Can someone clearly help me understand the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Abdulfattah Ogirima Yusuf

Almost 8 decades of conflict between Arab Palestinians and Israelis, and the world watch as the butchering one another. For people like me who don’t know what the cause of the conflict is, can someone clearly help me understand the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Jason Hamaan

Abdulfattah Ogirima Yusuf The Israel-palestine conflict is a conflict temmed from greed for more land, religious and political domination, and a tribal barbarianism.

How?

I will explain.

Greed: The Israel want not only Palestinians land but land spanning from Jordanian river to gaza, citing was a jewish ancestorial promised land of 4000 years ago, a reason for the reconquest and revival of the lost ancient solomonic kingdom; moreover, there’s need for more lands for high influx of jew migrants whom for thousand years were displaced throughout the world, longing to return to their home land. Greed was the same reason why the arab Palestine thought the land was illegally occupied by Europeans had claimed to be of jewish descent that the land which Israel and Kingdom of Jordan (a kingdom arab extreme conservatives believed was control by a jewish descent), was theirs. Claiming being the aboriginal of levant invaders took what’s theirs. What arab palestine refused to understand is that jews had inhabited levant and were expelled by romans to Europe. Modern archaeologists found imprints of ancient jews inhabitants in levant. It’s wrong for Palestinians to claimed sole natives of the region.

Religious and political domination: Since earlier 19th century, Zionism, a political party of europeans jews established im the late 18th century after had endured sequence of persecution for millennium being second class citizens in Europe, and had who wished to return to their home land was the peripheral reason for the party establishment. But years after the state of Israel was established (in 1948), the underlying reason for Zionists party unveiled, the need to dominate the whole levant with Zionism. Plus, Jew Judaists want the whole region free from every except jew judaists. Mind you, jews constituted minorities in foreign countries around the world. Some had sit in foreign countries’ parliament! Don’t you sense jews had more land privilege than any other tribe, or should i call this privilege or dominance? Today there are jewish india, jewish americans, jewish UK, russian jews, north African jews and more. On the other side of the coin, the arab of palestine led by hamas extremists used the 7th century Islamic Quranic verses and prophecies that instructed earliest Muslims to wage war on Jewish tribes in medina (for their treachery against medina constitution) as a pretex to annihilate the trace of modern jews not only in levant but around the world. Don’t you sense some dominance?
Tribal barbarianism: One may observed the conflict between Israel and Palestine has more to do with the continuity of barbaric tribal war which world have long been discarded and forgotten. One hand, the jews claimed were rooted from the sarah’s (Ishac); by the way, Sarah was a biblical women whom jews believed was the legitimate wife of patriarch Abraham (Ibrahim), whom jews believed the land where arab Palestinians are supposed to be occupied by her progeny, jews, dominated by jewish culture and religion. On the other hand, the arab Palestinians believed the whole region must be free from jews and be inhabited by arabs and arab speaking people whom were descendant of Hagar, a slave-turned wife of Abraham. Now, you sense the tribal barbarianism i mean.

[deleted]

Abdulfattah Ogirima Yusuf Can someone help me understand the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Okay, here comes my best attempt for a concise and unbiased explanation of this conflict:

Basically, there are only two things you need to know, in order to understand this whole conflict, the first is “Tapu", and the second is “The Sykes Picot agreement”

So let’s start with “Tapu”

In 1831, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the governor of Egypt in behalf of the Ottoman empire, rebelled against the empire. He and his son, Ibrahim Pasha assembled an army, and took not only over Egypt, but also over the entire Levant. During the 10 years in which he was in power, Ali Pasha settled some 30,000 people from Egypt and Sudan in the Levant, especially along the coastline, allowing them to own their small piece of land. He encouraged those farmers (as he did inside Egypt), to adopt modern corps, like Cotton and Citrus fruits, and modern agricultural methods and tools .In fact, the first step in the turning of the Levant, from a neglected and desolated corner of the Ottoman empire, into a much more developed area, was done by Ali Pasha.

Unfortunately, the idea of a strong and independent Egypt, didn’t fit well with the interests of the European superpowers. So in 1841, they helped the Ottomans to kick Ali Pasha out, and regain control of the Levant. The Ottomans had to pay a price though. Egypt itself became in fact, under British control, and the Ottomans were forced to make great reforms in the way they managed their empire.

