The Arab world: its peoples, history, and cultures - Essay Example

The origins of the conflict, however, should be sought long before the very dawn of modern Israeli state, insofar as the region has had a millennia-long history of political and religious volatility, marked with outrageous violence, bigotry, perfidy, and unscrupulous alliances. A variety of factors could be blamed for the persistence of violence up to the present. On the one hand, the very coexistence of two communities, whose members’ daily life is largely regulated by the postulates of two monotheistic religions – Judaism and Islam – each grounded in the belief in its own exclusivity, and each staking a claim to a narrow strip of land, which is considered extremely sacred to both, is per se a recipe for disaster; let alone the fact that they were often governed by a third side equally alien to their culture and internal dynamics.

On the other hand, the irreversible processes, which had been unleashed during and after the two major conflicts of the twentieth century, further intensified the tensions between those communities, insofar as each of them sought to realize its aspirations, identifying and collaborating with the one of the opposing camps. Additionally, the Cold War rivalry added much fuel to the fire, so despite the numerous attempts at negotiating a peaceful settlement of the conflict, it still devastates the region, sowing the seeds of its own cancerous growth.

This paper is aimed at exploring the history of the Middle East and the Arab people since the First World War onwards, with particular emphasis on those events and developments that called forth or/and contributed to the dynamics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Being often dubbed “the Great War”, the First World War is generally considered a Europe-centered global conflict that involved several theatres of military operations, i.e. Europe, the Middle East, some parts of Africa, central Asia,