Palestine accorded State status by UN

[Callie Del Noire]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20550864

I think that this COULD be a good thing. There has been a massive LACK of inertia on the part of the Israeli government for sometime, as well outright theft of lands that weren't theirs in the last few years. The US has done little to nothing to prod them into returning to practicing good faith measures.

In all honesty, the BEST solution to defusing the Israel/Palestine solution, as well as taking out the Hammas  control of the Palestinian authority would be to go 'yeah.. we need to give back this land.. and honor our past promises.'.

Don't see it happening though.

My take.. mostly as a semi-self-taught-informed outsider.

The Palestinians have been the kicking boy of the arab world for decades, used by everyone to throw at the Israelis.. and the Israeli government has been over backward to accomodate a small portion of their population (the Ultra-conservative Jews) and between these two issues.. this issue, which could have been fixed back in the 70s Camp David accords along with the issues between Egypt and Israel, has festered for far too long.

Neither side is in the wrong or in the right entirely.

[Black Hand]

Resident of Israel here. We have this problem. Only the far right really wants to continue the occupation just for the settlers sake. We have this problem though. No one here really thinks that if we were to leave the west bank, it would do anything besides give the Palestinians more room to attack us. When we left Gaza in good faith, the PA got overthrown and then Hamas started attacking us. I would love to end the blockade if that would solve anything, but if you think that will mean Hamas will stop attacking, I have a piece of land on Atlantis to sell you.

And while there is something to be said about giving the land to the PA, the PA is not particularly stable. The reason it maintains control of the west bank is because the Israelis keep Hamas out of action there. If we were to leave, I get the feeling the west bank would go Hamas too. And that is perfect breeding ground for another war. and then we'll win the war because Israel can wreck Hamas on it's worst day. And then Israel will be painted as a bad guy when we win the war. And then this whole fucking shinanigans will continue and no one wins. For peace to happen, sure the settlements need to stop. First the Palastinians need to get their shit together and stop supporting an organization that would rather a dead Jew then a living arab.

[Deamonbane]

I could be wrong about this, but wasn't the Hamas organized to stop the Israelis from killing and removing all Palestinians from the Middle East? By this I mean that, when there is no Israel to fight(As in, they stop trying to take back the Gaza Strip and lift the blockade) wouldn't Hamas suddenly lose all of it's use, and lose it's support? Hamas, the terrorist organization though it may be, needs a bad guy to keep it going. Remove the bad guy from the equation by turning him into the good guy, or at least just another guy, won't they stop fighting? Or at least, lose their support to fight, and, like you said, make it easier for them to be rooted out?

Despite all of the good intentions in the blockade, and this fighting, it is merely painting Hamas in a freedom-fighter, David vs Goliath light. And everyone knows that it is harder to find and root out a freedom fighter than to do the same with a 'terrorist'. If the bombings and shit like that keep happening, Israel is going to be doing the exact opposite of destroying Hamas: They will be making them stronger. Especially if Israel keeps hitting civilian targets.

My point being that you can't fight fire with fire, but if you suck all of the oxygen out...

[Callie Del Noire]

Ah glad to see you on Black Hand.. I would LOVE to hear a native look on it.

I know the Syrians are perfectly happy, when they aren't having their own civil war going on, to fight the Israelis to their last Palestian/Egyptian.

Like I said.. it seems to me.. (as an outsider looking in) that you got a lot of Islamic types who are perfectly happy to use anyone ELSE they can find to 'fight' the Israelis.. I know from the far away distance of the US that it seems to be solely a Jew vs Muslim problem.. but when I was in the gulf we noticed a LOT of ethnic classes between different groups of folks. (one of my guys got in a LOT of trouble for calling a man an Arab..turns out he was a Persian.. the kid didn't know the difference)

I get the feeling from my POV that a lot of this is each side has a small but influencial group that refuses to compromise for peace and that there are a LOT of outside interests who are perfectly wiling to keep things going the way they are.

As for Hammas Demonbane.. they are actually a 'late comer' to the issue I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#History

[Black Hand]

The victory conditions for Hamas is the complete removal of the Jewish state and the genocide or exile of the millions of Jews living in the country. Suffice to say these are entirely unacceptable terms.

