![]() There is one aspect of the conflict with a more overt religious dimension: Jerusalem. But beneath their language of jihad is, in significant part, the same nationalist drive of previous groups. It is true that more recent groups such as Hamas, which formed in 1987, espouse Islamism. Some early groups were even officially communist. They were not, despite common misconceptions, Islamic extremists they were Palestinian nationalists not unlike the Irish Republican Army were Irish nationalists. Initial Palestinian armed movements were largely secular, as well. While a number of Israelis are religiously observant, especially on the political right, the larger movement that created Israel was and remains primarily secular. Their movement, Zionism, treated Jews primarily as a nationality - like the French or Chinese - in addition to a religious group. The European Jews who first encouraged and organized mass Jewish migration to what we now call Israel, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were mostly secular Jews. It's a clash between nationalities - Israeli and Palestinian - over secular issues of land and nationhood. This is not, despite what your grade school teacher may have suggested, a clash between Judaism and Islam over religious differences. It is true that Israelis are mostly Jewish and Palestinians are mostly Muslim, but religion is pretty low on the list of direct drivers of the conflict. Myth #2: The conflict is all about religion So consider it your civic duty as a citizen of the world to ignore the naysayers who insist you could never possibly understand this conflict - you can. It also helps serve the status quo of perpetual conflict, which is great news for extremists on both sides that want to see the conflict end through total military victory over the other. The effect of all this, by the way, is to yield the conversation to the most vehement partisans, which is one of several reasons why that conversation is so toxic. This is a sadly effective way to shut down conversation it make people want to ignore the other side's legitimate positions, ignore their own preferred side's abuses, or simply check out altogether. In both tellings, the conclusion is the same: you shouldn't think too hard or read too much about what's happening. Third, pro-Israeli/pro-Palestinian partisans often push the idea that the conflict is complex beyond outsiders' comprehension, or that it is exceedingly simple ("our side is right"). But having two versions of history is not at all unusual in big conflicts, and it does not actually make the reality of what's happened somehow beyond human understanding. So you'll hear a lot of contradictory information, which can be confusing and exhausting this effect is compounded by the fact that American public discourse also splits between the two narratives. Second, each side has a very different narrative of the conflict, what's happened, what matters, and who bears what responsibilities. That means hashing out any one detail means reciting through lots of history while it can be tough to remember all that information, this does not make the issues inherently impossible to understand or resolve. First, it's been going on for several decades, which is a long time. There are three main reasons the conflict can feel much more complicated than it actually is. ![]() And while these issues can be extremely difficult to resolve, grasping them is not.Ī Palestinian woman walks past an Israeli soldier outside the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Yes, there are some very thorny details - how to divide the city of Jerusalem, for example - but the list of such details is not impossibly long. At its most basic level, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is over who gets what land and how that land is controlled. It's true that Israel-Palestine is complicated, but it's not that complicated (you can get the full primer here). This is, in many ways, the Israel-Palestine misconception from which all other Israel-Palestine misconceptions flow: that the conflict is an impossibly complicated mess so far beyond human untangling or comprehension that we should not really try. Myth #1: The conflict is too complex to possibly understand Once you see the truth about a few widely held misconceptions, the conflict starts to make a lot more sense.
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