Therefore the following caveats apply:
One, this is not meant to be a high-quality summary for general consumption, but, rather an attempt to do a clean-up in my own head. As a consequence, I haven't done a month-long heavy research, so in numbers and dates I will probably be frequently inaccurate, but the specifics should be in the ballpark of the real values.
Two, honesty demands that I start by laying my cards on the table and admitting that I have always been strongly pro-Israel. I will try to be impartial where I can, but my biases certainly influenced the choice of facts and perspectives below.
And with these in mind, let's start, as the core conflict revolves around a piece of land, with a bit of history of Palestine.
History: from the Iron Age to World War One
Thousands of years ago, much of Palestine was ruled over by two Israelite kingdoms, Israel and Judah. Then as empires in the Middle East rose and fell, the control of the land changed hands, first to the Assyrians, then to the Babylonians, then to the Persians, then to the Romans. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the land was swept over by the conquering Arabs, who centuries later were subjugated by the Ottoman Turks. Once the First World War put an end to their Empire, Palestine has become a British mandate.
History: from World War One to World War Two
The Zionist movement starting in the nineteenth century had the defining purpose of creating a Jewish state, preferably on what they perceived as their ancestral homeland. Jews started buying up land in Palestine with that intention, and they migrated (fled, frequently) from European countries to Palestine in increasing numbers.
After the Ottoman rule ended, both the Jews and the Arabs felt that their time had come to become the rulers of their own land. The Brits only wanted to manage their mandates until they felt it safe to cede control to the indigenous people and in the course of that they made some contradicting promises. As some Arabs fought on the British and French side in the Great War (although most supported fellow Muslim Ottomans), the British promised them that the land would be theirs. In the infamous Balfour doctrine in 1917, they also pledged support to create a national home for the Jewish people on the same territory. Fights between Jews and Arabs erupted frequently with the Brits trying to mediate ineffectually.
In 1938, in an open declaration of the fact that they want to make their country Judenfrei, Germany challenged the international community to absorb the Jews who wanted to flee the Nazis. Virtually no country was willing to accept the refugees. The Jewish influx to Palestine has continued to grow. Leaders of the Palestinian Arabs openly sympathized with Hitler, and the Nazis and they were entertaining the idea of a Middle Eastern implementation of the Final Solution.
History: from World War Two to today
The Nazis killed 6 million European Jews. In 1947, the UN proposed a partition of the British Mandate Palestine. The Jews accepted, the Arabs rejected it. The Jews went forward alone and declared independence in 1948. As a response, five neighbouring Arab states attacked the newborn Israel.
During the First Arab-Israeli War, a great number of Palestinian Arabs were uprooted. Some were driven away by the fear of violence, some by Israelis directly, and some followed the orders of their own leaders. The proportions are the subject of bitter debate. They fled in great numbers to Jordan, which gave most of them citizenship, and to Egypt, which did not. In the end, Israel won and controlled more territories than a year before. Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, Syria the Golan Heights, and Jordan the West Bank.
In response to the war, the neighboring Arab countries expelled their Jewish communities, who mostly fled to Israel.
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was born with the aim of destruction of Israel. In the following decades, they and fellow organizations committed many terrorist attacks, most famously the massacre of twelve Israeli sportsmen at the 1972 Munchen Olympics. The terrorism wasn't restricted to Israel and its allies only. The PLO killed fellow Arabs in Palestine, Libanon, Jordan, and Egypt whom they accused of collaborating with the Israelis.
In 1967 Egypt expelled the peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula and tightened the blockade of the Strait of Tiran, cutting an important Israeli maritime supply line. The Israelis answered by attacking Egypt. Jordan and Syria immediately attacked Israel. The war ended in six days and left Israel with full control of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and the Golan Heights. After the war, Israel offered the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights back to the Egyptians and Syrians, respectively, in exchange for peace and demilitarized zones. They refused.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched another attack on Israel to retake the Sinai Peninsula. The Israelis won again.
In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for Egypt's recognition of Israel’s right to exist. Three years later, the Egyptian president Sadat was assassinated for this.
Between 1982 and 1985 Israel invaded Lebanon to root out the PLO.
The First Intifada broke out in 1987, lasted till 1993, and claimed 160 Israeli and around 2,000 Palestinian victims. Half of those died in Palestinian infighting.
The Second Intifada took place between 2000 and 2005 and resulted in the death of approximately 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.
