I think I’ve said before that I’m not a Harry Potter guy, which is a shame, because I only kinda-understand the constant references that my dear writer, my dear friend, Adi, is constantly making in our back and forths. But apparently, the franchise features a lovably-pedantic character named Hermione, who is constantly correcting her friends’ mistakes with obscure tidbits from the millions of textbooks that she appears to have committed to memory before the age of 12.
And apparently… I’m “such a Hermione”?
I’m sorry. Honestly, I can’t tell if that should be something that flatters me or insults me, I have no idea.
Still, I kinda get the comparison. No, I wasn’t that kid who always shot their hand up first whenever the teacher asked a question. By the way, if you’re that kid, just slow down. But in my adult life, I do take pleasure in diving deep, unearthing obscure details, and exploring the nooks and crannies of history. Just look at our back catalogue – tens of thousands of words, hours upon hours of detailed storytelling about one single moment, one single event.
But most people don’t have the time, the energy, or desire to listen to hours upon hours of detailed storytelling about one single event. (Maybe I’m speaking about my wife?) For most people, the interest doesn’t go past skimming the headlines, maybe reading a couple of articles if they’re really dedicated. And hey, I include myself in that. Ask me to explain the Korean War and I’ll probably stutter something about communism and the Cold War and hope no one asks me any follow-up questions. Is that a gap in my historical knowledge? You bet it is. Am I going to spend my limited time and energy diving deeply into the history of the Korean War? Probably not. And that’s okay. At least according to me.
Okay, short story time.
My undergraduate major was history, with a concentration in Middle Eastern studies… Shocker! But to graduate, we had to pass an exit exam about all aspects of world history. I could be mis-remembering, but I think you had to get like a 33% to pass, though don’t quote me on that.
Yes, those were low standards, but lucky for me it’s hard to know a third of world history. Because these questions, y’all. THESE QUESTIONS. They were basically weird historical trivia. Do you know anything about the Japanese Nara period, which lasted from 710-794 CE? ME NEITHER.
How about how Denmark got its name? For some reason, this exit exam thought we should know that too. (For the record, it’s from the Old Norse word Danmork, which sounds like an alien race but means “the land or border of the Danes.” Not that creative.)
So yeah, I barely passed, because guess what, I do not know so much about these extremely specific aspects of Japanese or Danish history, and I think that’s okay. My concentration was in the Middle East. It would be weird for me to have an opinion on the Nara period, or on Danish civilization. (Other than I love hygge, thank you to the Danes for that. Love the concept of hygge, it’s awesome.)
So the team and I had a number of conversations about this. How do we summarize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a BRIEF and USEFUL way, with a minimum of highly specific trivia?
It wasn’t a hypothetical. Since October 7th, we’ve gotten dozens of emails asking us to please break down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that even the most casual listeners can understand. And for a while, we resisted. That’s not what we do. We’re all about nuance. We love detail. Have you directed your friends to the hours and hours of content in our archives?
The history of 36-39! It’s an amazing three part series! Just a cool three hours of your time. The three-parter on 1948. SO CHILL. Just two and a half hours on one TINY aspect of this long history!
And look, SOME PEOPLE WANT THAT. I want that. I love that.
But some people don’t have a chill three hours to learn about one extremely specific period in Israeli history. Some people are like Michael, who wrote us the following email. Word by word, here it is:
“There are many people… who are open to understanding the I-P conflict but not only have no idea about even the basic history of the conflict but also have very limited attention spans, or at least very limited experience engaging critically with such a complex subject. …What I desperately need is ONE podcast episode that can serve as a primer to the current conflict and its core issues. Directing people to a two-parter, or to a long series of episodes, is an unrealistic ask when considering most of the folks we badly need as allies in this moment are simply not as invested as we are.”
MICHAEL. Thank you for this. Because you’re totally right.
When it comes to faraway geopolitical conflicts, most people are Ron, not Hermione. (I’m told that analogy will make sense to our millennial listeners. Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I see you, and you see me.) I’m a Ron, apparently, about lots of things! The Korean War. The Japanese Nara period. Crypto (though if you want to learn more, just reach out to Jeff Handel, our head of video at Unpacked! Shout out to our Unpacked YouTube channel, it’s awesome.) And Harry Potter, yeah, I’m a Ron about it.
