Israel is a country endowed with a profound and tragic history, fledged through a century of intermittent conflict and religious persecution. Israel and Palestine have harbored constant tension for one another in a decades-long clash over the territories between them: the Gaza strip and the West Bank which are the Eastern and Western divisions of contended land between the two countries since the mid 20th century. Israel is known for its religious zealotry proliferated by its residents of Jewish and Muslim faith; however, that same devout nature not only constitutes the religious epicenter that is Israel but also the conflict between itself and Palestine. The clashing between the two countries can be sourced from as early as the 1940s which evolved into the Arab-Israeli wars. A catalyst of this long-lasting conflict was when Britain seized control over the Palestenian state from the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. The power had regulated Jewish immigration and delineated Palestinian borders during the course of its rule; however, Britain eventually revoked its mandate in the country because of the unpopularity for limiting Jewish immigration when Hitler’s rise to power had sparked a desperate need for Jewish refuge. After the end of World War II, the discord began when Britain proposed their “Partition Plan” in 1947 which would divide Palestinian rule into Arab and Jewish states; however, the Arabic people strongly opposed this plan while the Jewish seemed to ostensibly agree. The Arabic people dissented harshly as it seemed the proposition would favor the Jewish state given that a great number of Arabic people would be forced into the Israeli state based on the land where they lived and the territory allotted to the Jewish. The United Nations attempted to mediate the disagreements between the Jewish and Arabic; however, Israel declared itself an independent country in 1948 the day before the British Mandate would be repealed which was the final straw that invoked grotesque war between the two countries.
Even before Israel’s independence, Palestinian Arabs had garnered volunteer militias and partial military support in carrying out assaults on numerous Jewish settlements and forces in effort of protesting this Partition Plan and annexing all of the territory in question. The United Nations brokered a ceasefire between the two states that had gone ignored until 1949 where a temporary armistice had been reached. The conflict has continued since then until now with the Palestinian-Hamas on one side and the Israeli Forces on the other. Up until now, new armed forces such as the Hamas have risen, and Israel has annexed East Jerusalem, exacerbating the inevitable trail of conflict leading into today. As of late, Palestinian protestors have been consistently clashing with Israeli law enforcement over the harsh treatment towards Palestinians who had gone to pray at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City but were instead met with tear gas and rubber bullets from Israeli police. In the following days, Jewish nationalists led a march in honor of “Jerusalem Day,” but that route also included tracing through the Damascus gate which lead into a few of the Palestinian neighborhoods in the disputed land. Although Israeli officials had rerouted the march, participants in the march were still compelled to amass at the Western Wall due its religious importance to the Jewish people. Problematically, the Western Wall is also located near the al-Aqsa Mosque that Palestinians had fled from for exercising their own religious beliefs during Ramadan.
As the Israeli organizers began to approach the Western Wall, the radicalist Palestenian group Hamas threatened to bombard Israeli settlements and Jerusalem if the organizers did not retreat from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood: a densely populated Palestenian region already contending and protesting Israeli forces due to unjust eviction battles waged by Jewish settlers and containing both the al-Aqsa Mosque and Western Wall. The Israeli organizers did not flee from the East Jerusalem area which prompted Hamas to fire two rockets towards Jerusalem and Southern Israel. Israel quickly retaliated by sending a few missiles of their own targeting Gaza; the trade-off missile launches continued until an eventual ceasefire was established on May 10 for 10 days that resulted in the deaths of 256 Palestenians and 13 Israeli, among those deaths 68 children. This breakout of conflict is only one of many to come if the issues at hand continue to go unresolved concerning the fate of Palestenian refugees, location of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the division of ownership over Jerusalem, and the independence of Palestine. The most recent attempt of permanent reconciliation between the two countires was proposed under the Trump Administration in the United States where it gave Israel one-sided power in regulating Palestenian refugee control which the Palestinian state naturally declined. The future of Israel and Palestine will be binded to the endless loop of the same conflict if officials of the either two states do not reach a definitive compromise soon, free of religious clashing for the overall sake of the Palestenians and Israeli.