Part of these reforms, was what is known as the “Tapu". A word that everyone in Israel knows in its arabic mispronunciation, “Taboo”. The Tapu is a land ownership arrangement that makes it virtually impossible to privately own small pieces of land. It is the basis of Israel’s land ownership arrangement to this day, which is one of the major hurdles for our economy to become a real modern free market economy, but I am digressing…

Once the Tapu arrangement was implemented by the Ottomans, farmers were forced to sell their small patches of land to rich land barrons that were known as “Affendies", and so a feudal system was formed. And then a process have started in which very large areas of the Levant were sold to people from outside of the Ottoman empire. This was supposed to be forbidden by the Tapu, but in the Ottoman empire, everything was possible with the help of some “Bakshish”, the Turkish word for bribery.

At first, most of these foreign land buyers were not Jewish. In fact, the few first Jewish land buyers at that time were residents of the Ottoman empire who took advantage of the fact that land ownership was no longer restricted to Muslims. So most of the foreigners who bought land in the Levant were Christian Europeans, and most notably, Germans from the Templar movement. In any case the result of this process was that many peasants that were literally sold with the land they were living on (feudalism, remember?) were either expelled, or had to live in terms of almost slavery. That was the 19th century. Colonialism was at its peak, and not many people thought there was something wrong with that situation.

Notice, and this is crucially important, that we are talking about the mid 19th century. Several decades before the Zionist movement was officially established, but a great part of what will become “the Palestinian refugee problem”, was already in the making.

So when Jews started buying lands in Eretz Yisrael, in the 1880’s, they were just acting by the norms. The first Jewish settlements that were established then, were replicas of European colonies. In fact their Hebrew name, “moshava", translates into English as “colony". The lands were bought for full money, many times in what did not seem as a very good deal, and all the paperwork was handled as properly as possible, because the land buyers knew that one day questions will be asked. The only thing was that no one really cared about the peasants who live on those lands. Again, this was the 19th century…

Keep in mind that the Jewish settlers who came to Erez Yisrael in those years, did not even dare to dream of an independent Jewish state, certainly not with more that 6 million Jews living in it as it is today. At most they hoped for some sort of an autonomy by the merit of the Ottoman empire and its European allies. But then world war I happened, and everything changed, which bring us to the Sykes Picot agreement, that was signed by England and France in 1917. The purpose of this agreement was to facilitate the partition of the Middle east, once it is “freed" from the Ottoman empire, between the two colonialist states.

The Sykes Picot agreement was very poorly thought, and its implementation after the World War was even worse. In fact, the blame for all the chaos that we see in the Middle East to this day, may be in great part, put on this agreement. It created conditions that caused a large wave of immigration, within the Levant, into areas that were closer to the Mediterranean sea, because these were mostly developed by the British and French, and this is while at the same time, national borders were beginning to form inside the area, based on the promises for national independence that the British and French gave to various factions during the war.

One of these promises was the Balfour declaration, and as a result, a great wave of immigration of Jews into the era started too. These Jews settled the lands that were bought by the Zionist movement’s fundraising facilities.

Driven by a growing sense of an impending doom for the Jews in Europe, the Zionist movement became more and more aggressive both in its effort to develop the Jewish community in Erez Yisrael, and in encouraging more and more Jews to arrive. As a result, the Arab land owners in the country, the Affendies, started having concerns about their interests. So they began to incite the population against the Jews and against the British mandate. This resulted in a series of revolts, which gradually caused the British to turn back on the promises that they made during the world war. Now, while it was very clear that they were turning back on their promises to the Jewish population, in fact they were turning back on their promises to the Arab population too, by giving almost two thirds of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty - an area that became the Kingdom of Jordan, and by bringing in large number of labour immigrants from Haran (the south west part of Syria) and from Iraq.

And with this state of Chaos, the world entered the second world war, and I think it is needless to explain why after the war, and the Holocaust, there was no chance of things not ending up in a bloody and prolonged conflict. At one hand you had millions of Jews, now desperate to establish the Jewish state as the only mean to recover from their great disaster, and at the other hand hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, most of them still in fact peasants with no property and status, for which the newly created Arab states couldn’t care less. Their plan for Palestine was to conquer it and divide it between them, and when Israel won its independence war against all odds, the Arabs had no intention to assimilate the Palestinian refugees into their own population or help them the only way.

They still don’t.

The only place in the region in which there is any sense of remorse about what happened, and any political debate about how can this conflict be resolved is in Israel - And that is after all, the essence of the problem today.