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Your Guide to Understanding the Roots of the Israel-Hamas

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Israel Latest: Biden Considers Visit, Gaza Evacuations

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Israel Latest: Biden Considers Visit, Gaza Evacuations

By Lisa Beyer
October 13, 2023 at 5:03 PM GMT+1
Updated on January 16, 2024 at 6:29 PM GMT+1

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The struggle between Arabs and Jews over ownership of the Holy Land dates back
more than a century and has given rise to seven major wars. The latest broke out on
Oct. 7 when the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, which is dedicated to Israel’s
destruction and which the US and European Union have designated a terrorist
organization, attacked southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing 1,200 people in
towns, kibbutzim, army bases and a music festival in the desert. More than 24,000
people had died in Israel’s military response as of Jan. 15, according to the Hamas-
run health ministry in Gaza. Here’s your guide to understanding the conflict.

1. What are the roots of the conflict?

Nationalism grew among both Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land — which
encompasses what today is Israel, the West Bank and Gaza — after the World War I-
era collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the territory for centuries. In
1920, the war’s victors gave the UK a mandate to administer what was then called
Palestine. Intercommunal fighting in the territory was exacerbated by resistance
among Arabs to Jewish immigration, which rose in the 1930s; in the face of Nazi
persecution, increasing numbers of Jews from abroad sought sanctuary in their
ancient homeland, where Jews have lived for nearly 4,000 years. In an effort to stop
Arab-Jewish violence, a British commission in 1937 proposed partitioning the
territory to create a state for each group. A decade later, the United Nations
endorsed a different division.

2. What came of efforts to divide the land in two?

The Jews said yes both times, but the Arabs said no. After declaring its independence
in 1948, Israel was attacked by neighboring Arab states, and its wartime gains
established the borders of the new nation. The Palestinians use the term Nakba, or
disaster, to refer to this period, which produced an estimated 700,000 Palestinian
refugees.

How Two Peoples Could Have, and Have Split the Holy Land
1937 Peel Commission Partition Plan
A British report recommends separate states for Jews
and Arabs. Jews accept the plan; Arabs reject it.

SYRIA and
LEBANON
(French
Mediterranean Mandate)
Sea JEWISH
STATE

British
controlled

Jerusalem

ARAB
STATE

TRANSJORDAN
EGYPT

25 mi

25 km

1947 U.N. Partition Plan

Britain refers the Palestine question to the United
Nations. The General Assembly votes for two states in
an economic union. Jews say yes. Arabs say no.

LEBANON

Mediterranean
Sea SYRIA

International
zone
ARAB
STATE

Gaza
Jerusalem
City

JEWISH
STATE

TRANSJORDAN
EGYPT
1948–1967
Israel declares independence when the mandate expires
in 1948. Six Arab armies attack. War gains establish
Israel's frontiers.

LEBANON

SYRIA
Mediterranean
Sea

Egyptian
controlled
East
West Jerusalem
Jerusalem Jordanian
controlled
Old
city

ISRAEL JORDAN
EGYPT
East
east
Jerusalem
West
west
Jerusalem

Old
city

1967–Today
In a 1967 war, Israel captures the West Bank and east
Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai
Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria.

LEBANON SYRIA
Golan
Heights
(Israeli
Mediterranean
controlled)
Sea

Under Israel’s
overall control West
Bank JORDAN
Jerusalem

Gaza Since 1967,

Israel has
Strip controlled
b th E t
 both East
ISRAEL and West
EGYPT Jerusalem.
Sinai
Peninsula East
east
(Israeli Jerusalem
controlled
1967-1982) West
Jerusalem

Sources: The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict; CIA; United Nations
3. Who are the Palestinians?
In a 1967 war, Israel captured, among other territories, the Gaza Strip from Egyptian
control and the West Bank from Jordanian control. It put the Arab Palestinians who
populated those two areas, widely known by this time simply as Palestinians, under
military occupation, further fueling nationalism and resentment among them. A
large majority of Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. A minority are Christians.

