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When the President of the United States, Donald Trump, transferred the US Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem at the end of last year, this sparked outrage and protest around of the Arab world.
Most countries have long avoided recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital because of the disputed status of the city.
The city is holy not only for the Jews, but also for the Muslims and the Christians, and constitutes a major focus in the Israeli-Palestinian territorial conflicts.
Last month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke about Australia's perspective following the relocation of the US Embassy.
How did the conflict start?
Since the end of the Second World War, the bitter struggle between Israelis and Palestinians has been one of the most tragic and insoluble conflicts in the world. It's a complex mess, but on one level it's very simple.
"It's a territorial fight, as simple as that," Dr. