This is the Israeli-Palestinian question, a tangled ball of events, meetings, agreements, wars, and no matter how much any of us might try to unravel it by going back in history, there is always something even further back. Not only that, if you want to tell the story in precise times, you unravel it precisely, you risk losing the complexity of it all. So, the first thing I would like you to take home from this video is that the Israeli- Palestinian question is super complex, no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to tell it completely. Then there is a premise. If you are looking for a video that takes a clear position on the Israeli-Palestinian question, in which one is privileged over the other, this is not the video you are looking for. Don't watch it. If, on the other hand, you are looking for an explanation of the events to understand something more and form your own opinion, you are in the right place. Oh, and if you should make any mistakes or forget anything, write it in the comments. Absolutely, but please be polite, there is enough hatred around and I am a human being and therefore I can be wrong. Let's start guys. On Spotify and on all the other audio streaming platforms, the specific podcast of the geopolitics series has been released where we delve into, among other things, the Israeli-Palestinian question. So, please, if you want to follow us. Maybe just listen to us. You can find us there too. Thank you very much. Let's get back to us. The Israeli-Palestinian war arises from a seemingly simple issue. Two peoples claim the same territory. The Israeli Jews believe they have the right to control Palestine because it is the birthplace of the Jewish people. The Palestinian Arabs claim that they lived there before the Israeli Jews and that they are being expelled by force. The incredible thing is that they are two brother peoples whose common origin is traced back to the stories of the Bible. Jews and Arabs, in fact, are called Semitic peoples. They would derive from Shem, one of Noah's sons, and would have split up later. The Arabs would have originated from Ishmael, son of Abraham. The Israelites, on the other hand, from another son of Abraham, Isaac, and in particular from his son Jacob, nicknamed Israel, already from these stories which obviously Let's take the stories for what they are, but it's clear that establishing who lived in Palestine before and who has the right to be there is a bit of a waste of time. And anyway, let me tell you, history is a continuous succession of migrations, wars, conquests, all things considered, planet Earth is brutal. It's brutal to say it, but it's true, it belongs to everyone and to no one. As for what is called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, well, it began in the first half of the 20th century and worsened after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The only serious attempt to achieve peace was made in the 1990s, but it failed. To understand its dynamics, however, we need to frame the territory and the protagonists and take a few steps back in history. Palestine is a geographical region of about 28,000 square kilometers, like Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta combined, which borders Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The territory is desert for about 60% of its extension, and the Jordan River is the most important source of water, together with Lake Tiberias and the Dead Sea. Since ancient times, it has been a source of water for about 60% of its extension. It has been a territory of passage between the Middle East and Europe and therefore it has always been desired on a strategic and commercial level. In addition, nowadays various oil and natural gas deposits have been discovered off the Mediterranean coast in Palestine, therefore war has unfortunately been a constant for millennia, not an exception, and it has also been for religious reasons. The city is by far the most important. In fact, Jerusalem is sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. By the way, religion is one of the most obvious differences between Jews and Arabs. The latter, in fact, from the middle of the 2nd century AD, embraced Islam as their religion, becoming mostly Muslims. But be careful, not all Arabs are Muslims. The two terms are not synonymous. Arabs are a people. Muslims are all people who follow Islam. For example, in Palestine, more than 100,000 Christian Arabs live. Furthermore, to enrich the picture, there are also numerous people of Slavic origin from the former Soviet Union and many other ethnic groups. Another big difference between Jews and Arabs is the different history that distinguishes them as peoples understood in the traditional sense. The Arabs expanded from the seventh century after Christ to create a vast empire and export their religion to millions of people. Theirs is a history of conquests but also of the diffusion of culture and scientific discoveries. The Jews, on the other hand, almost always had to fight for their own survival and ended up dispersed throughout the world, having great difficulty integrating with the peoples who hosted them but at the same time often being segregated or discriminated against until the dramatic peak of the mass genocide carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, including Italy shortly before and during the Second World War. Palestine or just some parts of it have changed hands many times throughout history. Listing all the peoples would be very long, for example, Israelites and Babylonians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs until the expansion of the Turkish empire which controlled the region from 1516 until the end of the First World War. So here we are, by forced stages, at the period between 1800 and 1900. We have a situation in which the majority of the population of the Palestine is of Arab origin but there is still a small quota of Jews who are however dispersed for the most part around the world and here we must introduce a fundamental concept that is often heard Zionism Zionism is a word that derives from Sion Zion in English which is the mountain where the original nucleus of the city of Jerusalem was founded Zionism is an ideology propagated since the end of the 19th century by the activist writer Theodor Hersel which then became a political and social movement at the base was the will that the Jews after centuries of dispersion and persecution gave life to a Jewish society within an independent state to which they could emigrate from all over the world needless to say the territory chosen for this operation in the end was Palestine always considered by the Jews as the Promised Land and nicknamed the land of Israel in concrete terms the Zionist movement