In one paragraph can you summarise the Israel / Hamas conflict?

Wasn't Samson 'eyeless in Gaza' after Delilah had betrayed him. His eyes had been gouged out. No. I know it's not an answer to OP's question. I know Bible stories can be bloody and so few people know them, but all life is there.

Abraham came from 'Ur of the Chaldees' - one of my relations loved those words.

I thought @lavender2023 's longish summing up was very useful.

I have been looking up several things on Wiki. They might not be perfect but I would trust them more than many sources.

My very short history.

Jews are mostly exiled from Judea by the Romans. Small numbers remain and a yearning to return to the land of Israel remains strong in Jewish tradition, along with a retention of the hebrew language. A five year old Israeli child can quite easily read and understand ancient inscriptions found scattered around Israel. (Unlike, say Spanish colonisers of Inca lands). The land is ruled over by a series of empires - Byzantine, Crusaders, Mamluk, Ottoman, British. The non Jewish indegenous people don't seem to have objected to being ruled over by any of these countries. They did start complaining when Jews began moving to the area in the early nineteenth century. They rejected a Palestinian state in 1948 and Arab countries invaded and kept invading for the next 25 years. They didn't complain when the West Bank ws ruled over by Jordan. (also technically a Palestinian state, parts of which were once ruled over by Jewish people 2000 years ago) There are probably many wiser ways the State of Israel could have dealt with with this issue. Ironically the Arab inhabitants of Israel seem to a lot happier (with some exceptions)

Are the Israelis happy with the status quo?
Will they be happy with the greatly increased levels of generational trauma and hatred they will have caused throughout the ME? Will they still want the US to keep on paying to defend them?

Because it looks to most of us as if Israel’s charter is to kill or drive out the Gazans and take the Gaza Strip for itself

What about the Israelis who recently voted in their current government which failed to defend its borders despite the billions of aid the US gives them and is now slaughtering thousands of innocent children in revenge? The rest of us hope they are also writing to their MPs.

Though the definite origins of the word “Palestine” have been debated for years and are still not known for sure, the name is believed to be derived from the Egyptian and Hebrew word peleshet, which appears in the Tanakh no fewer than 250 times. Roughly translated to mean rolling or migratory, the term was used to describe the inhabitants of the land to the northeast of Egypt – the Philistines. The Philistines were an Aegean people – more closely related to the Greeks and with no connection ethnically, linguistically, or historically with Arabia – who conquered the Mediterranean coastal plain that is now Israel and Gaza in the 12th Century BCE.
(from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/origin-of-quot-palestine-quot)

The Romans gave the name Palestine to Judea when they conquered it.

The current Palestinians are probably not related to the ancient Philistines/Pelishtim.

Sarcasm is not required.

What about the other 50%?

If the citizens of Gaza are not happy with the status quo them they should raise it with their MPs or whatever is the equivalent in that in Gaza.

You mean when the 50% of Gazans who are under the age of 19 voted them in during the last election in 2006?

That's a bit like saying 'are all Christians the same'?
The answer is 'no'.
You can get liberal Christians that support gay marriage and have drag story-time in churches and at the other end of the scale you can get 'hardliner' Christians like the Westboro Baptist Church.

Hamas has a charter/manifesto that is committed to the Destruction of the State of Israel.

The inhabitants of Gaza were aware of this when they voted Hamas in.

Thing is imv is that none of the countries surrounding Israel want Israel there and are allowing Palestinians to be killed whilst claiming to be innocent bystanders.
Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon ,Syria,Iran could cobble together an arrangement to allow IandP to live side by side but won’t.

Do the members of Hamas have a different religion to the Muslim Palestinians?

This is soooo true.

The problem goes way back in history from 1517 when the area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire (Turks).

In 1918 the Ottoman Empire dropped a blooper and sided with the Germans in WW1, which caused it's downfall and dissolution.

It suited Great Britain to support the Arabs in their fight against the Turks and when WW1 was over helped them to secure an Arab homeland.

