The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the long, unresolved struggle between two national movements, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, over the same land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It turns on rival claims to territory, statehood, security, and the fate of Palestinian refugees, and it has run from the late nineteenth century into the present without a settled peace.
Ask two people whose land this is, and you may hear two answers that share almost no ground: the same hills, the same city, the same year of 1948, remembered by one side as a homeland reborn and by the other as a catastrophe. The hardest thing about this conflict is not that people disagree about what should happen next. It is that they disagree about what has already happened, and to whom.