The Israel & Palestine War: A critical examination

By Evan Kwok

Picture a family in Palestine living in the 1700s. It’s peaceful and happy, and everyone’s wearing a smile. But a Palestinian family living in 2025, that’s a whole different story. So, back then, the cultural essence of the Middle East was miles better than the cultural essence of the Middle East now. Back then, it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, an empire that ruled from 1285, in the Middle Ages, to 1922, 4 years after World War 1 ended. Cultural essence plays an essential part in keeping things peaceful. This is because religion can keep people from activating conflict and mediating problems.

However, as tensions began to rise between the 2 nations in the 1700s, the industrial era was starting to rise. The importance of religion was not so great anymore. And, on the 14th of May, 1948, the Israel-Palestine conflict began. The 2 countries put sanctions on each other, and they made the other countries, such as the USA and many Middle Eastern nations take sides. Actually, in the 1980s, there was a peace treaty between the 2 countries. Rabin of Israel and Arafat of Palestine went from enemies to what seemed like best friends in the eyes of the United States. But just right after they signed the peace treaty, Rabin, the prime minister of Israel at that time, was assassinated. The 73-year-old Rabin was shot 3 times by Yigal Amir. Yigal was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, Rabin did not survive. Arafat was permanently scarred when he saw that Rabin had been killed. This happened because of Rabin’s friendliness towards Palestine, and the people of Israel did not like that. After that, votes began for the new Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu rose to the throne. Relations were not good after that. Arafat of Palestine said that Netanyahu was disrespecting him.

Luckily, after 3 gloomy years of Netanyahu, Ehud Barak came to be the prime minister. But even though Barak had a perfectly fine plan to mediate things, it included both Syria and Palestine. Arafat also thought Barak was excluding him by focusing on Syria first.

Suddenly, the 2 countries were enemies again. On October 7th, 2023, Israel declared war on the Palestinian organization called Hamas. It was just like 1948. Chaos everywhere. We can deduce from what happened that we do not know if this will be the start of WW3.