Summary: Reading Time: 12 minutesSummary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict <br> <br> In my final post in this series it would be good to look at a summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that we have been reviewing. Understanding the history helps us to better understand the present state and the future of the conflict.<br> Over the course of this series we have looked at the idea of Israel and Zionism and how it developed. These are old ideas and ideals but not necessarily the same things that are talked about in Christian and Jewish scriptures.<br> <br> The idea of the land was only one piece of Jewish culture and identity that maintained them during the diaspora. The persecution from Christians in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Spanish inquisition did not provoke a return to the land or the Middle East.<br> <br> It took the formation of the ideas of European nationalism in the 19th century combined to the continued persecution from Europeans to give rise to an idea that was held only by a fringe group at first. The idea was at the core of modern Zionism; returning to a Jewish homeland.<br> <br> Even then it wasn’t about Israel or Palestine. It was just about a homeland for the Jewish people, a state of their own. Soon the target for that homeland became Palestine. This became more legitimized with the Balfour Declaration during World War I. The influx of Jewish immigrants into the Palestinian homeland during the interwar period led to an inevitable escalation of tensions that finally erupted with extremists and terrorists on both sides.<br> <br> Those on the Jewish side had to compete with the more diplomatic statesmen like David Ben Gurion within their own ranks. Ben Gurion and the statesmen would end up winning the internal conflicts among the Jewish Zionists just in time for the declaration of statehood following World War II and the holocaust.<br> Summary of the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Since 1948<br> <br> The turn of fortune for the Jewish people in securing their own homeland was a victory from their perspective but a catastrophe for the Palestinians who were displaced there. That Palestinian catastrophe was compounded decade by decade as the number of Palestinians who lost their homes to what they perceived as a growing Israeli occupation took full form.<br> <br> This hit a zenith after the 1967 Six Days War in which Israel more than doubled its territory and the amount of Palestinians outside the borders of Palestine who were living as refugees and not allowed to return to their homes. Those who remained in Palestine under Israeli rule learned to live as foreigners in their own occupied homeland.<br> The political nationalism of the 1960s gave rise to political terrorism in the 1970s. When that failed the rise of Islamic terrorism rose in the 1980s with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others. The failed peace process empowered these organizations while at the same time disempowering the PLA whom Israel had finally decided to legitimize and work with.<br> <br> By the turn of the century, as the state of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict entered more than half a century of existence, the shape and feel of the conflict began to take on a life of its own. A lot of these realities were contradicting and strangely irrational.<br> Summary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Peace Process<br> Following President Jimmy Carter’s successful initiate for peace at Camp David it became a right of passage for American Presidents to involve themselves in the Israeli Palestinian peace process.<br> <br> With the exception of George Bush in the early 1990s after the Persian Gulf War, these efforts usually came about in the second terms of sitting presidents where they supposedly had less political capital to lose and could take greater risks for peace.<br> <br>
