ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT: THE WORLD’S MOST INTRACTABLE
CONFLICT.
By Ahmed Abubakar Lamin
ABSTRACT
The state of Israel was created in 1948 after Britain withdrew its mandate from Palestine.
The UN proposed partitioning the area into Arab and Jewish States and Arab armies who
opposed the UN plan were defeated. Israel fought wars against its Arab neighbours in
1967 and 1973 coupled with occupation of West Bank and Gaza strip in the 1967 war.
The Israeli government has been having clashes with Palestine Liberation Groups. The
United States notably has been championing most of the peace processes in the conflict
without much positive impact. Few questions this paper seeks to analyse include; why is
the Palestine-Israel conflict uncontrollable? How impactful were the peace processes?
Who are the actors involved in the peace process? However, in a bid to explain the
intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict; the emergence of several movements such as
the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas and the peace processes that were
difficult to implement, the one or two state solutions and recent hostilities against the
Palestinians are issues this paper seeks to analyse.
KEYWORDS: Conflict, Intifada, War, Resolution, Liberation, Occupation
Introduction
Conflict has over the years been conceived as disagreement between two opposing parties
over scarce resources. However, Lewis Coser, a German-American Sociologist defines
conflict as a struggle between opponents over values and claims to scarce status, power
and resources (Coser, 1956). The possibility of one party infringing over the rights of the
other makes conflict inevitable. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is essentially a modern
conflict originating in the 20th century. However, the roots of the conflict involving
competing historical claims to the same stretch of land go back thousands of years. It has
often been referred to as the world's "most intractable conflict," with the ongoing Israeli
occupation of West Bank, Ramallah, Basrah and Gaza strip stretching over a period of 54
years. Jewish roots in the area began sometime between 1800 and 1500 B.C. when the
Hebrew people, a Semitic group, migrated into Canaan (today’s Israel). Around 1000
B.C., their descendants formally established the kingdom of Israel with Jerusalem as its
capital. The kingdom was frequently under foreign control most notably the Roman
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3965270