And you are not wrong in lot of respects. At least not completely. Sometimes Israel is too liberal about the force it uses, often times making too many casualties for comfort. The problem is what happens if Israel stops the blockade. Then by all logic Hamas will be able to get more weapons and higher quality easier. When Hamas has more weapons they are more liable to attack Israel in a mass attack like the wave of 1000 rockets that attacked the south of Israel all this month (Yes even before the fighting started to you westerners. we were already at war three days before the hams leader was killed). And when such an attack happens, the Israeli goverment will no doubt be forced to retaliate. And even if they were to do so with zero civilian casualties, then it will still demonize Israel. We still end up looking like the bad guy, and Hamas gets stronger every time it shows itself as the ones willing to take the fight to the Israelis. So all that changes if the Israelis lift the blockade is that more jews will be killed. So you can see why from my perspective this seems like a terrible idea.

And Hamas are very inteligent enemies. do you want to know where they launch their rockets from? Hospitals, Schools, Private residences. that way whenever the Israelis catch one, there will always be civilian casualties. The majority of the Hamas weapons depots are in crammed hospitals. Crammed hospitals that Israel was even the one who built.

Damned if we do, damned if we don't. While Hamas is so implacable, there isn't a way that Israel can defend itself without making life in gaza hell. It's terrible, and I hate it, but I recognize that every inch of a better life we give them means a worse life for me.

[Black Hand]

Hamas fills a role that the PLO, Black September, and their forunners as well as the goverments of Syria, eygpt, and Jordan used to fill. Whenever Israel makes peace with one, another head rises up to bite us in the ass.

[Deamonbane]

You are right, it is completely unacceptable. And it is very good to have a first hand witness around here to explain it.

Well, I always agreed that the using of civilian shields during a war is unethical, and if you do that, you deserve to lose the war. Which was interesting since the Rebels in Libya did it a lot, and the media around here was wildly in support of them. But that is beside the point.

What seems to be the most logical solution to me is that Palestine gets a lifted blockade if the leaders and heads of the Hamas get turned into the UN forces and is not allowed to hold power there anymore, and the thing is disbanded. Of course, that's probably not going to happen... So the only way to do it would be(Once again, a naive view) Would be to incorporate Palestine and the Palestinians into Israel, and use that as a way to be able to have the UN, Israel, and those Palestinians that dislike them, to be able to find and get rid of them from the inside out. That way, they cease to be freedom fighters, and quickly become common criminals...

[Callie Del Noire]

What gets me is how LITTLE of the stuff that Hamas does on their own people gets out. What about the beating of all the supporters of Fatah? Or the harrasment/assault of women who don't follow the arabic traditions of dress that most folks think of when you say 'Muslim' these days. They are at least as bad on their own internal rivals as they are on Israel.

I knew about some of their storeage facilities being Mosques.. but Hospitals are new to me.

[Deamonbane]

Yes... hospitals... if you think about it, it a devilishly smart tactic. If your enemy hits you there, you can immediately cry foul... if they don't then you have a virtually untouchable base of operations... Not that I approve, mind...

[elone]

Without getting into the history of the middle east and who are the bigger terrorists, Israel or Hamas, it is easy to see the positions of both sides of the argument. However, the issue here is the Palestinian bid for non member status in the UN. The result has been Israeli withholding tax revenues and the threat of building of new settlements around Jerusalem as punishment for Abbas doing exactly what Israel did in 1948. Israel is afraid that Abbas will join the International Criminal court and charge Israel with war crimes and even possible rule on the legality of the settlements if that is possible.

These moves are already stirring up more condemnation from Europe and elsewhere. Israel is putting itself in a position where at some point the world will say enough of the settlements and begin to issue sanctions much in the manner of what happened to South Africa. The idea that Israel can continue forever to build settlements in the West Bank without repercussions is just not going to happen.

As for Hamas, they are the democratically elected party. Of course Israel and the US immediately renounced their election and Israel began to imprison their leaders, and  impose a blockade around Gaza. They even calculated the amount of caloric intake needed to sustain the population, and let that amount of food in to keep from having a humanitarian crisis. They have for years fired at people across the border, not allowing farmers into their fields they consider too close to the border. This is Palestinian land, not Israel. Targeted assassination have been going on for years. And we wonder why they are pissed off at Israel?

In the West Bank, the settlers are the terrorists, burning olive tress, destroying wells, defacing mosques, attacking civilians, and harassing people on the streets. They get away with this under the eyes of the IDF. Does anyone really believe that the Israeli government is unable to stop this? As for the IDF, they continue to blockade towns, break into peoples homes in the middle of the night arresting people without charges, gas, douse with sewage, and fire rubber bullets at international humanitarian protestors at the so called security wall that is in reality a thinly veiled land grab.

