Oppression Is The Driving Force Behind The Violence

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the one of the world’s oldest conflicts, and it is still an ongoing problem in the world. Zionists and Arabs: two groups with conflicting beliefs who both claim Israel as their own. In wake of the Holocaust the U.N decided to gift the Jews a homeland for the lives lost in the genocide. In 1947, the U.N Partition divided the land of Israel (Historic Palestine) into two separate states: Arab and Jewish. Since then, the state of Israel has been the center of conflict between the Arabs and the Zionists. As time passed the Zionists gained more land from winning the Six-Day War, and consequently the Palestinians had to live as refugees in other Arab countries. Additionally, more than 75% of the land belonged to

In addition, I will examine the current state of political and human rights in Israeli occupied West Bank and analyze how they are approaching a level of apartheid. Finally, I will summarize the effects of these social tensions between Israel and Palestinians in the terms of how potential open conflict could reignite.

Before anyone can comprehend the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one must understand the theory of Zionism. Theodor Herzl was the first Jew to have the idea of creating Israel. He was a witness of the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish officer was accused of treason, solely because he was Jewish. Herzl also witnessed mobs of people shouting “Death to the Jews”. This was the last straw for Herzl. Herzl decided that there needed to be a change so he made it one of his life goals to create a successful movement in which Jews founded a Jewish state. One of his main arguments was that discrimination against Jews could be eliminated if they had their own Jewish State, and so modern Zionism was formed. The idea of modern Zionism is so pertinent to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because much of the reason for Israel becoming a Jewish state is behind the fact that Jews were perpetrated throughout the years before Zionism even came into play of the situation.

In the early stages of the Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, the founder and “Father of Zionism”, negotiated with Britain, a major world power at the time, to give up five thousand square miles of Uganda. In 1903, this idea was brought to the Zionists, which offered geographical protection and isolation from Russia. These negotiations, however, came to a halt when Herzl died in 1904. Months later, however, the cause did find potential in the area of Palestine. Palestine was remote enough that Jews had geographical protection and had suitable weather for agricultural purposes. Similarly, Palestine was religiously significant because it contained the holy land of Jerusalem. As a result, in a span of twelve years (1902-1914), the Zionists move around 70,000 Jews within two migration periods known as the First and Second Aliyahs. These major movements gave the Jews the manpower they needed to make a serious threat to the Palestinian forces. Nevertheless, WWI put a halt in the Zionist efforts until the end of the war in 1917.

Meanwhile, Zionists had been organizing small but steady waves of immigration into Palestine as early as 1882. The new, Jewish settlements, dubbed the “new Yishuv”, grew in strength; though it initially faced serious financial setbacks, the new Yishuv had become a viable political community by the eve of World War I. Arab resentment toward the Zionists emerged due to economic and political concerns: the local Palestinian population were justifiably afraid that the Jewish population would monopolize trade or provide unwanted economic competition, while the Arab nationalists were anxious that Zionism not interfere with their own political aspirations.

A series of stabbings has made the people of Israel restless and afraid. A statistic in the last paragraph of Ori Lewis’s report, “West Bank tensions rise after Palestinian stabbings in Israeli settlements,” stated that 25 people and a U.S. citizen have been killed. Over 148 Palestinians have been killed as well, a majority of them being victims of violent demonstrations (Lewis, 2016.)

To start I was wondering “What initially sparked the desire for a modern-day Israel?”. Theodor Herzl, a German-speaking Jew, was for a large part of his early years uninterested in Jewish affairs. This changed once he found out about the Dreyfus Affair - a noted political scandal involving Alfred Dreyfus allegedly selling military secrets to Germany. The problem of determining guilt or innocence divided the third French republic(Britannica). I then wondered “How the upbringing of Herzl influences their desire to start the movement ?”. Due to Herzl's Jewish faith, he encountered much antisemitism in Germany, before realized that Jewish people would always be seen as outcasts(Founders of the Modern State of Israel). Last I wondered “ How did the movement deal with struggles to achieve the goal during WW2?”. Due to the holocaust in Europe and the extermination of millions, many Jews had illegally gone to Palestine, which escalated the conflict. This occupation alongside the back of the United States would lead to Israel receiving half of the Palestinian land(“State of Israel