In 2005, Israel uprooted its settlements and unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip.
In 2006, a short conflict, known as the Second Lebanon War, erupted between Israel and Hezbollah.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists massacred close to one thousand Israeli civilians and triggered a new war.
Those were the dry facts I deem most important. The devil is in the details, but perhaps in their minimalism they still altogether outline a not very inaccurate picture. And now I want to draw up a list of fundamental questions that must be taken into account if one wants to form an opinion.
Did Jews in 1948 have the right to create their own state in Palestine?
I think yes. As the historical overview above shows, there was never a Palestinian State. Before the end of World War One, there was no such thing as Palestinian identity either. Local Arabs thought of themselves as part of a larger Arab population and members of local communities. The Jews have suffered millennia of persecution, and an incredible 6 million loss of life just a couple of years before 1948. The international consensus that they deserve a land where they can feel secure for the first time in thousands of years was just. In the end, two peoples were fighting for the same land, and one of them was more organized, more politically conscious, and had everything to lose. Their argument that the Arabs have the whole Middle East and Jews only claim a tiny piece of land was reasonable.
Did the local Arabs deserve to be driven away from their homes? No. It was an injustice on the individual level. But collectively, the initial moral upper hand of the Arabs is undermined by the centuries-long Muslim oppression against the Jews and by their modern support for the Nazis. Had they had their way and won, probably there wouldn't be Jewish refugee camps. There would be no Jews at all.
And if the bottom of the conflict is the expelled individuals, what about the Jews who lived in Arab countries and were driven out after 1948?
Did the Israelis during the Nakbah destroy Arab villages to steal the land and expel all Arabs?
The question is rather what proportion of the dislocations were intentional. 10% seems like just a consequence of any war regardless of who started it. Over 70% seem like deliberate, organized attacks to chase away people for good. This makes the conflict so frustrating. You need to know real data to make moral judgments and that would require enormous research (read a bunch of books, know which ones are reliable, ...). This question is probably impossible to answer.
Have the Israelis intended to conquer the whole of Palestine?
There have definitely been religious zealots and right-wingers among Israelis with this intention. But the country as a whole did not behave in ways that support this claim. Israel gained territories only after wars which it didn't start. Expansions were consequences of wars, not the reason for them. For example, Israelis offered, unsuccessfully, the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights to Egypt and Syria in exchange for peace. They unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Despite her roots in Judaism, Israel treats the lands as legitimate buffer zones and bargaining chips.
However, the illegal settler movement - the unlawful annexation of Palestinian land driven by nationalism or religious zealotry - has always enjoyed varying levels of government support. Israel as a whole has moved to the right in recent decades and the current prime minister Netanyahu built his whole political career on making a two-state solution impossible. His government definitely wants to take over the West Bank. Although at the moment they still represent a minority opinion among the general Israeli population, with the greater fertility rate of right-wing and religious Israelis, the trend is working for them.
Do Palestinians have the Right of Return?
I think, in general, not anymore. Eight decades have passed. Whoever were the direct victims of dispossession have died already. Taking away lands from Israeli families who have lived there for decades and giving them to someone else who never did, only their grandparents, would be as unjust as taking the land in the first place was. Historical injustices can't really be remedied.
Also, those who disagree with this opinion, what do they think about the descendants of the Jews who were uprooted from their homes in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Iraq?
Does the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza violate international law?
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure it does. However, the Israelis are given a choice no other nation is. Keep your citizens safe or conform international law to the letter. The two just don't work together if you are surrounded by enemies (at best) and murderous religious fanatics (at worst) whose literal aim in life really is to destroy your country. It's worth repeating. There is no other country in this situation, and for Israel, this has been a permanent reality for the last 75 years.
Is Israel an apartheid state?
Inside Israel, there must be some level of discrimination against Arabs as is the case with every minority everywhere. However, there is an Arab party in the Knesset and Arab judges in the Supreme Court. The reverse case would be inconceivable in any Arab country or Iran.
The West Bank can be justifiably called an apartheid state. But it is an occupied land so unlike other examples of apartheids, like South Africa, the reasons come from security concerns and not from racism.
Even assuming the Arabs are maltreated by the Israelis, I pose a better question: are Arab minorities treated better in other Arab countries? Are Arabs treated better by Hamas in Gaza or by Israelis in Israel?
Are blowing up school buses, massacring Olympians, and Oct 7 justifiable acts of resistance?
