The Legacy Of The Six-Day War: Why Israel Needs A Palestinian State

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now almost 70-years-old. An entire lifetime has passed without any meaningful progress towards peace being created. For Israel, this has been a time of growing prosperity and (despite the headlines) growing national security. For the Palestinians, it has meant the polar opposite.

International observers, and indeed much of the media, have fetishized the enmity between Israelis and Palestinians as the “worst in the world” and characterized the conflict as uniquely difficult to solve.

But in reality, these could be little more than lazy excuses – no more than attempts to divert attention and resources.

The truth is that this conflict is small on a global scale – both in terms of its death toll, and the number of people nominally effected. Exemplifying this, over the entire 70 year course of the conflict and its multiple wars, the total number of deaths stands at around 30,000 – while in Israel's neighbor Syria, more than that number died in 2016 alone. As well, ongoing contemporary conflicts in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Ukraine all are objectively worse than that over Palestine.

So with this in mind, the view that the conflict is too complex to solve can be viewed another way: the status quo is seen as tolerable to many groups involved.

Cognisant of this fact, this article in The Economist seeks to counter this narrative for the major stakeholders involved by showing how the status quo in Palestine harms Israel as well, and how the incoming Trump administration might be able to forge a new path forward.