Why are Israel and Palestine controversial?

Answer 1

Israel is not present in all Palestinian Conflicts. The Arab-Palestinian Conflict was fought between Arab States and the Palestinian people and Palestinian militant groups. The Palestinian Civil War involved the two Palestinian paramilitary organizations Hamas and Fatah without Israel at all.

As for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Israel is involved because Israel and Palestine cannot currently agree on a long-term solution of how to effectively divide the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine.

Answer 2

Not Based on Actual Importance
It is first key to understand that the size and scale of the conflict has absolutely nothing to do with why the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is controversial. There are numerous much larger conflicts, like Darfur or Syria or the Iran-Iraq War which do not engender as much controversy. In total, roughly 5,000 Israelis and 30,000 Palestinians have died since 1900 because of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This is nowhere near the 750,000 dead in the Iran-Iraq War or the 300,000 dead in Darfur. The amount of land in contention is also minuscule in comparison. The controversy really only derives from three aspects.

Actual Controversy
There are really three reasons why the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is controversial.

1) Anti-Semitism: The first is because the Jews are involved in the conflict and the prevalence of Anti-Semitism both in common personal views and world populations means that any attempt by Jews to secure terrestrial power and not be subservient to the other nations of the world. Additionally, because Anti-Semitism has been part of the far-left and far-right discourse for so long, ideas of Jews' mythical power have become part of the worldview embraced by people who are not themselves Anti-Semites. This is especially prevalent outside of the West, where the likelihood that a person will ever meet a Jew drops to zero.

2) Holy Land: Because all three major monotheistic faiths consider the Land of Israel or the Region of Palestine to be holy land, discussions concerning its future are particularly charged and emotional. People are far less rational when discussing items of sentimental value.

3) Framing of the Conflict: The two major methods of understanding the conflict each have a fundamentally different understanding of the conflict and these understandings are in clear conflict with each other. These two understandings are: (1) the clash of civilizations and (2) anti-imperialist dependency theory. The conflict between these ideologies is less vast and less obvious as concerns other questions of foreign policy.

The Clash of Civilizations ideology was first promoted by Samuel Huntington and describes that the world is broken up into regions defined based on the ideologies and values of each reigning group of people. According to this idea, not all regions (called civilizations) want the same values out of life. Each of them stresses different components of life and many of these are diametrically opposed between civilizations. As a result of people having different values in different civilizations, some civilizations are naturally superior to others. (This is superiority based on ideas and values, not race or ethnicity.) Because the civilizations have values that diametrically oppose one another, these civilizations will naturally come into conflict where they touch. Israel is a member of the Western Civilization and Palestine is a member of the Islamic Civilization. Since the values differ, there will inevitably be conflict. In the West, Western civilization and its values are celebrated, leading to most Westerners who embrace this perspective of the world to support Israel. Accordingly, most Muslims who embrace this perspective support Palestine for the same reasons.

Anti-Imperialist Dependency Theory came around in the 1960s and describes a state of wealth inequality in the world. It argues that there is currently a lack of wealth in the Developing World and the reason for this is that their pre-existing wealth has been confiscated by the Western Imperialists of the Developed World. As a result, the various conflicts around the world are facilitated by the Developing World wanting to acquire the wealth to which they are entitled but have lost. There is no ideological difference here between the West and the Rest, only an inequality of wealth. Israel, as a country primarily ruled over by people of European-origin and that embraces Western norms, is one of the last colonies removing this wealth from Non-Western peoples. As a result, the existence of Israel is a criminal injustice to the Palestinian people. This view is only prevalent in the West and most Westerners who agree with this are Pro-Palestinian.