Israeli-Palestine conflict

Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Introduction

Palestine is an area in the Middle East bounded to the west by the Mediterranean, to the north by Lebanon, to the south by the Sinai Desert, and to the east by the Jordan River. It is occupied at present by two peoples or national groups, Israelis and Arabs. Israel, a democratic republic that identifies itself as a Jewish state, was founded in 1948 and in 2008 had a population of 7.3 million (75.8 percent Jewish, 19.7 percent Arab, and 5.4 percent other) (Ben 2006 ). The term Palestinians denotes Arabs whose place of personal or recent-ancestral origin is Palestine. Some people speak of Arab Israelis as Palestinians, but the term is most often used to refer to non-Israeli Arabs in Palestine living in the major territories occupied by Israel since 1967: East Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Gaza Strip along the Mediterranean coast south of Israel. Most Palestinians are Muslim, but about 1.5 percent are Christian.

Discussion

Conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine arose in the early twentieth century, with Arab resistance to the European Zionist project of establishing a Jewish-majority homeland in Palestine, the site of an intermittent ancient Jewish kingdom until the extension of the Roman Empire to that area in 63 BCE (Ben 2006 ).

The existence of a Palestinian people having a distinct national or ethnic identity has been disputed by some Israelis. According to this view, Palestinians, being Arabs, are at home in any Arab state and there is already a Palestinian state and homeland, namely Jordan, to the east of the Jordan River. For example, in 1969 Golda Meir (1898-1978), the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, stated that there were no such thing [sic] as Palestinians at the time of Israel's founding (London Sunday Times, 15 June 1969) (Carter 2006 ). In 2002, Israel commenced construction of a security barrier around the West Bank with the purpose of preventing suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. While most Israelis refer to the project as a security fence, Palestinians refer to the barrier as jidar al-fasl al-'unsuri, or the racial segregation wall (Kaufman 2006). The United Nations (UN) and the major European media sources refer to the wall as the West Bank barrier and also use the term separation barrier.

On 9 July 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the construction by Israel of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and its associated régime are contrary to international law. Later that month, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution (150 in favor, 6 against, 10 abstaining) declaring that the barrier is illegal and should be removed. Votes in favor of the measure included all 25 members of the European Union. Israel and the United States maintain that the barrier is justified by Israel's right of self-defense and that it has been effective in decreasing the number of suicide bombings. Public opinion on the barrier in Israel is divided (Kimmerling & Migdal ...