So this one is for the Rons out there, who want a 30 minute overview, no extraneous details, no deep character development, no frills. We will still aim for nuance and transparency and different perspectives, because that’s what we do. But we’re gonna keep it as simple as we can. Are we gonna miss stuff? Indubitably. And if you email me about how could I possibly have missed x, y, and z, just know you are going to receive a short and quick email from me saying, “I agree.”
Are we going to be 100% objective? No, you know why? Because there’s no such thing. And when people tell you they are being fully objective about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just nod along politely like you’re Canadian or maybe from L.A. (Y’all just caught a stray, sorry about that.)
All I can promise is that we’ll try to be as transparent as possible, as layered as we can be – and that we’ll link to additional content in the show notes if you want to investigate further. In this episode, I’m going to resist saying one of my go-to links – link in the show notes for more – because if I said it, I’d have to say it 100 times. So consider this a blanket announcement: if you want to know more about something – like the Six Day War, or Arab citizens of Israel, or the 1930s in Mandate Palestine – check the show notes for more info.
With all those caveats out of the way, here is the brief Unpacking Israeli History version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You ready for this???
Yalla. Let’s do this.
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Prologue: Zionism
Zionism is a new-ish word for a very old idea: the deep, profound connection between Jews, Judaism, and the land of Israel. The yearning for Jews to be in the land of Israel. NERD CORNER ALERT: It was coined by a man named Nathan Birnbaum, who later in his life became salty towards the movement from a super duper religious perspective and he did not like that Zionism was broadly anti-religious at the time…But a convo for another time. As a political movement, Zionism owes a lot to all the other European nationalist movements of the late 19th century. The concept that Jews should govern themselves in their ancestral homeland was very, very appealing to a nation that was experiencing a substantial rise in antisemitic persecution in almost every single context. .
Theodor Herzl didn’t invent Zionism. Not the concept, and not the word. But it was his action, his global movement, that spurred Jews to begin moving to the region then-known as Palestine en masse.
And so, by the time our story starts, in 1917, Zionism as a political and nationalist ideology was already well-established. Herzl had died 13 years before – but his movement just kept gaining momentum.
I have a lot more to say about Zionism as a concept and as a fundamental part of Judaism – but that gets into overly specific and detailed territory, so we’re gonna end the prologue and hop on over to…
Chapter One: 1917 – 1948
Our story starts in 1917. The world is still consumed by The Great War, now known as World War I, but Britain’s already making plans for what comes next. There’s a lot of territory up for grabs, including the stretch of land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
For decades, Jews from around the world have been flocking there, eager to rebuild a Jewish homeland. A number of influential Brits are sympathetic to that cause – some are not – and in November of 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, promises that Britain would support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
The Jews were, broadly speaking, thrilled. The Arabs who lived in Palestine? Not so much.
Tensions rose as an increasing number of Jews made their way to Palestine through the 20s and 30s. They legally bought land from Arab landowners, building infrastructure, establishing institutions, and posing a serious economic and demographic threat to Arab society.
At least, that’s how Arab society saw it.
Simmering tensions erupted into violence, and the decades between the World Wars were punctuated by massacres, riots, revolts, and increasing hostility from both sides. The British, who were chosen by the League of Nations to administer the territory after the first world war, at first tried to please both sides.
You know what happens when you try to please everyone? You fail, big time.
But the Brits soon had a bigger headache to contend with: World War II. The tsunami of European antisemitism brought thousands of Jews to Palestine. They were the lucky ones. In a last-ditch effort to please the Arab world, the Brits instituted strict immigration quotas to limit the number of Jews allowed to emigrate to Palestine.
By 1945, one third of the world’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Listen to that again, one third of the world’s Jews!! At least another quarter million were refugees, languishing in European DP camps with nowhere else to go. Palestine’s Jews clamored to let them in, even setting up a roaring system of illegal immigration right under the noses of the Arabs and the British. Jewish refugees would sneak towards the Haifa shoreline by boat, where Jewish activists and militia members were waiting to meet them. If they were caught, the refugees would be sent away, usually to a DP camp in Cyprus, while the Jews who met them would be jailed or even deported.
It was not a great system for anyone, and in 1947, Britain officially gave up on administering Palestine, handing the problem over to the United Nations.
