The conflict there has been going on for literally thousands of years as the various Semitic, Arab, Greek, and Phoenician kingdoms jockied for control over the fertile agricultural lands in the Jezreal Valley and the overland trade routes connecting Mesopotamia with Egypt and the Hellenistic world.

With that said, the origins of the modern conflict date back to the second half of the 19th century when the Levant was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. At the time, modern Israel/Palestine was a sparsely populated impoverished backwater after centuries of devastating wars and mismanagement.

To encourage development, the Ottomans invited Jews fleeing persecution in Europe to settle in Palestine on land that was largely thought to be unsuitable for agriculture. This led to the promotion of Zionism in Europe as Jews began to envision repopulating the holy land to create a homeland for themselves. Over the next few decades, thousands of Jews immigrated to Ottoman Palestine becoming a sizable minority within the province. Their skills at modern farming caused the deserts to bloom, creating valuable land where there was once abandoned desert.

During WW1, the British encouraged the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the hopes that it would force them to divert troops away from the Balkans and the Gallipoli campaign. They really had little faith that such a revolution could be successful, but Lawrence managed to rally the Arabs to victories on such a scale that the entire Ottoman Empire collapsed. To govern the chaos, Great Britain governed Ottoman Palestine as a Mandate while France governed Lebanon and Syria. The house of Saud was allowed to ascend to the throne of the newly independent Kingdom of Arabia.

Under English governance, Jewish immigration increased, leading to increased tensions with the ethnic Arabs and other Muslims who were living there, but the British kept the peace. During and after WWII, the Jewish diaspora from Europe exploded, causing Jews to become a majority in many parts of Palestine.

Following the war, the English saw fit to give up their mandate and return the area to self-rule. They initially came up with a two-state solution of Israel and Trans-Jordan. As soon as the British left, however, a civil war erupted. Arabs immediately began massacring Jews wherever they could find them and Jews returned the violence in kind. This triggered multiple wars as the various Arab nations of the Middle East repeatedly attacked Israel and were defeated. The Jews declared the independence of Israel and deported a significant percentage of the surviving Arabs within the regions they controlled. A significant number of them fled to the Egyptian province of Gaza. Most every place where Palestinians fled to, they destabilized the governments of those nations. Palestinians nearly overthrew governments in Egypt and Jordan and succeeded in Lebanon, which has never truly recovered or seen stability since.

Control over the Sinai peninsula, Gaza, and the Suez Canal changed hands several times during the second half of the 20th century before the current situation resulted with Egypt controlling the Suez and Sinai, but Israel controlling Gaza after Egypt refused to allow any more Gazans to immigrate to Egypt proper. In the 90’s, some limited peace was achieved between Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. However, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon remained staunch opponents. These forces continue to supply Palestinian rebels in Gaza and the West Bank under the guise of humanitarian aid. These forces essentially wage a non-stop cold war of attrition and PR with Israel which occasionally gets hot.

The cold war exploded in October as Gazans conducted large scale raids on Israeli settlements, massacring thousands of civilians and taking hundreds of hostages. This triggered Israel to essentially declare total war and begin systematically destroying Gaza block by block. As neither Israel not Egypt will permit Gazans to leave Gaza to flee the war, and this bombing and demolition has destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and killed thousands of Hamas fighters and civilians, it is being decried as a genocide.

The sad reality of this conflict is that it has proven to Israelis that they can no longer coexist with Gaza, and that genocide or ethnic cleansing is the only solution. The Palestinian have never believed Israel had any right to exist, and continue to attempt to genocide and/or ethnically cleanse Israel, albeit, thus far unsuccessfully.

Both sides are now intent upon completely massacring the other, and the international community seems too paralyzed by partisan loyalties to come up with any workable solutions that don’t involve one side massacring or ethnically cleansing the other. To be honest, I am not sure there is a solution.