The Palestinian Conflict

If you really want to understand why everything is so broken right now, you can't just look at the last few years or even the last couple of decades. You have to go all the way back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’ve been digging through historical archives, old UN documents, and comparing how networks like the BBC and Al Jazeera have reported on this over the years, and the history is basically just a massive web of broken promises.

Back in the early 1900s, the area we call Palestine was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The population was overwhelmingly Arab, mostly Muslim, some Christian, along with a small, native Jewish population. Over in Europe, Jewish people were facing horrific, violent antisemitism. In response, a movement called Zionism started gaining traction. The core idea was that Jewish people needed their own sovereign nation to finally be safe, and because of deep historical and religious ties, they looked to Palestine. So, Zionist organizations started buying up land in Palestine from wealthy, absentee landlords. The problem was that Arab tenant farmers had been living and working on that land for generations. When the land was sold, those Arab families were suddenly evicted. That was the very first spark. You had European Jews desperately looking for a safe haven, and local Arabs getting pushed off the land they called home.  

Then World War I happened, and the British Empire essentially double-crossed everyone. To get the Arabs to help them fight the Ottomans, the British made an agreement in 1915, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, promising to recognize an independent Arab state, which the Arabs understood included Palestine. But then, in 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration. In this document, they promised to support the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. They were trying to get Jewish support for the war effort in places like the US and Russia. So the British promised the same piece of land to two different groups of people, while also secretly agreeing with the French to just carve up the Middle East for themselves anyway.  

After WWI, the British took control of Palestine under a mandate. Jewish immigration steadily increased, especially in the 1930s, as people tried to escape the terrifying rise of Nazi Germany. The Palestinian Arabs felt their country was being handed over to European immigrants without their consent. This led to a massive Arab revolt against the British in the late 1930s, which the British crushed violently. By the end of World War II, the British were exhausted and basically handed the whole mess over to the newly created United Nations.  

In 1947, the UN came up with a partition plan. They decided to split Palestine into two independent states: one Jewish and one Arab. At the time, Jewish people owned about 6% of the land and made up a third of the population, but the UN plan gave the proposed Jewish state over half the territory. The Zionist leaders accepted it, but the Arab leaders flat-out rejected it. From their perspective, the UN was giving away land that belonged to the Arab majority.  

This tension exploded into war. In May 1948, Israel declared independence, and several surrounding Arab nations immediately invaded. When the fighting stopped, Israel had won and actually ended up controlling a lot more territory than the UN had originally given them. But the human cost was staggering. Over 700,000 Palestinians either fled in terror or were forcibly expelled from their homes by Israeli forces. Palestinians call this the Nakba, which translates to the "Catastrophe." Hundreds of villages were destroyed. Those people were never allowed to return, and they and their descendants make up the millions of refugees currently living in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan today. The Israeli claim is that they won a defensive war for their survival and that a Jewish state is a historical necessity. The Palestinian claim is that their society was systematically dismantled and their homeland was stolen.  

Fast forward to 1967, which is another massive turning point. In the Six-Day War, Israel fought its Arab neighbors again and captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. This is when the military occupation started, and it’s still going on right now. Israel began building settlements in the West Bank, basically heavily guarded, Jewish-only towns built on Palestinian land. Under international law, transferring your civilian population into occupied territory is illegal, but it just kept happening. The maps show the West Bank slowly looking like a piece of Swiss cheese, with Palestinian communities isolated from each other by Israeli military checkpoints, walls, and settler bypass roads.  

When you sit back and look at how all of this is reported today, the bias is actually crazy to see. I was reading a study from the Media Diversity Institute that analyzed how the BBC and Al Jazeera cover the violence. You would think the BBC is completely neutral and Al Jazeera is completely pro-Palestinian. But the data showed that both networks consistently used Israeli sources way more often than Palestinian ones. The study also pointed out that the media frequently uses language that frames Israeli military actions as a "response" or "retaliation" to Palestinian violence, but almost never frames Palestinian actions as a response to the ongoing military occupation or settler violence. It subtly trains the reader to see Israel as the defender and the Palestinians as the aggressors, ignoring the fact that one side is a heavily armed occupying power and the other is a stateless population living under blockade and military rule.

Looking at the whole timeline, it’s really hard not to feel a strong pull toward the Palestinian side. Yes, the Jewish people have historical ties to the land and faced unimaginable horrors in Europe, and no Israeli civilian deserves to live in fear of violence. But the reality on the ground is that the creation and expansion of Israel has come at the direct, ongoing expense of the Palestinian people. From the evictions in the early 1900s to the Nakba in 1948, to the occupation in 1967, to the absolute devastation happening in Gaza right now, it’s a century-long story of displacement. Trying to be a neutral journalist doesn't mean ignoring the facts. And the facts show a massive, deeply entrenched power imbalance where an entire population is being denied their basic right to exist freely in their own homeland.