The UN came up with a plan to split the region into two states—one Jewish and one Arab—with Jerusalem as an international city. The plan wasn’t perfect, but Jewish leadership reluctantly accepted, while Arab leadership walked out in protest. (Guessing that was a no.) Despite this stalemate, Britain made plans to leave Palestine for good. Six tumultuous, violent months later, they were gone, and Israel declared independence, knowing full well that the Arab world was going to do its best to crush their new state, which they declared in May of 48.
Which brings us to Chapter Two: The War
On May 15, 1948 – a day after the newly-minted Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion declared independence, five Arab countries invaded the world’s youngest state. Fact that people often forget…The Jews and Arabs within the region of Palestine had been fighting one another, like I said just before, since November of 1947, when the UN approved Partition.
Now, the war was about to change. This was no longer a series of skirmishes between multiple guerilla forces. (By the way, u-e, not o-r. Okay, anyway.) This was a fight between armies. On the Israeli side was the newly-minted Israel Defense Forces, which had absorbed the three Jewish paramilitaries who had been active in the Mandate period. On the Arab side were troops from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, plus various guerilla forces made up of Palestinians and other Arab fighters.
Anyway, the war was long, bitter, and exhausting. But, at its end, the Jewish state was not only standing – it had even expanded its territory past the original borders of the UN plan.
Under the OG plan, Jews were allotted roughly 56% of the territory – much of it in the arid desert region. (You’ll notice 56% is more than half. Why did they get more than the proposed Arab state? Because the UN assumed – correctly – that the Jewish state would be absolutely flooded with Jewish immigrants from around the world. And by the way, many people didn’t want the Jewish people in their country and they were happy to have them go to their own area.) But after the War of Independence, the Jewish state controlled roughly 77-78% of the land formerly known as Mandate Palestine.
Yes – that territory came at the cost of one percent of the Israeli population – and still, the mere existence of the state was an unquestionable victory.
The Palestinians, they did not fare as well. For them, the war was a nakba, it was a catastrophe. They too lost a significant percentage of their population. But beyond that, over 700,000 people fled or were expelled from their homes, becoming refugees in surrounding countries.
There is a LOT of controversy and competing claims about this number, and also these terms. Who fled? Who was expelled? Why did they do these things? How many left voluntarily, under the explicit instruction of the Arab armies, and how many were quote-unquote “ethnically cleansed” in order for there to be a demographic majority of Jews in this new state? There is a lot of debate on this!
And why are they and their descendants considered by the UN and the rest of the world to be “refugees” nearly 80 years later?
We’re going to need to do a whole episode on the birth of the refugee crisis, on the displaced Palestinians and on the aftermath. But for now, just know that much of the Palestinians’ enduring rage and pain and trauma comes from this moment – and that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Jewish and Palestinian narratives tend to diverge on some key points around this issue. Okay, let’s move on.
For now, know this: more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced, many of them shunted into refugee camps in neighboring countries, including Egypt and Jordan. In the fighting, Egypt conquered the Gaza Strip. K, important history. While Jordan conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem, important history. Both countries held – or occupied – those territories and the Palestinians who lived in them for the next 19 years, in contravention of international law.
That’s important. Remember that.
But there was another group of Palestinians, who didn’t end up in refugee camps in Egypt or Jordan or Lebanon.
These were the 150,000 or so Palestinian Arabs who stayed inside the border of Israel.
Not all of these people considered themselves “Palestinians,” per se. Some were Druze. Others, Bedouin. Some fought on the side of the Jewish state. Others fought against the Jews but were eventually subdued. And many were internally displaced civilians just trying to stay alive. Either way, at the end of the war, those 150,000 Palestinian slash Bedouin slash Druze slash Arab folks became Israeli citizens.
The Jewish state had faced trial by fire and was still standing.
Now what? Well, you’ll have to wait til after the break to find out.
[BREAK]
Welcome back! We left off on a cliffhanger. Israel won the war in 1949, which meant that it was time to figure out how to be a state.
Chapter 3: 1949 – 1967
The war didn’t officially end with peace agreements. In fact, Israel’s neighbors didn’t recognize the Jewish state. Instead of borders, Israel had “armistice lines” – i.e., boundaries that demarcated “truce” areas.
Through the 50s, a constant stream of Arab infiltrators, known as fedayeen, crossed into Israel from neighboring countries, killing hundreds of Israelis. Israel retaliated strongly, hoping their reprisal attacks would deter future infiltrators, with mixed results.
