
of acknowledging Israel.
A few months after their
defeat in the Six Day War,
Arab leaders met to discuss what to do
with the Jewish state.
They walked away with the
consensus known as the three nos,
no peace, no recognition, and
no negotiations with Israel.
This position would define
the Arab world's relationship
to Israel for the next decade.
So Israel had minimal motivation
to give up these strategic territories,
and without the West Bank,
Israel's central borders
were only nine miles across,
easy for any hostile invaders
to cut the country in half.
So to bolster its defenses,
Israel built a few Jewish communities
known as settlements
in strategic locations
across the West Bank.
These communities would
be early warning stations
for any Arab invasion.
For many Israelis,
they also represented a
miraculous Jewish return
to the historic land of the Bible.
But for Palestinians, Israeli
settlement construction
and its military presence in the West Bank
was a continuing theft of their land,
this sense of injustice
reawakened dormant
Palestinian nationalism,
disparate Palestinian
guerilla groups united
under a charismatic leader
named Yasser Arafat,
and an organization
called the Palestinian
Liberation Organization,
originally formed in 1964,
their strategy,
armed struggle until the
liberation of Palestine
from the Jordan River to
the Mediterranean Sea,
meaning a total end to the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, resentment over
Israel's victory stewed
among Arab countries, notably
neighboring Egypt and Syria.
But Israel didn't believe the
Arabs would attack so soon
after their major military defeat in 1967.
They were wrong.
- It is an all-out war.
That's how Israeli defense
minister, Moshe Dayan,
describes an invasion of the Golan Heights
and the East Bank of the
Suez by Syria and Egypt.
The surprise attacks came
early this morning in the air
and on the ground.
- In 1973 on Yom Kippur,
the holiest day of the Jewish calendar,
Egypt and Syria hit Israel simultaneously,
catching Israel completely off guard.
Israel suffered heavy losses.
Even though it eventually emerged intact,
this victory felt more like defeat.
Egypt had given Israel a black eye
to make up for its humiliation in 1967.
Now, they were finally ready
for their icy relationship to thaw.
Just six years after the Yom Kippur War,
Israel and Egypt stood
on the White House lawn
and signed an historic peace agreement.
This treaty was the first shift
from the wider Arab/Israeli conflict
to the narrower
Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
Palestinian leadership believed
that Egypt had betrayed
and abandoned them,
and if other Arab powers
had failed to liberate them,
it was time to take matters
into their own hands,
with force.
Led by the PLO,
Palestinian militants
intensified their terror attacks
against Israeli civilians.
But rather than break
down Israel's defenses,
the terror campaign had
the opposite effect.
In the late 1970s, Israel
accelerated the construction
of settlements in the West Bank.
These communities serve to
isolate Palestinian villages
and make it harder to
draw contiguous borders
around Palestinian territory,
all while making the prospect
of a Palestinian state even more unlikely.
The ongoing tension between Israel
and Palestinians erupted
into the first Palestinian
intifada or uprising in 1987,
Israel's military responded harshly
to Palestinian terror.
160 Israelis
and over 1,100 Palestinians
lost their lives.
The first intifada marked a
couple significant changes
in the conflict.
The first was the emergence
of a new Palestinian
terror group called Hamas.
Its objective was simple, ruthless,
and rooted in religious fervor,
eliminating Israel completely,
and replacing it with the
Islamist Arab state of Palestine.
But while Hamas was bent on
destroying Israel completely,
the PLO, the defacto
Palestinian leadership
shifted to a more pragmatic approach.
In 1993, and then again in 1995,
after years of secret talks
and intense negotiations,
the Israeli government
and the PLO did the impossible.
They signed an agreement
called the Oslo Accords,
offering mutual recognition
and a roadmap for negotiating
a permanent peace agreement.
It was the first time
since Israel's founding
that any Palestinian leadership
had officially recognized
Israel's existence.
As an initial step toward
eventual Palestinian autonomy,
the Oslo Accords established
a new political entity
called the Palestinian
Authority, or the PA.
Israel and the PA divided the
West Bank into three sections
with the PA fully in control
of the majority Arab section.
As all of this was unfolding,
Jordan and Israel also
settled their differences,
signing a peace agreement in 1994.
After nearly 50 years of conflict,
it seemed that peace between
Israelis, Palestinians
and their neighbors was
tantalizingly close.
