The crisis in Israel-Palestine

If you’ve scrolled through Instagram Stories this week, you were likely met with a single image over and over: a desert camp in front of a dramatic mountain range, filled with endless rows of colorful tents and white ones in the middle spelling out the words “All eyes on Rafah.”

The image has now been shared on at least 40 million Instagram Stories, including those of Palestinian American models Gigi and Bella Hadid, actors Priyanka Chopra and Nicola Coughlan, and artist Kehlani. It’s certainly not the only image to go viral that attempts to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians during Israel’s seven-month assault on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attack, and not even the only one this week (another, which groups several headlines in which Israeli officials claim its deadly attacks were “mistakes,” has seen wide traction). But it’s unlike many of the other posts to circulate on social media during the war, in which Israeli forces have killed more than 35,000 people (more than half of whom the UN says are women and children) and displaced around 1.7 million more. That’s because it appears to be AI-generated.

A Palestinian journalist shot in the leg by Israeli forces will receive no compensation for the injury, continuing a worrying trend of the Jewish state’s military facing no consequences for harming Palestinian reporters.

Freelance photographer and journalist Ahmad Tal’at was covering a protest in the West Bank in 2015 when he was shot in the leg — by, he claimed, an unknown member of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

It took almost no time for Palestinian leaders to reject President Donald Trump’s Israel-Palestine peace plan.

“After the nonsense that we heard today we say a thousand no’s to the ‘deal of the century,’” said Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, at a news conference shortly after the proposal’s unveiling Tuesday. “We are certain that our Palestinian people will not let these conspiracies pass. So, all options are open.”

Senior White House adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner spent three years working on the Trump administration’s newly released Israel-Palestine peace plan. Yet the main talking point he’s using to sell the proposal reveals the fundamental problem at the heart of the plan itself: the administration’s tacit endorsement of Israel’s continued illegal settlements in Palestinian territory.

In multiple interviews right after the administration released its proposal on Tuesday, Kushner said Israel’s rapid growth — in other words, the settlements — are precisely why Palestinian leaders should make a deal now.

President Donald Trump claims his peace plan for Israel and Palestine will prove to be a triumph that will last for the next 80 years. But it’s unclear whether it will be viable for even 80 minutes.

That’s because most analysts believe the deal — the political portion of which was finally released on Tuesday — is dead on arrival.

Donald Trump’s “peace plan” isn’t a plan for advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. It’s a plan for scuttling them.

The president released the long-awaited political framework of his “Peace to Prosperity” plan on Tuesday afternoon after a White House ceremony featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After much delay, President Trump has finally unveiled his Middle East peace plan — a plan he claims will lead to the “deal of the century.”

The problem? It’s likely dead on arrival.

Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Middle East peace, is stepping down from his post — throwing even more doubt on whether the “deal of the century” between Israel and the Palestinians that Trump has been teasing for months will actually work.

Multiple news outlets reported Thursday that Greenblatt, whose previous job was as a real estate lawyer for the Trump Organization, planned to step down later this month after releasing a draft of the long-awaited “political” portion of the Middle East peace plan following Israel’s upcoming elections.

One big question that’s bound to come up in the 2020 presidential election is where do the candidates stand on Israel? It’s an issue that some say is already threatening to split apart the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — which the US attempted to broker for decades — has basically disappeared from view.

Israel and Gaza have been on the brink of war for months — and it’s possible Sunday night’s actions will push them closer to that outcome.

Rockets allegedly fired from Gaza hit a home in central Israel, north of Tel Aviv, injuring seven. It’s the second time in less than two weeks that the area has come under attack, a rarity since most rockets from Gaza target Israel’s south.

The United States will now recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel — a massive change in American foreign policy that will likely benefit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The surprise announcement by President Donald Trump about the disputed territory is in keeping with his full-throated support for Netanyahu and embrace of right-leaning Israeli positions. The questions now are if the decision will complicate the administration’s efforts to bring peace to the region and if the move will help Netanyahu’s reelection chances next month.

Fighting between Israel and Gaza may be winding down after a furious few hours that threatened to plunge the region into further chaos.

On Thursday, two long-range rockets fired from Gaza streaked toward Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s largest cities. The Israeli military said that they were likely accidental launches during maintenance work.

Tensions between Israel and Gaza — already extremely high — may grow even higher in the coming hours.

On Thursday, two long-range rockets fired from Gaza streaked toward Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s largest cities. And although no casualties or property damage have been reported so far, Israel is likely to respond forcefully.

Months of low-level conflict between Israel and Gaza seem to be reaching a boiling point — and experts worry the two sides may be hurtling toward all-out war.

Since March, thousands of Gazans have been protesting nearly every week at the Israeli border. They’re calling for the “right of return” for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their descendants who fled or were displaced from their homes after the creation of the state of Israel, as well as an end to Israel’s crippling 12-year land, sea, and air blockade of Gaza.

When you talk to people about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the myth that you’re likeliest to hear — even more than the myth that they’ve been fighting for centuries, or that it’s all about religion — is that the conflict is too complex to possibly understand, a mess so far beyond human comprehension that we shouldn’t even try.