Inside Israel, tensions between Jews and Arabs were high, and for the next 18 years, Palestinian citizens of Israel lived under martial law. As the government saw it, they were a potential fifth column that needed to be contained.
By the summer of 1967, the Jewish state was doing… okay. Not great, since the security sitch wasn’t awesome. Economically, it wasn’t on the brink of collapse or anything, but it also wasn’t a rich or even highly developed country. People were focused on survival. Because the neighbors did pose an existential threat. For months, Egypt and Syria rattled their sabers, broadcasting increasingly ghoulish threats about what they were planning on doing to the Jewish state. (Spoiler: Eliminating it. That’s what they were planning. That’s what they said.)
At this point, the Jewish state was still the scrappy underdog – a Jewish minority in the mostly-Muslim/Arab Middle East, surrounded by enemies. But that status would not last. It wouldn’t last.
By June of 1967, Egypt had more or less declared war by closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships, and the Israeli Prime Minister gave the IDF the official go-ahead. In a shocking surprise attack, Israel decimated the Egyptian air force, then went on to quadruple its territory in under a week.
At the end of the war, the Jewish state had routed Egypt from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. It had conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem from the Jordanians. And it had even wrested the Golan Heights away from the Syrians.
It was a shocking victory, it was. Tiny Israel defeats Syria to the north, Jordan to the East, and Egypt to the South. (And the Mediterranean Sea to the West.) And it changed everything.
Chapter 4: 1967 – 1992
You might imagine that the absolute victory of June 1967 would put Israel in a stronger bargaining position with the neighbors. You would be wrong.
Egypt and Jordan had both shown up to an Arab League meeting with policies geared towards some kind of compromise. But they were shouted down by the PLO, Syria, Iraq, and Algeria – rejectionists who called for continuing the armed struggle against the Jewish state.
The rejectionists. they won. Israel was the aggressor, they claimed. Israel had started it – not just in ‘67, but in ‘48. So the Arab League adopted a resolution that came to be known as The Three Nos.
No recognition of Israel.
No negotiations with Israel.
No peace with Israel.
Which left the Jewish state in a bit of a pickle. They now held the West Bank and Gaza, home to over a million Palestinians.
The Israelis weren’t going to give the territory back unilaterally without a security or diplomatic agreement. But the Arab states weren’t interested in such an agreement. So Israel hung on to these territories. And the Palestinians who lived there were, shall we say, not thrilled.
Millions of Palestinians found themselves under Israeli control – with some unexpected results.
They’d had a national identity before. As early as the 1910s, some Palestinian thinkers had called for a self-determining Palestinian state. But now? Now that they lived under Israeli control, the Palestinian national consciousness burst into the forefront. Arab citizens of Israel, as well as Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, began to assert their identities, intensifying calls for a “free Palestine”” – which, to many, meant the obliteration of Israel.
In 1981, Israel officially annexed East Jerusalem for pretty obvious cultural and religious reasons and the Golan Heights for pretty obvious security and economic reasons. But the state left the status of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai ambiguous, and some Israeli citizens began to build communities, aka “settlements” in these territories.
To most of the world, these settlements – and the military occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – are a violation of international law and to others they are not seen as occupied territories at all, but disputed territories.
Things continued in this fashion for 20 years. And then, they imploded. 1987, right?
After two decades of tensions and Israeli military rule in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians decided that they had had enough, launching a grassroots rebellion known as the First Intifada. The Intifada had two aims: one, resisting Israeli military occupation and two, legitimizing the Palestinian struggle abroad. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which styled itself as the representative of the Palestinian people, had spent decades publicizing their cause through international terrorism – from airplane hijackings to massacres of schoolchildren, tourists, and even Olympic athletes. But during the First Intifada, the world saw a different Palestinian movement: one of young people throwing stones, fruitlessly, at Israeli tanks. This image changed everything. Media changed everything. The first intifada was not started by the Palestinian leadership, but the people, and this moved the world in a different way. The narrative was shifting. Both at home and abroad, Israel was no longer perceived as the puny David armed only with a slingshot, but a heavily-armed Goliath. Right or wrong, perceptions changed.
David and Goliath fought to the death. But neither Israelis nor Palestinians were going anywhere. And if violence hadn’t yielded a solution, maybe it was time for a different approach.