But the Oslo Accords
didn't solve every problem.
The Palestinians pressed Israel to agree
to a so-called Right of Return
for the Palestinian
refugees displaced in 1948.
The question of refugees
had been an open wound
for Palestinians for decades.
They believed that according
to international law,
Israel was required to permit
the 1948 refugees to return
to their former homes inside Israel.
And this right also applied
to their descendants,
who in the early 90s totaled
more than 3 million people.
Israel rejected this position.
They believed that the demand
for the right of return
was a deliberate attempt
to undermine Israel
as a Jewish majority state.
At the time, Israel was home
to about 4 and a half million
Jews and 1 million Arabs.
If the Arab population
suddenly quadrupled,
Israel's identity as a
Jewish majority state
would be at risk.
So both sides agreed that
over the next five years,
they'd meet again to
hammer out tough questions
like the refugees
and what to do with Jerusalem
and the settlements in the West Bank.
But the Oslo negotiating
process was threatened
by extremists on both sides.
Hamas initiated a terror
campaign to murder
and maim Israeli civilians,
undermining Israeli confidence
that Palestinians were truly interested in
or even capable of enforcing peace,
and many right wing Israelis opposed Oslo
because they felt it
surrendered sacred Jewish land.
Extremists whipped their
followers into a frenzy,
culminating in the assassination
of Israel's prime minister
by a Jewish extremist.
The peace process was
quickly put on life support.
So in a last ditch effort to revive it
before he left office,
American President, Bill
Clinton, invited Israelis
and Palestinians to a peace
summit in the summer of 2000.
After several rounds of back and forth,
Israel agreed to a
demilitarized Palestinian state,
consisting of all of the Gaza Strip,
along with 95% of the West Bank,
plus land swaps from Israeli territory.
But the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat,
rejected this without
offering a counter proposal,
and the two sides couldn't
agree on the right of return
or how to share control of Jerusalem.
These two sticking points
and Arafat's refusal to
entertain the Israeli offer
ground the discussions to a halt.
The hope of Oslo was now a failure.
The next five years saw
devastating bloodshed
as Palestinians initiated
a second uprising.
About 1,000 Israelis,
mostly civilians were murdered
in terror attacks in buses,
restaurants, and shops.
Israel struck back in deadly
counter terror operations,
resulting in as many as
4,000 Palestinian fatalities.
Many more were injured and arrested.
The second intifada
drastically altered reality
for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The Israeli left had been
some of the fiercest advocates
for peace with the Palestinians.
Now they were disillusioned
and politically weakened,
and Palestinians faced a bleak future.
To contain the lethal terror threat
emanating from the West Bank,
Israel began erecting a security barrier.
The barrier worked,
but it also made life extremely difficult
for many ordinary Palestinians
who were sometimes forced
to wait for hours to cross
into Israel where they had jobs
and extended families,
sometimes they were denied
entry into Israel altogether.
The two state solution had
been popular at one point.
Now, few believed it was possible,
but while Israel was
determined to keep control
of the West Bank,
the government's attitude
on Gaza had shifted.
(Ariel speaking Hebrew)
- Some 9,000 Israeli settlers
lived in the Gaza Strip
who were surrounded by roughly
1.4 million Palestinians.
The cost to protect the settlers was high,
and Israel's military efforts
to protect them were
sharply criticized abroad.
So in 2005, in a move
that divided the country,
Israel completely dismantled
the Jewish settlements
and extracted Jewish settlers
and the Israeli army from the Gaza Strip.
But handing Gaza to the Palestinians
wasn't as simple as it seemed.
Gaza still dependent on
the movement of goods
through border crossings,
tightly controlled by both Egypt
and Israel,
and Palestinians couldn't
agree among themselves
on who would be in charge.
Hamas won a majority
in the Palestinian
legislative elections in 2006,
but it's in-fighting
with rival group, Fatah,
made governing impossible
until Hamas took control of
the strip by force in 2007.
Over the next 16 years,
Hamas intensified rocket
strikes into Israeli territory,
firing more than 20,000
rockets at Israeli communities,
each one triggering air raid alerts
and sending Israelis
scrambling into bomb shelters.
The group poured its resources
into building a vast network
of tunnels hundreds of meters underground,
enabling them to move their fighters
and rockets out of sight of
watchful Israeli technology.