Unfortunately the Arabs couldn't agree and there was a big fallout between the House of Saud, and the Hashemite Dynasty as to who would be the guardian of the Holy Places. (Mecca and Jerusalem)

So to keep them happy, and as thanks for their support against the Turks, when the Holy Land/Palestine was partitioned the Hashemites were given a huge slice of land known as "Transjordan".
It was also agreed that no Jews would be allowed to settle beyond the Jordan river to the East.

So now the Saudis had Mecca and the Hashemites had Jerusalem.

Were they happy ? Nope.

As soon as the State of Israel was declared Jordan plus other Arabs countries attacked Israel.

🙄

Would Israel have become such a ‘bully’ if the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries hadn’t been consistently trying to kill their citizens and wipe them off the map do you think?

By that logic, the Pakistani British are colonists.

Ok so I am a settler too as is the prime minister. We came from other countries. Wonderful. My DH's great grandfather came from Russia to London to escape the Tsar's conscription of Jewish boys in the army, guess he is a settler as well.

They were expelled from their countries in response to the founding of Israel, which was not even their doing. Where else could they go?

If you break it down based on your definition, most people in the UK are settlers. What a racist dickhead you are.

Hippyhippybake· Today 12:44

are you seriously suggesting that all people who are kicked out of a country or indeed even choose to leave are automatically settlers / colonialists when they arrive in their new country?

They're immigrants and if they intend to stay, they're settlers. If they kick out the people already there, or move into land cleared of people who were already there, then they're 100% colonists.

How else could you possibly describe them?

I am not saying that it wasn't a tragedy and a travesty that some were forced out of North Africa and Mesopotamia, that's a given. Can you explain why someone else had to suffer the same fate, in order to accommodate them?

Can you justify one injustice by carrying out another one, on people who had nothing to do with the first one? Unless you think that the Palestinians are Iranian, Tunisian, German?

Yes. Lots of history lessons right now, telling us that it’s ok to murder civilians because someone else did it 3000 years ago.
We’re the ones who are currently alive. We and only we are responsible for what we do.

The history in so many ways is just a deterrent from recognising what is happening right now and resolving it. The history is complicated but in many ways not crucial to understand to know what is happening now is wrong and needs to stop.

The status quo (the situation before the current war) is the issue. Israel needs to just stop being such a bully, let Palestinian people eat earn live and enjoy and that distracts everyone from their history and doesn’t give enough space for radicalisation to grow and if it does, not enough to be a full grown movement, just the one off crazy person.

Amazing! Thank you.

Complex, multifaceted, and ultimately insoluble if you're looking for a win-win; which is why it is so easy to split under the pressure of "right vs. wrong" and not only make one side 'right' and one side 'wrong' - but to presume that there are only two sides in the first place.

@SinnerBoy are you seriously suggesting that all people who are kicked out of a country or indeed even choose to leave are automatically settlers / colonialists when they arrive in their new country?

I feel so ashamed that Jewish people no longer feel safe in Britain.

As @YireosDodeAver says:
The strip of fertile land at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea has been the most desirable bit of land in the region for so many thousands of years that the start of the conflict dates to myths and legends from before reliable histories were ever written. Throughout all recorded millenia the land has very rarely been able to exist as an independent nation for more than a few decades, it's generally part of a wider global empire. It is currently in dispute between the US dominated western hegemony and the middle eastern islamist hegemony. Neither side will ever give up - historically, no empire ever gave up its claim, the cease of any previous claim only came about with the decline and fall of the empire in question.

Is there an etymological or cultural link between the word Palestine and the Philistines in the bible? Maybe, maybe not. It is a subject of discussion. This article is a calm starting point.
https://greekreporter.com/2023/10/09/palestinians-ancient-philistines/

about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists...

There you go, you've kicked the arse out of your own argument. You've said that they came from other countries, but that they're not settlers, or colonialists!

auberginefortea

In reality, much of the land was sold by Arabs (admittedly absentee landlords) to Jewish immigrants

According to the CIA World Fact Book, circa 2002, it was 6% of the Palestinian lands.