Chapter 5: 1993 – 2005
After five years of bitter fighting, Israelis and Palestinians were exhausted.
In 1993, the PLO chairman and the Israeli Prime Minister shocked and delighted much of the world by signing the first of the Oslo Accords – a set of agreements that gave Palestinians a form of self-rule for the first time, with the unofficial intention of eventually creating a state.
They divided the West Bank into three areas, creatively named Areas A, B, and C.
Area A is only 18% of the West Bank’s landmass, home to 60% of West Bank Palestinians. This is where the major cities are: Bethlehem, Jenin, Ramallah, Tulkarm, etc. Oslo dictated this area would be governed exclusively by the Palestinian Authority. Today, it’s illegal for Israelis to enter – mostly because when they do, very bad things happen to them.
Area B makes up 22% of the West Bank’s landmass but is home to about 30% of West Bank Palestinians. The PA has authority here, too – but Israel takes responsibility for security matters. There are no Israelis in Area B, though technically, they can enter legally, if they want. (It’s not recommended.)
And then there’s Area C, where Israel would be completely in charge.
Area C makes up over 60% of the West Bank’s landmass, and it is entirely in Israeli hands. Today, it’s home to roughly 400,000-500,000 Jewish Israelis and 300,000 Palestinians, who – unlike the Jews – are subject to Israeli military law rather than civil law.
It’s important to mention that Areas A and B aren’t contiguous. So even if a Palestinian lives in Area A, entirely under Israeli control, he or she may well need to go through checkpoints to get from one Area A city to another.
It’s complicated, I know. But that was the agreement. That’s what they agreed on.
Plenty of Israelis and Palestinians alike were deeply unhappy with the Accords. Terrorist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad did their best to tank the accords with a string of horrific suicide attacks. And, in late 1995, less than two months after the second Oslo Accords was signed, a Jewish terrorist shot and killed the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as he exited a peace rally, sending shockwaves throughout the nation and the world. Somehow, the peace process limped on, but despite the negotiations and the offers and the strong encouragement of the Americans, no peace emerged.
Instead, a second Intifada erupted in the year 2000. And this one was far deadlier than the first, killing over a thousand Israelis and four thousand Palestinians. The Second Intifada deeply scarred both sides.
The First Intifada had sidelined the Israeli right. After five exhausting years, the Israeli public was more willing than ever to “give peace a chance.” The Second Intifada brought hard line Israelis front and center. They’d given peace a chance, and look what it got them! Suicide bombs? Restaurants blown up? Buses unsafe for little kids? The Israeli left said, no thank you. Ever since then, the Israeli left wing has been, well, it’s there, but withering.
Why? Because Israelis just don’t trust Palestinians anymore.
And Palestinians just don’t trust Israelis.
I would say that the Second Intifada dragged mutual trust to an all-time low… but as the October 7th massacre and subsequent war has proven, things can always get worse.
Cheery, huh? Which brings us to:
Chapter 6: 2005 – 2023
After five exhausting, bitter, miserable years of the Second Intifada, Israelis were just – done.
So the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, who was known to be pretty hawkish, made the surprising and highly controversial move to unilaterally withdraw Israelis from the Gaza Strip, leaving the 1.3 million Gazans to govern themselves.
Withdraw, in this case, meant two things.
1 – The 9,000 or so Jewish Israelis who lived in Gaza would be uprooted from their homes.
2 – Once the Jewish civilians were gone, the IDF would pull out of Gaza completely, leaving Palestinians in the Strip to their own devices for the first time… ever.
The so-called Gaza Disengagement was deeply divisive in Israel, raising fears of potential violence between Jews. But the process went relatively smoothly considering the fears, and many Israelis hoped that the Palestinians of Gaza would be too busy governing themselves to pose a security threat to the Jewish communities just across the border.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, the Palestinians held elections. They were tired of what they saw as the Palestinian Authority’s corruption and incompetence, and the terror group Hamas was offering real change. Hamas won the majority of seats, shocking the world. Hey world, stop being so shocked. But the terror group was unable to effectively share power with the Palestinian Authority, and by 2007, a mini-civil-war erupted between the two.
Hamas won.
Now, the Palestinians had two governments: Hamas in Gaza, and the PA in the West Bank. Two micro statelets essentially. Israel – and most of the Western world – considers Hamas a terrorist organization.
Here’s a quote from their original charter:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” “ Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.”