4. What is Hamas?
The Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas was founded in
1987 during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation. It
was a spinoff of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist religious, social and
political movement. It initially gained popularity among Palestinians by establishing
a network of charities that address poverty as well as health-care and educational
needs. It later gained notoriety for a campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks
on Israelis.

Read more: What Is Hamas, the Militant Group at War With Israel?: QuickTake

5. What does Hamas want?

The main goal of Hamas, as articulated in a revised charter issued in 2017, is the
destruction of the state of Israel. The document describes all of the Holy Land as “an
Arab Islamic land” and says Hamas rejects any option but its “complete liberation.”
According to the revised charter, the group’s conflict is with “the Zionist project,”
not with Jews, per se. The original charter of Hamas said, “The day of judgment will
not come about until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.” The newer document
says “resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right
guaranteed by divine laws.” An early September poll in the Gaza Strip and West Bank
suggested that, if given a choice in legislative elections, 34% of Palestinians would
vote for Hamas, versus 36% for Fatah, the main faction of the secular Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), the former guerrilla group that made peace with
Israel in 1993.
6. What’s a Zionist?
The Zionism movement, originating in late 19th century Europe in response to
antisemitism, supported the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in
their ancient homeland. It was named for a hill in Jerusalem mentioned in the Old
Testament. Since the movement has achieved its aim, today a Zionist is someone
who supports the development and protection of the state of Israel.

7. What’s the Gaza Strip?

The Gaza Strip is a small enclave — bounded by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean
Sea — where 2.2 million Palestinians live in crowded and impoverished conditions,
most of them classified as refugees. For about a decade, Gaza was governed by the
Palestinian Authority, the body responsible for limited Palestinian self-rule under the
Oslo peace accords signed by Israel and the PLO. In 2005, Israel withdrew troops
from Gaza and abandoned settlements of Israeli citizens there. In Palestinian
legislative elections the next year, Hamas defeated the PLO’s Fatah faction, which
dominates the Palestinian Authority. After months of fighting between the two
groups, Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. Since then, Hamas has used Gaza to
periodically launch rocket attacks and raids on Israel, and Israel and Egypt have
enforced tight restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the
strip. Israel has long maintained control of Gaza’s airspace and maritime territory.

Read more: Why Gaza Is Epicenter of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: QuickTake

8. Why are there so many refugees in Gaza?

Many of the Arab refugees from the 1948 war and its aftermath fled to Gaza. Their
descendants are counted as refugees today because no permanent solution for them
has been found. Palestinians argue that in addition to thousands of the original
refugees who are still alive, some 5 million of their descendants — in Gaza, the West
Bank and abroad — are entitled to the “right of return” to Israel. Israeli officials
disagree. They worry that with such an influx, combined with the nearly 2 million
Arabs who are already citizens of Israel, the country’s 6.7 million Jews could become
outnumbered, defeating the purpose of creating a Jewish state.

Read more: Why Palestinians Demand a ‘Right of Return’ to Israel: QuickTake

9. What’s the situation in the West Bank?

The West Bank is a landlocked block of territory west of the Jordan River where 3.2
million Palestinians live. It’s also home to about a half-million Jewish Israelis living in
so-called settlements established after the occupation began. And unlike in Gaza,
Israeli security forces still have a fixed presence in the West Bank. Some Israelis
argue that because the West Bank — which they refer to by its biblical name, Judea
and Samaria — was part of the historic homeland of the Jews, Israel should annex it.
The Palestinian Authority exercises limited autonomy in the West Bank, and Israel
has overall control there, as laid out in the Oslo accords. The agreements were
meant to establish interim arrangements while the two sides negotiated a final-status
agreement. That was widely presumed to mean a so-called two-state solution,
entailing the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Read more: Israel Annex the West Bank? How a Taboo Idea Got Real: QuickTake

10. What happened with the peace talks?

In the years after the first agreements were signed, trust between the two sides
eroded. Hamas launched suicide bombings and other attacks in Israel, and Israelis
continued to expand settlements. Negotiators repeatedly failed to resolve issues
standing in the way of a final-status agreement, including where to draw borders,
how to share Jerusalem, and the status of Palestinian refugees. A second intifada,
from 2000 to 2005, was bloodier than the first. The last round of talks broke down
in 2014.