The Palestinians want and deserve a nation that is viable and contiguous in its territory. Israel wants security. Neither of these things are ever going to happen until enough pressure is put on both sides to get the job done. The only player in the world who could even remotely achieve this is the US, who doesn't want to do it.  As long as Netanyahu and the right wing are in charge, no peace will be achieved because he believes in his heart that Judea and Sumaria are part of Israel. Of, course, the rest of the world, including the US, see the settlements as illegal in international law.

The real solution is for Israel to go back to their 1967 borders, make Jerusalem an international city for Jews, Christians, and Moslems alike, and to get rid of the settlements. If the settlers wish to remain, let them, they can live in Palestine just like the Arabs do in Israel, under Palestinian authority. If need be, put in United Nations or American peacekeepers on the ground to assure the security of Israel. The other alternative is a one state solution which is demographic suicide for Israel as they would have a growing Palestinian population that would become equal to or a majority to the Jewish population. Of course a third scenario is that Abbas could disband the government and let Israel rule, in a complete colonial fashion. Then once again as the occupying power, Israel would have to take responsibility for the well being of all Palestinians, financially and morally.

The problem is this:

Damned if we do, damned if we don't. While Hamas is so implacable, there isn't a way that Israel can defend itself without making life in gaza hell. It's terrible, and I hate it, but I recognize that every inch of a better life we give them means a worse life for me.

So in order for Israel to prosper, Palestinians have to suffer. Not acceptable.

[Moraline]

Here's something to think about.

All of the Palestinian community around where I live, fled Palestine because of Hamas - not because of Israel.

[Callie Del Noire]

Here's something to think about.

All of the Palestinian community around where I live, fled Palestine because of Hamas - not because of Israel.

A lot of Terrorist groups do suppression efforts on their own people. Hamas has beaten and killed rivals in the past. Both the IRA and the Protestant equals have done similar actions to cement their positions.

[Cyrano Johnson]

The trouble is that the far right of the Israeli political spectrum is in the driver's seat of Israeli politics. And this part of the Israeli political spectrum has never been in the least concerned with "making peace" with anyone, and has persistently made a farce out of the "peace process" whenever there was one (when Yitzhak Rabbin showed some actual commitment to make it work, it was one of these right-wing whackjobs who assassinated him, not an Arab). It essentially used "negotiations" as cover for advancing its settlement agenda (and steadily establishing "facts on the ground" to make a Palestinian state nonviable), and then rent its garments and wailed to the heavens whenever the Palestinians worked up the nerve to fight back: an act which has so persistently fooled the center and left of Israeli politics that the right-wing racist narrative of Palestinian resistance (it's always Israel making the concessions and seeking peace, always the perfidious Arab undermining it, Israel always 'retaliating' and the evil Arab always 'attacking') has gradually become the Israeli narrative.

And it's bullshit. And the endless bullshitting about this is the reason why Israel is an issue that's begun to divide the Jewish community abroad (even as the right and ultra-orthodox have begun to fatally divide Israel itself) while it's steadily soured most of the world on Israel. For a long time, Israel was able to sell the image of itself as a liberal state acting on ethically liberal lines abroad. But since 1967 -- and especially since the Eighties -- that image has gradually corroded due to the frequency with which the standard pro-Israel line on any given event is simply, and pretty obviously, bullshit. People don't like being treated like chumps, they don't like being played, they don't like being lied to; they didn't and don't like it coming from Arab states, and they don't care for it from Israelis either*. The unflattering comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa is harder and harder to avoid. It's on the surface, now. And once you've seen Jews being accused, abused and slandered as "self-hating" and "anti-Semitic" by other Jews for daring to point any of this out -- which now happens frequently -- the narrative that any departure from the official Israeli line is "anti-Semitism" loses its lustre.

* Western journalists in the Middle East during the Civil War in Lebanon had a name for the shapeless, formless enemy all the factions claimed ultimately to be fighting: it was "the Plot," the universal paranoia about foreign perfidy and elaborate conspiracies. What's noticeable about Israeli rhetoric since Lebanon is how much "the Plot" has infected it. People -- particularly Israelis, for some reason -- are prone to comparing the Occupation to what the Nazis did; but I think the truth is that Israel hasn't become anything like Nazi Germany at all. It's becoming like any other Middle Eastern state, right down to absorbing the region's age-old air of paranoia and hyperbole.