envisaged that Palestine would be progressively colonized from an agricultural point of view and to do so it sought on the one hand money and on the other it wanted to obtain an official international document that would authorize everything Said and Done through the establishment of specific funds for finance the purchase of land and thanks to a series of international pressures and agreements the Zionist movement gave life to the project in this was facilitated by some factors, some unfortunately dramatic we list some of them first of all the arrival of large flows of money from the Jews who lived in Europe and America allowed the Jews who emigrated to have money to buy the land. Secondly some periods of famine and economic crisis brought many Palestinian Arabs to their knees and forced them to sell all or part of their assets then from the international point of view at the end of the First World War Palestine ended up under the protectorate of the United Kingdom and the latter did not disdain the creation of an allied Jewish state in perspective in a predominantly Arab and Muslim context and therefore facilitated the Zionist movement finally the tragic increase in discriminatory and persecutory acts against the Jews during the 20th century with the height of the Shoah led many Jews to seek refuge in Palestine these other conditions allowed the Jews to progressively grow in the region if in 1922 they constituted the 11th of the The population of Palestine and the Arabs instead 78% in 1947 They had gone down to 32% against the Arabs' 60%. Obviously, such a process created great tension for the Arabs. In fact, they saw the territories they had inhabited until a short time before being progressively colonized without being able to intervene and so both on their front and in contrast to the Jewish one, paramilitary organizations were born to counter the counterpart which gave rise to the various clashes. The first clashes after the Second World War, the United Kingdom left the hot potato in the hands of the UN, the newly formed United Nations organization which in 1947 voted by majority on resolution 181 according to which the Palestinian region would be divided into two states: the State of Israel in Jewish hands and the State of Palestine in Arab hands. Let's go into more detail, however, because in this case 55% of the territory of the Palestinian Region is essential, among which the most fertile area would have ended up in the hands of the Jews who however constituted only 32% of the population of the area. The remaining part, 44% of the territory, would have become the official homeland of the Arab component, however equal to 18% of the territory. 60% of the inhabitants at that time finally Jerusalem and Bethlehem would have assumed the character of international zones and here the question arises spontaneously why the resolution does not seem fair for various reasons we list some in this case too first of all many countries especially Western ones had the interest in the existence of a Jewish state in an area like the Middle East with an Arab and Muslim majority Secondly in many states various people of Jewish origin held influential positions and therefore had a good ability to exert political pressure on the Jews themselves in Palestine On the other hand although in minority and were a more cohesive group rich and powerful than the Palestinian Arabs divided into many different factions without a common sense of belonging and therefore were more capable of making their voice heard finally during the Second World War the Arab world - at least its leaders let's say - had largely sided with Germany more or less openly supporting the Shoah and therefore at the end of the war it was essentially considered a defeated faction On the other hand it must be said that this closeness between the Arab world and Germany also depended on important and failed territorial promises made by the United Kingdom above all and France to the world Arab during the First World War in the following years so again a complex situation in any case as you can imagine the Palestinian Arabs losing a large part of the territory in which they lived rejected UN resolution 181 while the Jews accepted it officially declaring the birth of the State of Israel in 1948 the situation could not help but get out of hand already in the months between the acceptance of the resolution and the independence of Israel the Jews expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from the territory that they now considered their own or in many cases it was the Arabs themselves more or less forced to leave. The fact is that this process in Arabic called nakba meaning catastrophe was marked by clashes and numerous victims and caused a humanitarian disaster that is still unresolved today the forced migration moreover increased in number after the proclamation of independence of Israel this in fact was considered as an act of war by the Arab countries around Palestine that had recently united in an organization called the Arab League military contingents from Lebanon Syria Jordan Iraq and Egypt together with the Palestinian Arabs thus attacked the State of Israel on several fronts at the same time but incredibly Israel repelled them and Annette left of the territories occupied during the counterattack passed thus passing from the control of 55% of the Palestinian territory to 78%, be careful. 22% of the territory did not end up in the hands of the Palestinian Arabs but was divided between Egypt and Jordan. Egypt kept the Gaza Strip, a coastal strip of about 360 km² in area more or less the same as the province of Prato which takes its name from the city of Gaza. Jordan instead took the so-called CIS Jordan, a territory of about 5000-600 km² a little more than Liguria to the west of the Jordan River and divided the city of Jerusalem with Israel. The western part ended up in Israeli hands and the eastern part in Jordanian hands. By the way, if you were to hear talk of the green line in reference to the Israeli-Palestinian question, it is precisely the border line between these territories that I just mentioned, a line that, be careful, at that time was recognized as legitimate by the UN. The 1948 war, unfortunately, was only the first of many conflicts between these, but the one that essentially led to the The current situation is the so-called 6-day war of 1967. There was increasing tension. The troops of the various countries in the region had massed at the borders. The Suez Canal had been closed to Israeli ships and Israel, fearing an imminent attack on its territory, invaded the neighboring Arab countries and in 6 days defeated them, conquering the Gaza Strip, Jordan, the city of Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Be