Arab-Israel Conflict

The Arab-Israel conflict is basically a fight over the land of historic Palestine and whether a Jewish state has legitimacy there. Israel's claims to the land are rooted in the Old Testament, while the Muslim and Christian Arabs known as Palestinians argue that they have lived there uninterruptedly ever since Biblical times.

The conflict dates to the wake of World War I. Until then, the Ottoman Empire had ruled much of the Middle East for centuries, including what was then called Palestine, comprising today's Israel and the Palestinian territories. Jews and Arabs coexisted there uneasily, with occasional violence breaking out between them. But the Ottomans were on the losing side of the war, leaving the European allies to carve up the Ottoman territories. Palestine was put under British mandate.

In 1939 the Brits cut off Jewish immigration to Palestine, just as the Holocaust was making refugees of millions of European Jews. The local Arabs opposed Jewish immigration as an invasion of foreigners. The restrictions on newcomers provoked violent rebellion among Palestine's Jews, prompting the British in 1947 to bring Palestine's status before the United Nations. The UN approved a plan to partition the territory into two nations, one for Jews, one for Arabs. The Jews accepted the plan; the Arabs rejected it.

In 1948, in an attempt to prevent the establishment of Israel, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan (today's Jordan) attacked the fledgling Jewish state. The two sides fought for months until a UN truce left Israel in control of most of the territory, with Jordan controlling the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip.

The Arab states thought it was just a matter of time before they would remove the Jewish state from their midst. In 1967, the Israelis judged that Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq were preparing to attack again. Israel struck preemptively, devastating the Arab forces and conquering large parcels of land. Israel took the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. In time, Israeli settlers began taking up residence in these places. In the war's aftermath, Yasser Arafat took over as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, based at first in Jordan, then in Syria and Lebanon, from which he stepped up guerrilla raids into Israel and eventually acts of terrorism on a global stage.

Angered by Israel's reluctance to give back the conquered lands, Egypt and Syria in 1973 attacked in the Sinai and Golan Heights, nearly overpowering the Israeli forces. In the end, the Israelis, with resupply assistance from the U.S., managed to push the Arab armies back before the U.S. negotiated a ceasefire.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat stunned the region in 1977 by visiting Jerusalem, where he pledged his willingness to live in peace with Israelis. That launched the Camp David peace process between Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, hosted by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Their talks produced the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, Israel's first such accord with any Arab state, which led to Israel's return of the Sinai peninsula to Egypt in 1982. In the same year, Israel invaded Lebanon in an effort to drive out the PLO. Israeli troops would occupy southern Lebanon until their withdrawal in 2000 as a result of resistance by the Shi'ite militia Hizballah.

In a spontaneous burst of pent-up frustration, the Palestinians in 1987 launched the first intifadeh, or grassroots uprising against Israeli occupation. Over time, the insurrection grew deadly. The resisters began using guns and bombs against Israeli soldiers and civilians, and to kill suspected Palestinian collaborators. The newborn militant Islamist group Hamas thrived in the climate of the intifadeh.

With the uprising, the Israelis found it increasingly unpalatable to maintain the occupation, and in 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Arafat announced the first Oslo peace accord. It provided limited autonomy for the Palestinians in about half of the Gaza Strip and in the city of Jericho in the West Bank, with a promise of more territory to come. Arafat arrived in Gaza in 1994 and set up the Palestinian Authority. Subsequent agreements extended limited self-rule to the major cities of the West Bank.

In 1995, an Israeli extremist opposed to the peace accords assassinated Rabin in Tel Aviv. In 1999, centrist prime minister Ehud Barak said he was determined to reach a deal with Arafat on the final status of the Palestinian territories, but talks at Camp David in July 2000 collapsed. In October, the Palestinians launched a second intifadeh, using suicide bombers.

In 2005 nationalist prime minister Ariel Sharon pulled all Israeli settlers and soldiers out of the Gaza Strip. The following January, Hamas members were elected to a majority in the Palestinian parliament, bringing peace talks to a halt. In July 2006, after the Islamist Lebanese militia Hizballah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, fighting erupted, with Hizballah rocketing the towns of northern Israel and Israel destroying much of south Lebanon and parts of Beirut.

What could break this persistent cycle of hostility, mistrust and violence? For peace to happen, the Arabs must give guarantees that they are willing to allow the continued existence of a Jewish state. The Israelis must understand that the Arabs will never end their opposition to Israel as long as it keeps its hold on the territories seized in the 1967 war and refuses to let Palestinians set up their capital in East Jerusalem, the site of Islam's third holiest shrine, the Dome of the Rock.

Since the end of world War II, the U.S. and other Western powers have deemed that they have a moral obligation to protect Israel. At the same time, Muslim rulers and clerics around the world have sought to mobilize Islam's believers against Israel. Iran has threatened Israel with nuclear weapons, and one of the key reasons why Al-Qaeda terrorists are carrying out attacks against the U.S. and its allies is because of what they see as Washington's one-sided support of Israel. Without a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, there can never be a durable peace in the Middle East.

—Lisa Beyer and Tim McGirk