A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

One of the most persistent and challenging conflicts in global politics today, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians arguably dates back thousands of years, with respective claims to the land based on the Hebrew Bible and Islamic tradition. The more modern roots of the conflict began in the late 19th century when European Jews began fleeing persecution and sought refuge in their Biblical homeland. This movement led to an idea known as Zionism, the belief that Jews ought to return to Israel and found a modern nation-state. As the number of immigrants increased, they clashed with the Arab population who had constituted a majority for many centuries. Arabs and Jews had lived relatively peacefully for many years under the Ottoman Empire, but Ottoman rule was collapsing, and control of the area fell to the British in 1920, with the expectation that they would prepare the territory for self-determination. The British tried to maintain peace between the two communities but had little success, and in the aftermath of World War II, they decided to hand the issue over to the newly formed United Nations. The UN voted for the establishment of a state for both Jews and Arabs but could not enforce its own plans and failed to prevent the outbreak of war between the newly established State of Israel and its Arab neighbors in May 1948.