Smooha, Sammy. “Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Chichester: Wiley, 2016.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118663202.wberen253
Extract
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the dispute between the Palestinian and Jewish peoples about the ownership and control of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is protracted, intractable, and deadly. As a multilayered and deep conflict, it is also territorial, national, religious, regional, international, costly, zero-sum, and unwinnable. Its intractability stems from its quasi-colonial nature. Partition of the land into two states to two peoples is the only logical solution to this unique conflict. Both sides have already reached this realization but deeply distrust each other and disagree over details of the implementation. Stateless, occupied, and refugee stricken, the Palestinians bear a much higher cost of the impasse than the Israelis.