By Staff Reporter
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the planet’s longest-running struggle that goes back to the early 1900s when a small number of European Zionists were seeking to establish a Jewish state.
In 1917, Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Zionist community.
In the letter, Balfour committed the British government’s facilitation of “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”.
The letter has since then been known as the Balfour Declaration.
In 1922, The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine. It included the land compromising of modern-day Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza.
During the mandate, Britain allowed the influx of Jewish immigration into Palestine and started drastically changing the region's demographics towards establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
Founding Israel
Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1933 and 1939 resulted in widespread unrest and violent incidents involving Jews and Arabs.
On May 14, 1948, Britain ended its mandate over Palestine following a UN resolution from the previous year that called for partitioning the territory between the Arabs and the Jews.
On the same day, Israel was founded on the land granted to the Jews by the Partition Plan.
The following day, the first Arab-Israeli war erupted involving forces from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon.
In the aftermath of the war that Arabs lost, more than 500 Palestinian villages, towns and cities were destroyed, and an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forcefully displaced from their homeland.
Popular uprising
Palestinians suddenly became stateless, and the land that had been called Palestine before 1948 became the present-day Israel.
The end of the first Arab-Israeli war was just the beginning. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has gotten more complicated ever since.
Israel fought four more wars against the Arabs (in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982) and arguably, each time came out victorious.
The Arabs, who rejected a UN partition plan in 1948, are now ready to accept only the extra land the Palestinians lost in the Six-Day War of 1967: Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In 1987, a popular uprising - known worldwide as the first Intifada - erupted in Gaza against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
The uprising ended after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 with the formation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as an interim government with limited self-rule in urban parts of the West Bank and Gaza.
However, Israel maintained security control over the vast majority of the land enabling it to raid at any time.
Hamas' prominence
In 1995, Israel fully cornered Gaza with electronic fence and concrete walls, snapping interactions between the split Palestinian territories.
Hamas was founded in 1987 shortly after the start of the first Intifada.
The group, which has grown more prominent ever since, opposes the Oslo Peace Accords, does not recognise Israel’s statehood, but accepts a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.
Its military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was created to pursue an armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.
Hamas has been in control of Gaza since 2007, a territory of about 365 sq km and home to more than two million people, after winning the legislative elections in 2006.
In June 2007, Israel imposed a land, air and naval blockade on Gaza. It repeatedly carried out operations against Hamas, trapping more than two million people in what Palestinians call an open-air prison.
Bleeding sore
All peace initiatives between Israel and Palestine somehow got shelved after being rendered useless as both sides remained focused on the ever-intensifying cycle of violence.
The peace mechanism and talks have proven helpless and fragile due to the fact the focal point of discussions did not evolve around the core and thorniest issues of an independent Palestinian state, Jerusalem and the return of refugees - estimated around six million.
Palestinians who remain currently in the conflict zone account for around 21 per cent of the total population of 9.73 million.
After decades of violence, the conflict remains an open, bleeding sore with the latest military confrontation between Israel and Hamas.
It will remain so, as long as both Palestinians and Israelis insist on reserving the right to fight.
Palestinians to pursue their struggle to regain their usurped land, and the Israelis -under the pretext of “self-defence” and “war on terror”- to crush the Palestinians.