Unfortunately, precisely because of the "facts on the ground" the Israeli right was able to achieve, the "two-state solution" is a mirage, now. You have only to look at a current map of the West Bank to understand what a joke it is. Israel has too much population in place, has invested too much in infrastructure and the defense of that infrastructure, to just walk away from all of that. It's never happening, because any attempt to make it happen would probably mean civil war in Israel; it would certainly make the drama over the Gaza pull-out look like a family picnic. The UN recognition is therefore, I'm betting, far too late to really accomplish anything except dragging out a doomed farce of a "peace process" in which neither side believes and to which neither side is committed. The only real solution that can now be hoped for is a one-state solution in which the Arabs demand full democratic rights within Israel itself, challenging the premise of an ethnic state.

[Black Hand]

One state solution can't work. We hate each other WAY too much. Immediate withdraw is impossible as well. Cyrano is right in his statement that Israel is too engaged on the ground for such an action. A gradual withdrawal to borders that likely aren't EXACTLY '67 because those simply don't match reality anymore seems remotely plausible (See the offer that Israel made at Camp David in 2000 for the terms I deem exceptible), but not until the Netanyahu is out of office and Hamas isn't there to swing public and governmental opinion away from any more mutually functional relationship. Which is unlikely, seeing as Hamas hasn't promised to lay down arms until Israel immediately accepts all of their demands.

So really we're pretty fucked on that count to. Really, I'd like to be the first one to admit that all of this LOOKS REALLY REALLY BAD. Netanyahu's ability to remain in office is entirely because the Israeli liberals who were working to fix things have been castrated since our big idea of disengagement went tits over end.

This is the opinion that seems to be common consensus. How can you tell us that it's a good idea to eave the west bank when the last time we left a single piece of soil, it pretty much turned into a safe haven for Hamas to fire rockets at us? And Abbas, reasonable as he might be, doesn't have the most stable government. If Israel leaves the PA will almost certainly lose power, Considering it is a wildly unpopular dictatorship who's army forces are small and badly armed. If Hamas controlled Gaza is bad, what would Hamas controlled West Bank look like? How would Israel respond to that. Even that version of Hamas likely couldn't beat Israel in a war. It would be horrific. More for them even then for us.

If the situation now looks bad, which it does, can you imagine how horrible it would be if that scenario came to pass? We wouldn't be talking about one or two thousand deaths a year, we'd be talking tens or hundreds of thousands. Certainly it's an assumption and certainly that might not be result, but that feels much more likely a result then Israel withdrawing and then conditions and relations improving on both sides.

You'll find most Israelis are not the settlers. We want the end of the blockade and the occupation more then anyone in the west. But, we don't want a stupid or badly thought out solution being implemented. We already had that in the Gaza withdrawl. Is there anyone who still thinks that was the right move?

[Cyrano Johnson]

One state solution can't work. We hate each other WAY too much.

Hope that proves not to be true, because the alternatives all look a lot shittier. I do however hold out hope that most Israelis are not the settlers, and the most Palestinians do not want to drive anyone into the sea -- any serious study of either population shows both these things to be true over considerable spans of time -- the trick is getting them each to actually believe it about the other. A pro-democracy movement within a state might remove some of the impediments (like the fear of competition or attacks from a foreign state) to their figuring this out.

Netanyahu's ability to remain in office is entirely because the Israeli liberals who were working to fix things have been castrated since our big idea of disengagement went tits over end.

From the outside -- and this is what Sharon's detractors said at the time -- "unilateral disengagement" didn't look like a "liberal" idea at all, and never looked like either a good idea or a step toward peace. It was essentially the creation of Gaza as a big open-air prison, and the criticism of it was that this truncated echo of independence was going to be played up by Israel as a "test case" for Palestinian self-government while essentially being set up to fail, and thus providing an excuse for an agenda of open-ended conflict. It looks to me like that's exactly what's happened.

[Chris Brady]

So in order for Israel to prosper, Palestinians have to suffer. Not acceptable.

And in order for Palestine to prosper Israel must die to a man, woman, child.

Pick ONE.

[Cyrano Johnson]

What gets me is how LITTLE of the stuff that Hamas does on their own people gets out. What about the beating of all the supporters of Fatah?

Well, you know, after Fatah lost the election, many Fatah elements did after all refuse to be governed by and in fact attempt openly to attack, kidnap and assassinate Hamas officials and personnel. If you're going to bring up the Hamas-Fatah conflict -- which did indeed "get out," BTW -- that's sort of an important detail, isn't it.