In fact, a little over a century ago, the place we today call Israel-Palestine was pretty peaceful. And if you look at the history of what’s happened since, how these past few decades have unfolded, the conflict starts to make a lot more sense:

One of the toughest questions in the Israel-Palestine conflict is a very basic one of cohabitation: how can Jews and Arabs get along, side by side, after decades of fighting? It’s a beloved cliché that food brings people together, but in Israel-Palestine even this can drive them apart. As with the land itself, there are competing claims for what dishes or flavors belong to whom, and bitter fights over possession and identity between two groups that have lots of shared history.

Could those fights over food actually be an opportunity for the Jews and Arabs of Israel-Palestine to come together? That was a major topic when, in early 2013, the authors of Palestinian cookbook The Gaza Kitchen, Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, sat down with Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi for Bon Appetit magazine. Ottolenghi co-authored the cookbook Jerusalem, which explores intersections in Jewish and Arab food in the divided city, with Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi.

If you’ve read about the Israel-Palestine conflict at all in the last few years, chances are your eyes have stopped at least once over the photography of Gharabli Ahmad. The East Jerusalem-based Agence France-Presse photojournalist has developed a distinctive style during his years of documenting life in Israel and the Palestinian territories, much of his work conveying the conflict from the Palestinian perspective. It’s a subject that normally invites clichés, but which he gives new life by finding someone standing out in a crowd, a meaningful glance at the camera, a moment of unscripted candor amid the usual routines of the conflict. Collected here are 25 of his photos from the last few years, much of it from Jerusalem. They show the conflict, normal daily life, and the vast grey area in between. In keeping with the nature of life on Israel-Palestine’s front lines, the conflict and non-conflict photos are intermixed.

Everyone who’s ever spent time talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially on social media, knows that it’s hopelessly, miserably partisan. A new study of tweets during the Gaza conflict — and the gorgeous visualization of its results, posted below — suggests one deceptively simple reason why that’s true: the two camps are operating from totally different sources of information.

Gilad Lotan, the chief data scientist for the venture capital firm Betaworks, was curious about how, exactly, the social media conversation on the Gaza war worked. He used the July 24th attack on a UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school/shelter in Beit Hanoun as a test case, scraping Twitter between July 25th and 30th for any tweets mentioning “UNWRA or related words.” He wrote up his findings in an extremely popular and interesting post on Medium.

In one of the Gaza offensive’s many awful tragedies, an Israeli missile struck near a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school in Rafah that was being used as a shelter, killing at least 10 people. Israel was targeting three suspected militants on a nearby motorbike.

In an interview with me last night on MSNBC, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness called for a full investigation, noting that the UNRWA had made 33 calls to the Israeli army telling them this school was being used as the shelter and making sure they had the precise GPS coordinates so that the Israel army knew to give it a wide berth. The last of those calls was put through an hour before the strike. The interview begins at 04:30:

Why does it feel like the end might finally be in sight? It’s impossible to say for sure, but a big possible explanation is that both sides have gotten the minimum of what what they wanted out of the war. Israel has done serious damage to Hamas’ tunnel network and demonstrated, again, that Hamas can’t launch rockets without paying a serious price. And Hamas has plausibly won a political victory, one that may allow them to get some much-needed concessions from Israel and Egypt.

But the war isn’t just about tunnels. According to Brent Sasley, a Professor of the University of Texas-Arlington, Israel wants “quiet.” He argues that Israel would actually tolerate a number of rockets out of Gaza, so long as those rockets are not from Hamas. “They don’t cause any damage, certainly don’t kill any Israelis, and there’s nothing else that requires a bigger response,” he told me.

From the outside of the US-Israel alliance, it can look like the countries are so close that they are practically extensions of one another. From within, though, the relationship is a good deal more complex. One of the complexities that gets overlooked: Israelis get that the US is a crucial backer, but they sure don’t trust President Obama.

That came through in a recent reader poll on the popular Israeli news and entertainment site Mako, which asked readers what Obama should get for his 53rd birthday, on Monday. By far the most popular choice is “An envelope of the ebola virus,” which has tracked about 50 percent of votes since the poll went up.

As controversial as Israel’s military offensive in Gaza is internationally, there’s something close to absolute consensus in Israel: a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 95 percent of Jewish Israelis say Operation Protective Edge is justified. That’s higher even than the number of Americans who supported the Afghanistan War in the direct aftermath of 9/11.

This interview Deutsche Well conducted with Amos Oz, Israel’s most famous novelist and one of its most prominent peaceniks, helps explain why. The interview begins with Oz taking over:

The English-language Israeli publication Times of Israel today published, and then quickly deleted, a blog post by the writer Yochanan Gordon with the extremely inflammatory headline “When Genocide is Permissible.” The post does not explicitly endorse the genocide of Palestinians, but it asks if doing so would be morally justified after building up the case it would be and presenting only evidence in the affirmative.

“What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely?” Gordon asks. And later, arguing that Hamas will never accept peace and that Israel is justified in doing anything necessary to impose it, “If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?”

Shortly after Israel and Hamas finally entered their ceasefire earlier today, what was hoped to be the beginning of the end of the three-week war in Gaza, the Israeli military announced that one of its soldiers had been kidnapped. The ceasefire is over.

So what is Hamas thinking? Why would they do this despite the easily foreseeable devastation it will invite? There is, from within the Hamas worldview, potentially more logic to it than you might think. To be clear, this is not to endorse that worldview, but to explain why Hamas would do this, what it likely hopes to accomplish, and why.