No. Mass murder, mass rape, torture, and kidnapping of children are not justifiable acts of resistance, regardless of what the other side might have done. Period. Whoever thinks otherwise has something very wrong with him.
Has Israel been committing genocide in Gaza?
This claim has been made for decades, even before the recent war. The answer is that the population of Gaza has grown from 1.3 million in 2005 to 2.1 million in 2023. Anyone who calls it genocide doesn't know what the word means.
Is Gaza then an open-air prison? The fact never mentioned in Arab and Western media is that Gaza has a land border with Egypt. And Egypt keeps it closed.
Is the IDF committing genocide now? No. They lead a brutal urban campaign against an enemy that hides behind its own people. If Israel wanted to exterminate Palestinians, it could do it in a week.
How great is the role of religion in the conflict?
The major motivating factors that drive the actors in the conflict (Israel, the Palestinians, and the wider Arab/Muslim world) are secular antisemitism, nationalism, geopolitics, land dispute, and religion. Zionism was at its birth a secular movement, but anti-zionism in the Middle East has always been mainly religiously motivated.
Islamic Jew-hatred explains why Arabs being killed and dislocated by other Arabs as we speak in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, or Yemen never get the same attention as Israeli actions, even if the loss of lives is orders of magnitudes higher.
Even more revealing is Iran's hostility against Israel. The Persian state that has no love for Arabs. The majority of Arabs, Palestinians included, are Sunni, which makes them heretics in the eyes of the Shia theocrats of Iran. The only reason (apart from geopolitics) for their hatred of Israel is that according to their beliefs, the whole of the Middle East is ordained to be a Muslim land.
What responsibilities do the Arabs bear?
It makes sense to distinguish between three types of Arabs here. The Palestinian leaders, the Palestinian people, and the fellow Arab states.
Let's start with the other Arab states, that except Jordan have kept the Palestinians in refugee camps for almost 80 years now. Apart from financial support, they do nothing to alleviate their plight, their cause is just a cynical tool to keep Israel always on the defense.
Regarding the Palestinian political leadership, they are horrible, even terrorism put aside. The Palestinians have been offered a deal 5 times. The first proposal by the Peel Commission was made at the time of the British Mandate. It offered 80% of the disputed land to the Arabs, and the rest to the Jews. The Arabs said no. The second proposal was the UN's partition plan in 1947. Rejected by the Arabs again. After the Six-Day War, Israel offered the Golan Heights and the Sinai for peace and recognition. The answer was yet again no. In 2000, Israel offered Gaza and 94% of the West Bank. Rejected. In 2008, additional land was on the table on top of the previous offer. Rejected. After Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the Hamas turned it into a terrorist base.
The Hamas was voted into power by the people of Gaza. The founding charter of Hamas declares that Israel be destroyed, and the Jews be killed - supported by verses from the Quran. Among others, for the sins of causing the Russian and French revolutions. And this is the party the Palestinians voted for in their first and last democratic elections. According to a poll in 2022, 56% of Palestinians support armed attacks against Israelis inside Israel, and the overwhelming majority support Hamas over Fatah.
After the Second World War, an international consensus was formed - and shared by the Germans themselves - that the citizens of Germany bear some responsibility for the acts of the Nazi regime. A similar statement about Palestinians is immediately decried as Islamophobia or racism.
How does the behavior of Israelis and Arabs compare since 1948?
This point is a matter of subjective judgment. But I try to make my point to draw attention to some revealing facts.
The Palestinian authorities give life-long pensions to the family of any Palestinian who is killed, injured, or imprisoned while trying to kill Israelis (civilians included).
Burning Israeli flags and chanting "Death to Israel" by schoolchildren is something authorities encourage not only in Gaza or the West Bank but in several other Muslim countries as well.
Palestinians have repeatedly killed civilians (and were being praised for it by Muslims all over the world). Israel has repeatedly been willing to exchange hundreds of imprisoned terrorists for a single Israeli hostage. Even for the bodies of its fallen soldiers.
The IDF is the only military in the world that precedes its every attack sending warnings to the civilians in the affected area. Hamas kills civilians on purpose and celebrates it.
And finally...
What would happen if either side stopped fighting?
If Palestinians and the Muslim world put down their weapons and accepted the Two-state solution, the conflict would end.
If Israelis let Palestinians back and stopped fighting, Israel would cease to exist.
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