Palestine/Israeli Conflict - Part 1

Even from young and while living thousands of miles away (in physical, cultural and ideological distance) from Israel and Palestine, the conflict between these two factions has always been a staple in my view of international turmoil. I will always remember a young me, perhaps no more than 10, watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, before it remained on air only in syndication, and seeing a girl of about my age, jokingly bid her family farewell by saying "peace in the middle east" - an extenuation on the "Black" way of saying goodbye - a simple "Peace".

Not only did I understand the joke enough to laugh, but also at some vague level of my young mind, I considered such a possibility implausible and perhaps a little silly. Seeing the image, on the few-minutes-long international portion of the Trinidadian news, of poor Palestinian boys throwing rocks at Isareli tanks was the norm. It was Just The Way Things Were.

As I got older, my understanding of this conflict only grew as much as the attention it was given by the international news and as much as my angst-ridden mind would allow – so not much. Even less so now, with the increasing popularity of info-tainment being passed off as news by the large news organisations I once considered credible (CNN now with at least one solid foot on this list, though luckily the BBC with barely a finger). It is all too easy now to base your entire opinion of a complex issue on the rhetoric-filled sound-bite that cable news feeds you.


With international politics and the like, there is always a lot going on – a lot to attempt to formulate a cogent opinion about, but the Palestinian people's recent bid for statehood has brought the Israel/Palestine conflict to the front of my mind in a big way for the first time. Why? For one thing, it challenged the seemingly permanent fact that a stateless Palestine and unmoving Israel perhaps may not be Just The Way Things Were. But mainly, it was the varying response from the international community and the USA in particular that made me want to look a bit further. It was always somewhat understood that despite the USA attempting to broker deals between the two sides, that it favoured the Israelis (my guess is because of the substantial power held by people of Jewish faith in the upper echelons of US politics and business). But it seems that their bias was far more than I anticipated,when Palestine successfully gained membership into UNESCO (therefore the international community supported them) and the USA responded by cutting all funding to that international body. It quite literally made me go – What The Fuck?


Up to this point, my opinion on the situation was somewhat vague as it was based on only whatever the pundits were saying during their allotted two minutes on the news whenever the Palestine/Israeli conflict was more sensational than any other international topic at that point in time. And my opinion was this:


Give the Palestinians their nation – that was the only reason they were launching rockets or sending suicide bombers into Israel. Give them their nation and stop building settlements in disputed territories, Israel – if there is still a dispute over who owns these territories, building settlements there is tantamount to spitting on the paper of any possible peace agreement because it is obvious that Israel has the power and the resources to do such while Palestine not only does not have the same power, but is also powerless to stop Israel. Israel has the upper hand – it always did. Whenever fighting between the two factions broke out, the casualties were always far heavier on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side. Primarily because Palestine did not have full control over its resources as a sovereign nation would, it remained in poverty and social upheaval, thereby facilitating a vicious circle of poverty breeding hate and violence, restricting economic and intellectual growth, thereby breeding more poverty to breed more hate and violence.


But the Israelies did not want to give Palestine its state – why? And my mind simply went to – they wanted more of their Messiah-promised land to continue building their settlements. If they gave Palestine their state, they would have to demolish these settlements as well as relinquish some claim to their holy cities, and they certainly wanted to keep the entire of Jerusalem – a city that the Arabs wanted to claim at least in part. So of course, I thought the Israelis completely unjustified – they were building the settlements on disputed land so tough shit if they lost them under an agreement. And the city of Jerusalem was a holy site for three major religions, so the Israelis should compromise and give up at least a part of it in the name of peace – in the middle east.


That was what I thought – in vague terms – before I started researching the history of this situation. Written out all on paper, it does sound a bit silly in premise, doesn't it? Even when such ruminations were vague, I thought that they were incomplete. There had to be more to this situation than just this. Why can't the Israelis and Palestinians agree? It seemed so simple. I thought the main reason had to be the ideological differences – both sides considered the land rightfully theirs under whatever version of the same God they served. But who was really to blame for it all? I needed to understand it better so that I could better formulate an opinion that I can feel confident in defending.


I first turned to a friend – a fellow Trinidadian and one of the few (friends as well as Trinis) who took interest in international situations such as this and understood/knew enough about them to have an opinion I took seriously. Imagine my surprise when he seemed to slightly favour the Israelis in the situation, citing that Israel is willing to have a two-state solution – a Palestine state existing alongside Israel – but that they were concerned that those in power in Palestine denied that Israel had a right to exist and cited security concerns with having such a nation existing right alongside it. Of course Israel will not agree to a Palestine state under these conditions – and the Arabs had their chance to agree to a Palestine/Israel state division several times back in the 40's, 50's and 60's and rejected it. But, I said – doesn't the PLO agree that Israel has a right to exist and wishes to broker a deal? Yes, he said, but the PLO only controls half of Palestine, with Hamas controlling the other half and denying Israel's right to exist. Hamas' power is growing – what if they took over the whole of Palestine? You will now have a sovereign nation with control over its own borders who can oust any occupying Israeli force and invite fellow Arab nations to establish military bases and the like in preparation for an attack against Israel, a country that is not well favoured by other countries in the middle east.


This got me to thinking – quite a bit of thinking, actually. I still held onto my view that the Israelis should not be blockading the establishment of a Palestine state because of the “possibility” of an invasion by the newly established state. (Basing military policy on the “possibility” of war just brought back too many nasty thoughts of the alleged reasons America invaded Iraq.) But first, I needed to understand – how did this all start? Who was to blame? And is America's position justified?