Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Essay

The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to the day the state of Israel declared independence, days ahead of the official end to the British Mandate in Palestine in 1948. While there were some minor conflicts and skirmishes between the Arabs and the Jews prior to 1948, those ongoing tensions erupted into a full civil war and countless bloody battles that have claimed the lives of many innocent people and have dominated the international political arena for over seven decades. Peace efforts to bring a resolution to the world’s most intractable conflict, including proposals for a three-state solution, a two-state solution and one-state solution have all failed. And with all these failed attempts, the two sides could not be further from and more pessimistic about reaching a lasting resolution that would …show more content…
The situation on the ground, however, tells a different story as decades of futile negotiations that produced a number of elaborate agreements and initiatives ranging from the Oslo Accord in 1991, the Beirut summit in 2000, the Roadmap for peace in 2002, to Israeli–Palestinian talks in 2007 and 2009. None has culminated in addressing the pressing issues argued by both sides. I do not think that their demise could be attributed to lack of a political will by either side, but rather because the issues of the settlement, right of return and sovereignty over Jerusalem are complex and are not easy to tackle because of the significance of these issues to the Israelis and the Palestinians. The only viable solution to all of these issues is the establishment of a binational state with citizenship and equal rights in the combined entity for all inhabitants, without regard to ethnicity or