Read more: How Israel, Palestinians Went From Peacemaking to War: QuickTake

11. What are prospects for reviving the two-state solution?

US President Joe Biden was among the global leaders who voiced support for this
idea even as the latest war was starting. But since the last big push for it, under US
President Barack Obama, the positions of both sides have hardened. A joint survey
of Israelis and Palestinians conducted in December 2022 found that support for a
two-state solution had fallen to the lowest level since 2016. According to the survey,
the concept was supported by about a third of Palestinians and about the same share
of Israeli Jews. A higher percentage of Israeli Jews said they’d prefer to see a single
non-democratic state in which Palestinians did not have equal rights. Thirty percent
of Palestinians said they wanted a single, Palestinian-dominated state.

Read more: What Israeli, Palestinian ‘Two-State Solution’ Means: QuickTake

12. What’s a kibbutz?

Several of the towns Hamas fighters struck were Israeli communities called
kibbutzim, the Hebrew plural for kibbutz, which means gathering. A phenomenon
unique to Israel, a kibbutz is a collective community, typically engaged in farming.
The first was established in 1910, and today there are about 250 of them. The early
kibbutzim were radical experiments in egalitarianism, with residents pooling all
income and sharing it equitably, eating all their meals together, and sometimes
raising their children in group houses. Today, many of the kibbutzim have departed
from those practices, but they still preserve elements of communal living.

13. What explains the timing of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack?

Hamas didn’t cite a particular reason, but the timing of the assault, unprecedented
in its scale, was notable for a couple of reasons. First, it happened at a time of
protracted Israeli infighting over a plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
government to weaken the judiciary. Retired generals had warned that Israel’s
enemies might seek to exploit the disunity. Second, it came amid a diplomatic effort
to seal a grand bargain in which Saudi Arabia, the richest and most powerful Arab
state, would normalize relations with Israel in return for US security guarantees.
Saudi Arabia wants an agreement with the US that would be as close as possible to a
mutual defense pact — in which Washington would regard any attack on the kingdom
as an attack on the US — to ease its concerns about Iran, which it blames for
devastating strikes on Saudi oil facilities in 2019. Such a deal would further isolate
Iran, Hamas’ patron, and expand the circle of Arab and Muslim countries friendly to
Israel, Hamas’ enemy. Saudi Arabia put talks related to the deal on pause in the face
of Israel’s response to Oct. 7.

14. Why does the US support Israel?

After the Hamas attacks, to show support for its ally the US moved additional
warships, aircraft and troops into the region and expedited shipments of munitions
to Israel. Since World War II, Israel has received more US aid than any other country
— some $158 billion in assistance and missile defense funding. For the first two
decades after its birth in 1948, Israel wasn’t an especially close ally of America. The
US drew Israel close partly as a result of Cold War calculations, as the Soviet Union
supported its Arab enemies in the 1960s and 1970s. By the time the USSR collapsed
in 1991, the US-Israel relationship had developed new underpinnings. Israel enjoys
popular support in the US. American Jews, who became outspoken as antisemitism
declined, expect Congress and the White House to keep Israel close. So do
evangelical Christians, who believe Israel’s creation foretells the second coming of
Christ. Their Republican leanings made support for Israel — originally a Democratic
cause due to Jews’ links to the party and Israel’s early leftist orientation — bipartisan.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution and attacks by Islamists on US targets, including those on
Sept. 11, tended to make Americans unsympathetic to Israel’s enemies.
The Reference Shelf
A United Nations report on the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

US Congressional Research Service reports on Israel and US relations and

the Palestinians and US relations.

The Council on Foreign Relations explores the meaning of the Hamas

attack.

Israel shouldn’t fight its war alone, Michael R. Bloomberg writes in

Bloomberg Opinion.
— With assistance from Ethan Bronner

Lisa Beyer is an editor of news explainers. She was previously at Time magazine, where she
was an assistant managing editor, foreign editor, national editor and Jerusalem bureau chief.
She also worked at the nonprofit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

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