The most essential reasons behind the Israel-Palestine conflict were geocultural factors. These factors contributed greatly to the contentious argument between both groups because with the geocultural perspective, the religious tensions between Muslims and Jews have resulted in the problematic issue over the holy structures in Jerusalem. The second most contributing factors in the Israel-Palestine conflict were psychological factors. These were the second greatest factors that started the dispute because with the psychological perspective, the aftereffects of the holocaust have traumatized the remaining Jews and also the Palestinian refugees losing their homeland. The conflict takes place in the Middle East, holy land of Jerusalem and officially started from 1948 and ongoing. The average person in Israel is a wealthy Jew and the typical Palestinian is an impoverished Muslim. The forced migration of Palestinian refugees and military checkpoints are disadvantages towards Palestine and are huge advantages to the Israelis.

Violence is never justified; even in the most irksome circumstances. Using violence will only result in chaos. Many faced oppression thousands of years ago, and many -still- face oppression like: People of Color, LGBTQ community, immigrants, women, Muslims, and plenty more.

Oppression is at the root of many conflicts in today’s society. I refer to such conflicts as racism, ageism, sexism, discrimination and so forth. It exists within anything that involves power. For example, oppression is greater towards the African American population, especially when it comes to the authority of law enforcement or even dating all the way back to slavery. Everyone has experienced oppression in their lives before whether they realized it or not. Oppression is what makes life hard, it kicks you when you’re down at your lowest point and continues to do so. An oppressed person can learn to fight oppression, if they only make themselves aware of it.

With no doubt in my mind violence is is never justified to combat oppression. Actions may speak louder than words, but your words have more impact on anyone who is willing to listen and understand. A weapon or your fist shouldn’t determine how a group of people express their emotions of oppression. If you respond with violence , then more violence than before will occur.

With half of the Israeli nation being split into Arab or Jewish, people do feel a huge amount of aggression towards one another. The war between to the sides of the country results in wars that will never be solved; the wars create problems among its people. With the problems among its people, it is hard for citizens to live their everyday life. Women do feel the most hardship in wanting to escape the country. All of these factors result into

The Jewish involvement with Israel/Palestine can be traced back to 2000 BCE, when Abraham, who the Jews claim is their oldest ancestor (Little, 2007, p.303), followed a message from God to immigrate to the Land of Canaan (Genesis 12:5), which is modern day Israel. Since this point, the Jewish people have fought to reside in Israel because it is the land that God promised them in the covenant he created with Abraham. Although this ideology is rooted in the biblical rights to the land, Theodore Herzl, who initiated Zionism to regain authority over Israel, intended for the movement to be political (Little, 2007, p.305), thus

They were met by a community of Arabs people who believed they had as much of a right to the territory as the Zionists did “Zionism is a nationalist movement that seeks the creation of a homeland, in effect a nation-state, for the Jews (Lesch 25) For over two thousand years, the Jewish people experienced a Diaspora (exile) that dispersed them across the glove, but they never gave up their goal of returning to their biblical homeland. The movement was founded in the late 19th century by mostly secular Jews as a response to the rising anti-Semitism across Europe. The proverbial straws that broke the camel’s back were the Dreyfus affair in France and the massacres (pogroms) of Jews in the Russian Empire. Theodore Hertzl a sympathetic journalist reacted to these events by encouraging a Jewish migration, proposing the ottoman Palestine as a possible option (39-43). While the movement would become increasingly secular many preeminent Jewish thinkers saw Zionism as the potential bridge that would create harmony between not only “religion and life” but between “religious tradition and the demands of the modern world. (25)” Zionism was birthed out of a religious need and because of this has been unable to

The conflict between Israel and Palestine is just one of the many facets that have shaped modern day politics in the Middle East. It is a conflict rooted in generations of violence, discrimination and prejudice that is complicated by a history older than any of the modern day superpowers. Ever since the creation of the state of Israel by the 1947 UN partition of Palestine