Israel's attempts to
contain Hamas' aggression
through airstrikes and
occasional ground intrusions
yielded only temporary successes.
Hamas' grip on the Gaza Strip was firm.
Meanwhile, tensions
persisted in the West Bank.
While the security barrier
dramatically lowered the
incidents of terror in Israel,
Israeli civilians living in the
West Bank were not so lucky.
In the years following
the second intifada,
hundreds Israelis were wounded
or murdered in terror attacks.
For Palestinians, these terror
attacks paid, literally.
The Palestinian authority
provided lifetime payments
to the families of militants,
financially incentivizing
them to target Israelis.
In response, Israel's government
pursued its own interest
in cementing its control over
the West Bank by building
and expanding Jewish settlements.
They were undeterred
by international bodies
that deemed the settlements illegal
under international law, Israel disagreed.
Palestinians also faced emerging threats
from the right wing Jewish extremists
responsible for a wave of
aggression against them.
But while Israelis
and Palestinians lived
in an uneasy status quo,
cycling between many
wars and terror attacks
and settlement construction,
Israel's relationship
with the wider Arab world
was improving.
In 2020, Israel signed the Abraham Accords
with four Arab states.
Even Saudi Arabia seemed like
it was about to get on board,
but events were about to
unfold that would shake Israel
and indeed all of the Middle East.
Shortly after sunrise
on October 7th, 2023,
thousands of Hamas terror
operatives who were later joined
by Palestinian civilians from Gaza,
broke through the Gaza border fence,
stunning Israel in a vicious
and well-planned onslaught.
The day turned out to be the bloodiest day
in Jewish history since the
Holocaust, over 1,100 Israelis,
the vast majority of them
civilians, were murdered.
More Israeli lives were
lost in a few hours
than in the entire five
years of the second intifada.
Israeli communities bordering
Gaza were overwhelmed
by Hamas fighters who went
house to house in a rampage.
They targeted partygoers at
an overnight music festival,
butchering many as they tried to escape.
Militants breached secure military bases,
slaughtering soldiers
and crippling the army's ability
to respond to the offensive.
As a central part of their attack plan,
Hamas operatives dragged
250 captives into Gaza,
including women, children,
and elderly people.
These hostages would play a critical role
as the war developed, but
in Hamas-controlled Gaza
and the Palestinian
authority-controlled West Bank,
the onslaught was met with
cheering and celebration.
The leadership of Fatah,
the political organization
dominating the Palestinian authority,
praised the attacks as self-defense,
and the attackers as heroes
who were a source of pride
and honor for the Palestinian people.
Vowing to root out Hamas once and for all,
Israel struck Gaza from the air
and mobilized troops
for a ground operation.
Hundreds of Israeli
soldiers went into Gaza
only to return in body bags.
The war has devastated the Palestinians.
The Hamas-controlled health ministry says
that the loss of life in Gaza
is in the tens of thousands.
Israel claims that nearly
half of the fatalities
were Hamas terror operatives.
Most of Gaza's 2 million
Palestinians have been displaced,
forced into wretched refugee camps
where they experience a dire
food and water shortage.
Much of the infrastructure in
Gaza has been reduced to dust
and rubble and will take years to rebuild.
The damage to both Israeli
and Palestinian civil society cuts deep,
and it's only reinforced
the dually narratives
of the conflict.
For Israelis and Jews around the world,
October 7th reawakened
primal Jewish fears,
forged by centuries of pogroms
and the devastation of the Holocaust.
The events of October 7th fit the pattern
that many Israelis have come to expect,
that Palestinians are bent on
the annihilation of Israel,
that seeding any territory to
Palestinians endangers Israel,
that temporary peace only
leads to worse consequences.
The world will be hard
pressed to convince Israelis
that Palestinian independents
won't spell further danger.
For Palestinians and their
supporters around the globe,
the destruction unleashed
by Israel in Gaza
is unforgivable and criminal.
They see the war as a mass
extermination attempt,
and even though some
Palestinians do blame Hamas
for the chain reaction
that followed October 7th,
many more blame Israel for the carnage.
Today we are at one of
the most difficult points
in this long history,
and how these two traumatized peoples
will pick up the pieces is anyone's guess.
But for any lasting peace,
both sides need to step
out of their narratives,
see the other's perspective,
validate each other,
and find common ground.