Speaking of bullshit, a great deal of it swarms around Hamas. Hamas is far from liberal or squeaky-clean; on the other hand a great deal of the pro-Israeli line about it is bullshit, and easily disprovable bullshit at that. There is much banging on about how Hamas' victory condition is driving the Jews into the sea, but in fact Hamas has long since publicly accepted the basic "two-state solution," along with right of return (falsely portrayed by the bullshitters as tantamount to Jewish genocide) as its victory conditions. [EDIT: BTW, this also bleeds over into immense amounts of bullshit about Hamas and rockets. The common Israeli narrative is that Hamas always just shows up and starts firing rockets randomly, for no good reason; but in fact that's not what happens. It's not that Hamas is always in the right, but there's generally a context of Israeli military actions and pressures that's always conveniently left out of the pro-Israeli, anti-Hamas account. Which is bullshit.] Perhaps Hamas knows perfectly well that no Israeli will now accept the basic two-state solution, but they also know that the "facts on the ground" are a result of Israeli intransigence and deception, not Arab, and so on the world stage it redounds to their benefit. And to an extent, if this was their calculation, they would be right; that's how the UN recognition scenario even became possible.

This is what should give Israel supporters pause. They're very close to completely losing the advantage they once had in manipulating international opinion, even of international Jewish opinion. The Arab side doesn't need now, to whatever extent it ever did, to resort to deception to portray the Israelis as the "rejectionist" party, and that's a huge advantage in the international arena. The facts speak for themselves, and the fog of bullshit that pro-Israeli parties have attempted to obfuscate them with has hugely, and probably irreparably, damaged Israeli credibility abroad. Signing on to the claim that the Arabs just want to drive the Jews into the sea is just signing on to drive another nail into the coffin of that credibility; it would've played in the 1970s, maybe for a time in the 1980s, but it's definitely insupportable now and Israel's far right and their supporters have yet to cotton to that. They're the mirror of the American right wing, riding decades-old con games into the ground while affecting not to notice that the cons are past their sell-by date.

The outcome of all this is that Israel has only two real options: one, try to hold on to the occupation in perpetuity (a doomed strategy when the virtually inevitable one-state pro-democracy campaign materializes, a campaign in its turn which would also provide much greater purchase for the right-of-return campaign); two, try to hold on to the Jewish State by physically deporting the bulk of the Arab populace of the West Bank and perhaps the Gaza Strip (in which case Israel is virtually certain to find out what it's like to really become an international pariah state). Those options are both unpalatable, but the third way was the two-state solution, and unfortunately the fateful lack of push-back at Rabin's assassination put that one permanently in the grave.

[Callie Del Noire]

Well, you know, after Fatah lost the election, many Fatah elements did after all refuse to be governed by and in fact attempt openly to attack, kidnap and assassinate Hamas officials and personnel. If you're going to bring up the Hamas-Fatah conflict -- which did indeed "get out," BTW -- that's sort of an important detail, isn't it.

What about the charges of voter suppression, kidnappings, assaults on Fatah supporters before and after the election. As well as ongoing attacks, and assaults, as well as attempts to enforce 'Islaminization' by elements of Hamas?

I'm not saying Fatah is white as the driven snow, to be honest.. NO one in the region is after all these years, but Hamas isn't a good guy. Fatah is more progressive than Hamas. They want self-sovereignty. Hamas has mortgaged their primacy to elements like Iran and the more radical elements in Saudi Arabia and Jordan.. who are perfectly happy to fight the Israelis to the last Palestinian.

As for your assertion that NO Israeli is wililng to go with the two state solution.. that has been refuted right here. Black Hand has said as much.

The problem, like here in the US, is in the massive conservative elements in their government has sold their souls to a small extremist religious faction whose outlooks and goals are not the mainstream ones.

[Cyrano Johnson]

What about the charges of voter suppression, kidnappings, assaults on Fatah supporters before and after the election.

Periodic conflicts between Fatah and Hamas go back a long way, like a lot of grudges in the region. However, the post-election Hamas-Fatah conflict was pretty definitely instigated by Fatah, not Hamas. (By most accounts, the elections that brought Hamas to power met inernational standards for freedom, fairness and transparency. The election was described as peaceful by international observers. Fatah's alternate account of it does not hold water, nor does their story that it was Hamas who instigated the post-election violence. The uncomfortable reality was that Hamas beat them because Fatah's continued participation in an increasingly fictional farce of a peace process had robbed them of credibility; many Westerners prefer the Fatah story because it relieves them of facing up to the reality that the preace process had become a farce... which would also require acknowledging who made it that way.)

