\tThe conflict between Jews and Palestinians in the Gaza strip is far from a new story. Ever since Jews began to try and establish a state there in the early 1900s conflict has occurred. Despite it being over a century since its these issues began, these tensions have not lessened. Currently, 8 million Israelis and 4.4 million West Bank Palestinians still attempt to claim the Gaza strip as their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most recently in the evolution of this conflict, Israeli military forces killed the leader of Palestinian group \u201cIslamic Jihad\u201d named Bahaa Abu al-Ata through targeted air strikes. Islamic Jihad\u2019s fighters responded by firing some 450 rockets towards Israel. The group said that their leader was killed during \u201ca heroic action\u201d and promised to take revenge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was the one who authorized the operation against Abu al-Ata blaming him for recent attacks against Israel. He warned that a period of fighting could follow this burst of violence saying that \u201cIsrael is not interested in escalation, but we will do everything required to protect ourselves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This series of attacks come at a delicate time in Israeli domestic politics, as Prime Minister Netanyahu heads a temporary government following two indecisive elections. Netanyahu\u2019s bloc of ultra-orthodox right wing parties currently stands at 55 seats: this is two seats behind the centre left bloc headed by political rival Benny Gantz. Gantz is currently forced into trying to form a coalition government. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Between his uncertain position within the Israeli government and facing corruption charges, Netanyahu knows he needs to be careful about his actions as prime minister. This stops him from taking even more extreme action militarily. He knows that if he loses even more support from his party bloc and the Israeli people he could face legal battles without the immunity as prime minister. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I find it interesting how closely this situation describes the security dilemma very well (only with a stateless nation and state rather than two states). Israel thought that to protect its national security it needed to kill the leader of Islamic Jihad which in turn threatened the security of the Palestinian people. Both parties view one another as the aggressor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Overall, if I had to predict what will happen militarily, I would say not much. After their heavy and quick as retaliation, Islamic Jihad does not have the direct backing of Hamas and therefore lacks the resources and organization at the moment to continue large scale attacks against Israel. Though, tensions will remain even higher than normal in the Gaza strip as this has been the highest number of deaths and injuries in a back and forth between Israel and the Palestinians in a while.
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The conflict between Jews and Palestinians in the Gaza strip is far from a new story. Ever since Jews began to try and establish a state there in the early 1900s conflict has occurred. Despite it being over a century since its these issues began, these tensions have not lessened. Currently, 8 million Israelis and 4.4 million West… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3857,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3856\/revisions\/3857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}