And that’s just the prologue!
But wait, there’s more!
Article 22: “With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there….”
It goes on like that for 36 exhausting articles.
In 2017, Hamas wised up and got PC, by which I mean they deleted some of the more obvious Elders of Zion conspiracy theories and reassured the world that, quote:
“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine…”
To that end: “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity” and “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance.”
They don’t hate Jews! They just hate Zionists! Sounds polite, sounds too familiar in the modern western construct. Note to self – if you are trying to make the argument that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same thing, and you sound like Hamas’s charter, it’s probably not a great thing.
In any event, from the moment Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, they made it clear that they had no intention of pursuing peace, or at least quiet, with its Jewish neighbor. So both Israel and Egypt placed the Gaza Strip under strict blockade, hoping to prevent the flow of weapons and other military hardware that made its way into the Strip via an intricate network of smuggling tunnels. Gaza’s economy shriveled terribly under the blockades, which would tighten any time Hamas attacked Israel. And Hamas attacked Israel a lot.
For the next decade and a half, the status quo looked something like this:
- a few months of relative quiet;
- a barrage of rockets from Hamas;
- a relatively short but often lethal Israeli counter-operation;
- an internationally-brokered ceasefire;
- a few months of relative quiet,
- a barrage of rockets… You get it.
That was more or less the cycle until 2022, when Hamas – strangely – declined to join Palestinian Islamic Jihad in their rocket attacks on Israel. My analysis here – and I could be wrong – is that the Israeli leadership got naive, soft and complacent, and truly believed Hamas was softening their stance, finally more invested in fixing their broken economy than destroying Israel. So the Israeli government eased up on many of its restrictions, even expanding the number of work permits allotted to Gazans who wished to earn a living inside Israel.
But the quiet was a ruse. Behind the scenes, Hamas was planning the worst day in Israeli history.
Chapter 7: Today
The October 7th massacre caught Israel with its proverbial pants around its proverbial ankles, as Hamas infiltrated dozens of Israeli communities, slaughtering 1200 people and kidnapping 251 more.
For weeks, Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with retaliatory airstrikes, eventually expanding into a ground operation. The war was punctuated by a temporary ceasefire, during which 101 Israeli hostages were returned in exchange for a lull in the fighting and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
As of this recording, in late January, 2025, around 90 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza. At least 34 are confirmed dead. Hamas and Israel are in the midst of a multiphase ceasefire agreement meant to bring the remaining hostages home in stages.
So, as of now, the Palestinians are still bitterly divided. Gazans continue to endure all the horrors of war, with tens of thousands dead. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has begun flexing its muscle and cracking down on terror. Meanwhile, Israeli society is deeply torn about what happens next – both in Gaza, and at home.
The scars of October 7 and the subsequent war are going to last a long, long time. Both societies need desperately to heal. But the journey towards healing will be long and painful, and Israelis and Palestinians alike will need to confront their extremists before they can reach anything that looks like peace.
So… that’s the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as briefly as I know how to tell it. It’s not easy to summarize a conflict that operates on basically every axis: religious divides, zero-sum nationalist aspirations, territory, etc.
Both parties have legitimate grievances.
Both parties have a strong claim and connection to the land.
You might think one is more valid than the other. That’s fine. What’s not fine: Here’s what’s not fine, denying the ancient Jewish connection to this land. I’ve heard it too often. Acting like this whole conflict is merely a land grab by white settler-colonizing imperialists. I’ve heard it too often. Pretending the issue is absolutely black and white. I’ve heard it too often. Demonizing an entire people as baby killers or blood drinkers or any other blood-libel-inflected insults. I’ve heard it too often.
This story is much more complicated than that.
So take the time to learn the history. Read or watch or listen to people who were actually there. Read or watch or listen to histories that examine events from multiple angles and deal with complexities.
The version I just told you is little more than an invitation. It is a way to dip your feet into the complexities of this conflict, to the history, without getting swept away by the current, lost and confused. It’s a cracked door, beckoning you to come in and explore, if you want to. It’s not the end of the story. It’s barely even the beginning.
But every journey starts somewhere. And I hope very much that this episode can act as a guide as you take your first steps into this maddening, harrowing, essential, so important history.
So if you’re interested enough to do more homework, we’ve got a big back catalogue for you to peruse. Yes, links in the show notes.