There are no white hats. I'm not remotely saying Hamas are "the good guys," just that the persistent narrative that portrays them as being entirely irrational, savage, genocidal and implacable is bullshit. Being aware of their brutality need not mean signing on to an irrational and propagandistic view of them.

As for your assertion that NO Israeli is wililng to go with the two state solution.. that has been refuted right here. Black Hand has said as much.

No, Black Hand is willing to accept a highly modified version of it, not the actual pre-1967 borders (which classically is what the two-state solution means). Things have evolved to the point where most Israelis view the basics of the two-state solution -- those which would render the second state, Palestine, actually viable -- as unrealistic or dangerous. And because their right wing was given its druthers in the West Banks, it's entangled them there to the point where this is de facto correct; the Hamas insistence on the actual core of that bargain is very probably a deliberate means of bludgeoning the Israelis with their own accumulated deceptions.

[Ironwolf85]

we are facing a political Gordian Knot, and I can see why long ago Alexander said "fuck it, just cut the rope"
I'm not suggesting that mind you, but I can see the attraction

[Dashenka]

This whole Palestina vs Israel is a pointless debate. Both nations are too stubborn to accept the other and to have a lasting peace. Palestine is bombing Israel for fun and Israel are taunting Palestine by building houses on (acclaimed) Palestina land. It's like kindergarten really, with two kids bullying each other.

They WANT to provoke each other, it's like their sole reason for existance. Let us, the rest of the world, for the sake of peace, not get involved. When they stop getting attention, they will stop. Works with kids, works with dogs so should work with Israel and Palestine.

Or..

Send some UN troops as peacekeepers and somebody for the love of God tell the Israeli government to make apologies for the Turks that have been shot on that 'conviscated' relief ship. Shooting innocent people trying to send help out to Palestine?? That's low even for Israeli standards.

I should stop now.

[Cyrano Johnson]

IDF has never shown any compunction about killing UN troops, unfortunately. Someone would have to essentially decide to invade the region, disarm all parties and enforce a truce. Not possible: Israel is nuclear-armed and would probably lash out at the first sign of such a development. (Shame the "just ignore them" plan wasn't easier. Maybe the time will eventually come when the MidEast is less strategically important.)

[Dashenka]

As long as we got Russia and other CIS states, who needs the middle east? It's good for the weapon industry but other than that there is no significant meaning that other countries cannot fullfil.

[Moraline]

The issue in the Middle East is two fold.

1) The Arab nations refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist. So the only thing what would keep them from conflict is the complete removal of the Israeli nation.
2) Israel refuses to leave. (Call it history, call it whatever.)

The entire conflict between Israel and the Middle East all revolves around the land that Israel occupies. No border will ever be good enough to any of the countries involved. Everything else that happens is just a symptom of this problem.

The only current solution seems to be that Israel has to dissolve as a country or smash the Arab nations into submission. Which is essentially what they've had to do numerous times. (See the Six Days War for incredible detail about what's wrong in the Middle East as far as Israel is concerned.)

Israel's founding was preceded by more than 50 years of efforts to establish a sovereign state as a homeland for Jews. The1917 Balfour Declaration asserted the British Government's support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Palestine became a British mandate following the end of World War I (1914-1918).

Immediately after the end of British mandate on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed, and the U.S. recognized Israel that same day. Palestinians in Palestine and neighboring Arab states rejected a 1947 UN partition plan that would have divided Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, and the area has seen periods of invasions and armed conflict since 1948.
~ (full article) http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3581.htm

That is where the modern conflict started.

I see why Palestine is upset. I see why Israel has no choice but to fight.

An Unlikely Peace:

They both have to agree to current boundaries and agree to live in peace. Changing or fighting over boundaries doesn't do any good. There are no boundaries that will make anyone happy. If they can negotiate a redraw it's fine, but it's unlikely they'll ever find a happy ground.

Both sides need to agree to live in peace and mean it, then they both need to suppress their own militants aggressively.

They need to open borders and trade with one another in peace. Closed borders can't work because too many countries there are landlocked - trade has to be open and free.

[Cyrano Johnson]

As long as we got Russia and other CIS states, who needs the middle east? It's good for the weapon industry but other than that there is no significant meaning that other countries cannot fullfil.

Well... I am told there's a certain amount of oil there...