Jerusalem has been a big talking point in the conflict in the Middle East. Jerusalem has changed hands many times, because of it’s religious significance and has been occupied by Jewish, Christian and Muslim conquerors. Forty years ago, Israel's army captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the June 1967 War. The victory of the war in 1967 and the capture of East Jerusalem was an exciting time for Jews.
No country has an Embassy in Jerusalem, and even Israel's closest ally the US, have withstood pressure from Parliament to move its Embassy from Tel Aviv, insisting the status of Jerusalem should be decided in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but neither of these two States are willing to not own the whole of Jerusalem, as it is such a significant city particularly for religious reasons, but also because they both think it is their home land.
The Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict about land, but maybe just as crucially the water, which flows through that land. The countries need water to survive and develop. In Israel's history, it has needed water to make possible the entry of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants, therefore, on the borders of one of the most waterless environments on earth, the available water system had to support not just the original population, or the Palestinian peasant farmers, but also hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. In the 1967 war Israel gained exclusive control of the waters of the West Bank and the Sea of Galilee, and this has given Israel about 60% of its fresh water (a billion cubic metres per year).
During the era of Arab-Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s, the water rights became one of the hardest areas of discussion, and this debate was never concluded. It doesn’t look like there will be any solutions, and they are desperately need, in the long term, so it is a necessity that the Israelis and the Palestinians work together, because they cannot survive as enemies in this situation.
Refugees that are living in other Arab countries has been a huge problem in the outcome of the peace process between Palestine and Israel, as a lot of the refugees want to live back in their ancestry homeland of Palestine. Nearly 60 years since the establishment of Israel, there is no Arab-Israeli issue that remains as utterly disruptive as the fate of Palestinian refugees. Today there are millions of Palestinians living in exile from homes and land their families had inhabited for generations. Four million UN-registered Palestinian refugees were recorded in the1948 exodus, 750,000 people belong to families displaced in 1967.
Registered Refugees
Jordan: 1,835,704
Syria: 434,896
West Bank/Gaza: 1,699,025
Lebanon: 405,425
Total: 4,375,050
Israel persistently argues that all refugees should give up any goals to return to what is now it’s territory, and instead be taken in by Arab host countries or by a future Palestinian state.
Today there are millions of Palestinians living separate from homes and land their families had inhabited for generations.
Israel has kept Palestinian refugees and their descendants out of negotiations on a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but for most Palestinians, their fate remains an out of their hands and they are surplus to helping in any way for their refugees, unless there is a Middle East peace deal that acknowledges what happened to the immigrant.
Settlements and borders has been a huge problem in the outcome of the peace process between Palestine and Israel. The modern Israeli state was forged in the fires of the first Middle East war in 1948-1949, but from the beginning it was a state without clear borders. Today, about 400,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The land is strategically significant, but in Judaism it is also religiously and historically so.
From the Arab viewpoint, the acceptable territorial solution for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement is withdrawal from all the 1967 land, but not all Palestinians want a two-state solution. Hamas, which won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election, wanted at all costs to avoid a peace deal with Israel that involves drawing permanent borders, because its wider aim is to establish a single, Islamic state within the borders of pre-1948 Palestine. In the long-term Israel's reluctance to accept the existing Green Line in many ways plays into the hands of militant Islamist groups such as Hamas.
I think that it will take a long time to find a solution between the two states, as there are so many obstacles and problems to overcome and the states want different solutions and even in the same state different people and parties want different resolutions, as some want all of their land back, but some want their fair share. All the problems are very hard to overcome but I think what is the hardest to achieve is a decree to their share water as both of the states need water to survive and run as a well-established province.
