Abstract
In January 2006, the Islamic militant group Hamas won the Palestinian Parliamentary elections, with 42,2% of the votes. The election in Palestine of a group that remains committed to an armed struggle, the destruction of Israel and retaliatory attacks on Israeli civilians shows that nearly sixty years after the creation of the State of Israel, the co-existence of Palestine and Israel is still problematic in the Middle East. When did this Palestinian problem start to emerge and how did it became a more general conflict between Arabs and Israel? According to Cleveland, in the 1880s, "Zionist claims to the same territory inhabited by Palestinian Arabs lay at the root of the conflict over Palestine? . How did these conflicting claims over a territory cause the emergence of an Arab-Israeli conflict that spaned more than one century of political tensions and open hostilities with "Jordan, Egypt and Syria, whatever their mutual animosities, ... aligned against Israel? ? How did this conflict generate five wars and create over 1 million refugees? How did it produce misunderstanding and bitterness among the various parties involved and repercussions throughout the Middle East and the world at large?