careful, however, in this case the UN declared the conquests illegitimate but Israel remained where it was. How has the situation evolved since then? The Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt following the Cem David Accords in the United States while the Golan Heights are and still remain under Israeli military occupation and are slowly being colonized. Ok, but everything else: Well, since the mid- 1980s, Israel realized that it had to find a compromise with the Palestinian Arabs, especially with their most important political representative body, namely the PLO, the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine. In 1988, the PLO declared the independence of the State of Palestine and almost a hundred UN member states recognized it, even if everything remained practically only on paper. At the same time, however, more extremist positions were growing among some Palestinian Arabs, which erupted in the so-called first intifada, a popular uprising that led to boycotts of Israeli products, barricades, and even armed clashes. Those who were the protagonists in organizing the revolts were Hamas, a new political and paramilitary organization now considered terrorist. Among others, by the European Union and the United States, during the 6 years of revolt, needless to say. Unfortunately, there were numerous victims, especially on the Arab side, until it became clear that a ceasefire was needed, and once again, the United States took care of it. In Oslo, in 1993, historic agreements were signed that provided for mutual recognition by Israel and Palestine and the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority, acronym PNA, a sort of operational arm of the PLO to which sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and the CIS was gradually granted. The Gaza Strip was thus progressively abandoned by the Israeli Jews who nevertheless still today, among other things, have control of the airspace, the territorial waters, the registry of the entry of goods and people and the tax system in the CIS Jordan instead three zones were formed some areas were ceded to Palestinian Arab control in others the Palestinian Arabs obtained civil control But the Israeli Jews retained military control and everything else remained under full Israeli control In short there had been some progress and it seemed we were finally on the right path but as you know this process that should have led to a definitive peace has unfortunately failed resoundingly despite the Oslo Accords in fact the Israeli Jews have continued to colonize the CIS Jordan and to appropriate in a more or less legal manner entire neighborhoods of the city of Jerusalem previously in the hands of the Palestinian Arabs this latter process was in some way supported by the decision of the United States in 2017 to consider Jerusalem the capital of the state of Israel the process of Zionist colonization has therefore unleashed the most extremist fringes of the Palestinian Arabs in particular of Hamas so already Since the 90s, some suicide attacks against Israeli Jews have occurred, up to an escalation with more than 100 attacks in the early 2000s when a second uprising, a second intifada, broke out which caused thousands of deaths, especially Palestinian Arabs. Faced with these events, Israel has erected two very long walls to contain the CIS Jordan and the Gaza Strip, segregating the population in the Strip in particular, the living conditions before this ongoing conflict were dramatic with a very high population density, poverty and unemployment rates above 50%, largely contaminated water and electricity available only a few hours a day. These conditions have, as we said before, led to the emergence and then facilitated organizations such as Hamas, responsible on the one hand for policies of assistance to the local population but also for attacks and missile attacks directed against Israel, attacks to which the Jewish state has always responded in kind with bombings which have unfortunately often caused civilian casualties. Also because sometimes it is the members of Hamas who purposely hide among the In short, guys, in the end, it is always the population that pays the price on both sides. In Jordan's CES, however, the situation is different after an internal civil war between Palestinian Arabs that broke out after the 2006 elections won by Hamas. Jordan's CES remained under the management of the Palestinian National Authority and in particular of the more moderate Fatah party. But with little consensus led by Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, in 2012, however, the NP at least managed to obtain UN observer state status for Palestine, which means it can participate in the General Assemblies of the United Nations but without voting. Here we have seen the Palestinian Arab side, but on the other hand, Israel is not doing any better. In recent years, the Israelis have returned to the polls several times and are now led by a government led by Netanyahu with a fairly narrow majority and with increasingly extremist and authoritarian positions compared to the past. Furthermore, the population is incredibly divided between secular citizens who support Zionism, ultra-Orthodox Jews and in any case a 20% of Arabs living in Israel but with fewer and fewer rights in 2018 a fundamental law of the State was passed that no longer defines Israel as a democracy but the national state of the Jewish people that removed Arabic from the status of second official language and that legitimized the Zionist-style colonization now if all this internal framework were not enough there is then the international geopolitical framework there are countries that support and finance Israel such as the United States of America which in recent years have favored the so-called Abraham Accords between the Jewish state and some Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates in 2020 and Bahrain and there are countries that instead support the Palestinian cause and in particular They are allies of Hamas such as Iran, Qatar or Hezbollah, a Lebanese political and paramilitary organization. In short, I would say that we can stop here. On the other hand, we are thinking of specific and more in-depth content on various topics, for example on the Gaza Strip and the history of Hamas on internal divisions in Israel and on international alliances, so please continue to follow us guys. I hope you enjoyed this reconstruction and that I have first of all conveyed to you the complexity of the issue. However, if you think I have made serious mistakes or oversights, please report them politely in the comments, expanding the narrative. Thank you very much for following us and I always wait for you here on geopop, science in everyday life. Bye.