There are two wars being fought in the world right now that someday, somehow, will likely end. Sudan’s grudge war will probably end up with one side vanquished by the other. Ukraine’s grinding war also could end with one side or the other achieving total victory but perhaps more likely, each will claim some kind of triumph while giving up more than it admits.
But it’s the third war, a war that sometimes runs hot and sometimes goes cold, that will outlive them all. It’s a war that has long eclipsed the U.S. wars in Iraq, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan. It’s a war that American presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, have tried but failed to settle. It’s a war far more ingrained in combatants on both sides than Sudan’s power struggles or Russia’s dream of empire.
It’s the war between Israelis and Palestinians. There has been a perpetual state of war since the creation of Israel in 1948, when virtually the entire Arab world lined up with the Palestinians and against Israel.
That’s 75 years without a lasting peace. 75 years of terrorists, of massacres, of rockets from one side and air strikes from the other. 75 years of targeted assassinations and clashes in the streets. It’s years of hopes lit, then extinguished for a two-state solution that might stop the killing.
And while each side has provoked the other to prolong the battles, there is something more basic behind them. From what I saw over the years that I covered these clashes, they are not fought by one generation, then forgotten by the next. On both sides, many members of each generation pass their resentments, their fears, their hatred, to the next generation. So each generation inherits hostility from the generation that came before. I’ll never forget many years ago spending a day talking with young Palestinians on the streets of Ramallah, then with young Israelis on the streets of Jerusalem. I asked each group, “What do you have against the other side?” The almost uniform answer from Palestinians was, “When Israel was created, the Jews took our homes.” On the Israeli side it was the very same thing in reverse: “When Israel was created, the Palestinians fled rather than live beside us.”
There is some truth to both versions of history but here’s the real point: when I talked with these young people, it was more than 30 years after the creation of Israel. They weren’t even born when Israel was founded. They were telling me what their parents had told them, and what their parents had told them. I remember thinking, it was almost in their DNA. Now, three additional generations down the road, with more provocations and more deaths on both sides, the hostility has only grown.
And this summer the temperature has once again gone up.
In the past month, Palestinians have attacked Israelis and Israelis have attacked Palestinians and more citizens on both sides have died. In one ugly episode— one among many— two Palestinian gunmen shot and killed four Israelis near an Israeli settlement called Eli in the West Bank. The next day, several hundred Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian town called Turmus Aya, near the West Bank capital of Ramallah, torching homes and burning cars and killing one. Palestinians retaliated, and the Israelis hit back, launching missile strikes on a Palestinian refugee camp in the city of Jenin, then sending in troops. The Israelis say they unearthed and seized weapons, explosive devices, and a rocket launcher. The Palestinians say Israel killed twelve people. In turn, a Palestinian gunman rammed his car into a crowd in Tel Aviv, then got out and started stabbing them. Eight were hospitalized.
None of this leads to peace. It only leads to more animosity and more attacks. According to the United Nations, last year saw the highest number of deaths on both sides in many years. If the violence continues at this year’s pace, the numbers will be even higher.
Looking back, Israel and its Arab neighbors fought three major wars— what are commonly called the War of Independence in 1948, the Six Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Collectively in those wars, according to casualty figures that authorities have been able to verify, about 10,000 Israelis died, while the Arab death toll was closer to 50,000.
But the last of those hot wars was 50 years ago, and unless the Islamic Republic of Iran decides to risk annihilation with an all-out attack on Israel, there’s not likely to be another. Egypt, once Israel’s most powerful enemy in the Arab world, was the first to make peace. Then Jordan followed. The other two military powerhouses that tried three times to wipe Israel off the map, Iraq and Syria, are weakened by their own internal conflicts and don’t have the resources to start another fight. Oil-rich Gulf states that could afford to finance another war with Israel are moving in the other direction.
The United Arab Emirates signed a peace treaty in 2020 — joining Jordan and Egypt, Bahrain and Sudan, Morocco and Oman, which have either treaties or “normalized” relations with the Jewish state— and it is reported that even Saudi Arabia might soon follow suit, abandoning its decades-long insistence on the creation of a Palestinian state.
But none of that changes the dynamic of this small sliver of the Middle East. The war keeps starting, then stopping, then starting again. Despite occasional initiatives to make peace, the war still persists and on both sides, people still die.
There are different casualty counts from 75 years of conflict, depending on which sources you use. But when you include those three major wars in Israel’s first quarter-century of life, the round figures seem to be that more than 90,000 Arabs have been killed or injured, and roughly 25,000 Jews.
The way the two sides treat each other today, the war will keep going hot, then cold, then hot again. And those casualty counts will continue to grow.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Well stated. Sad
Greg, you’ve described the problem quite well. How about suggesting a solution or two?
For example: the world’s great powers come together to impose fair borders (look at the map: So much dirt, so few people). Religious sites can be protected. The billions spent to kill each other can be spent to build a superpower in the Middle East. Control of land is not the future.