“Free Palestine.” “Bring them home now.” If you have a phone and social media, there is no doubt that you have seen videos, infographics and celebrities talking about the Israel-Hamas War. From more than 6,000 miles away, the war in the Middle East has taken the U.S. by storm, with nearly 2,300 protests, rallies, marches, demonstrations and direct actions in support of Palestine or Israel, recorded by the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC).
The Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023, marking the deadliest attack against Israel since the state’s establishment in 1948, and one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history, according to The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Members of Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist military and political organization governing the Gaza Strip, entered neighboring communities outside the border and began an attack that killed about 1,200 people and saw 240 others abducted to Gaza, according to The New York Times. Israel declared war on Hamas in retaliation, and the ensuing warfare has led to thousands of casualties, most of them Palestinian. Additionally, over 80% of the Gazan population, about 1.8 million people, have been displaced according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Although the death toll of over 25,000 reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry does not differentiate between civilians and militants, international aid groups generally agree with its tallies, according to NPR News.
As the war wages on and continues to dominate the Western news cycle, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is brought up again and again. Who has the right to the land? Who was there first? The answers to these questions are not as simple as a 30-second TikTok video.
The earliest known reference to “Israel” as a nation (besides the Old Testament) dates back to about 1208 B.C.E., to the Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian inscription detailing the conquest of Israel by the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah. Israel is further mentioned in three different 9th-century B.C.E. artifacts — the Mesha Stele, Tel Dan Stele and the Kurkh Monoliths, as a nation and an established power, according to the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology. According to Britannica, the united kingdoms of Israel, under the Jewish kings Saul, David, and Solomon, lasted through most of the Iron Age until they fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Shortly after, the Babylonian Empire invaded the region, destroyed the First Temple, and exiled most Jews to the Mesopotamia region or modern-day Iraq. While the Jews retook control during the Hasmonean Dynasty for a century, they were soon incorporated into the Roman Empire.
Like a deadly game of “Hot Potato,” the land of modern-day Israel has been conquered and fought over for centuries, exchanging hands between the Romans, Persians, Mamluks, Islamists, Egyptians, Seljuk Turks, and others — finally ending up under the rule of the Ottoman Empire from 1517 to 1917, according to History Channel. The United Nations reports that as the Ottoman territories were crumbling in World War I, Britain, France, Russia and Italy tried to establish spheres of influence in the area under the Sykes-Picot agreement. This plan pushed for Palestine to be internationally controlled due to its ties to several major religions, but due to a rise in Arab nationalism, this agreement fell apart. Throughout the war, Britain High Commissioner Sir Henry McMahon corresponded with Emir of Mecca Sherif Husain and came to the agreement to ensure all Arab nations were independent, including Palestine. However, due to separate interpretations from both individuals, Palestine remained under British rule through the Balfour Declaration, which designated the land as a “home for the Jewish people.” This establishment led to a large-scale Jewish immigration from 1922 to 1947 in order to escape Nazi persecution. In response to the influx of immigrants, the Arab population that was already settled in this area launched a rebellion in 1937, which sparked violent protests and death for both Arab and Jewish residents.
In 1947, in response to Jewish and Arab tensions, the United Nations supported a British plan to divide Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, which triggered a series of hostile acts from both communities, according to Britannica. Israel officially declared its independence on May 15, 1948, which led five Arab nations — Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon — to immediately invade the region in what is known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. As part of the following ceasefire agreement in 1949, the West Bank became part of Jordan and the Gaza Strip became Egyptian territory. Several acts of violence and war between Arabs and Jews have occurred since the Arab-Israeli war, including the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria, taking control of the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Golan Heights.
Israeli and Palestinian tensions accumulated into the intifadas, two Palestinian-led uprisings protesting Israeli military occupation. The first intifada began in December 1987 with a series of violent and nonviolent Palestinian protests, leading to conflicts between protesters and the Israeli government that killed 50 Israeli and over 1,000 Palestinian citizens according to PBS. In September 1993, after two years of negotiations, the conflict ended when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Negotiator Mahmoud Abbas signed the first Oslo Accords. As found by Britannica, in their series of agreements, Israel accepted the PLO as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In return, the PLO renounced terrorism and acknowledged Israel’s right to exist peacefully. Both parties agreed to establish a Palestinian Authority which would gradually assume governance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip within a five year timeframe. Subsequently, discussions on borderlines, Jerusalem, and refugees would take place. Just as negotiations and increasing pragmatism seemed to pave the way for coexistence, a new organization, Hamas, began to gain control.
Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, known by the acronym Hamas, is a militant Palestinian nationalist and Islamist movement that opposed the secular approach of the PLO. Founded by cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the organization was originally a peaceful network focused on charities, clinics and universities in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Once employed as a political arm to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas released a charter in 1988 that called to destroy Israel in favor of an Islamic society, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Britannica, Hamas rejected the Oslo Accords and began a series of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israelis, leading it to be declared a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union. At the same time, Israel engaged in conflicts that killed hundreds of Palestinians by spring 2001, and tensions rose as the amount of Jewish settlers grew past 8,000 in occupied territories, according to NPR. The second Intifada, more violent than the first, broke out after Israeli prime ministerial candidate, Ariel Sharon, visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, asserting power over the Al-Aqṣā Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam. The violence subsided by 2005, and Israel pulled out of Gaza, ending 38 years of occupation. As the Palestinian Authority lost support over allegations of corruption, Palestinians began shifting to Hamas, which won the 2006 legislative elections against Fatah, the Palestinian social democratic political party. The following year, Hamas forcibly took power in Gaza.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not begin with the Israel-Hamas war. It is a long, complex regional conflict that involves two groups with strong ethnic connections to the land, stretching millenia. Former President Barack Obama criticized the one-sidedness of political discourse online, believing that a deep understanding of the conflict is necessary to facilitate peace.
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And…that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview on the podcast Pod Save America. “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth, and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean.”
