At a January 2018 meeting of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, Nickolay Mladenov, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said, “…all have fallen into a pattern of ‘managing, rather than resolving’ the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.” He also said, “it was time to end this paralysis, show political leadership and push for policies on ...
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It depends on who you ask. According to several human rights organizations there is strong evidence that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) forces have committed war crimes. One example from 2015 involves the IDF use of “disproportionate or otherwise indiscriminate attacks” during their bombing of residential areas of Rafah associated with the capture of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin. Israel ...
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Eighty-three percent of the world's countries, and almost every country that doesn’t have an Arab or Muslim majority, recognizes Israel. However, “Israel is extremely unpopular worldwide. In one BBC poll of 22 countries, Israel was the fourth-most disliked nation (behind only Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea)…Most of the world believes that Israel's continued control of the ...
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On the surface it does sure seem like it would be a good idea for Israel and Palestine to just become just become independent countries. And, in fact, that is what is known as the two-state solution. However, there are four main reasons standing in the way of solving this critical, decades-long problem: borders, Jerusalem, refugees and security. Where to draw the borders is an issue since the ...
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Hamas is an Islamist Palestinian political organization and militant group that currently controls Gaza. Hamas has long wanted to destroy Israel and replace it with a Palestinian state. So they are basically fighting over the land. (Gaza was originally controlled by Egypt until 1967, but then Israel occupied it during the Six-Day War.) Hamas has been attacking Israel since Hamas’s ...
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No. The Jews and Palestinians have not always been arch rivals. They have had religious differences for probably thousands of years but their recent conflict began when the Jews, fleeing discrimination and murder in Nazi Germany, wanted to establish a national homeland. The area they chose for their homeland was at the time, an Arab- and Muslim-majority territory once under the Ottoman and ...
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I would not say America has always supported Israel in its fight against its Arab neighbors but they certainly have almost always supported Israel. I say this because in the 1956 Suez War, Israel, the UK, and France fought against Egypt but at the time, the American President Eisenhower was not supportive. Also President Obama had some disagreements with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ...
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The “Iron Dome” is not like a dome that protects a football stadium in the United States from bad forms of weather. Israel’s Iron Dome is a missile defense system that protects Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities against short-range rockets and mortar shells, typically launched against Israel from Hamas forces in Gaza. The Iron Dome’s missiles target incoming rockets and ...
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Good question, but a hard one to answer. Turkey’s current leader, Erdogan, has declared his intention to have Turkey once again become the leader of the Islamic Mideast where states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Tunisia, Iraq and Iran already have adopted Islamic law or have Islamist governments. (Many of those countries were once part of the Turkish or Ottoman caliphate which ...
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The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) probably do not have the capacity to defeat Turkey. For example, just look at the population of Israel, about 8.5 million, compared to only one city in Turkey, Istanbul: over 14 million. Of course, population numbers alone do not necessarily mean Turkey would win a war with Israel. In March, 2018, Turkey’s unofficial newspaper, Yeni Åžafak, stated, ...
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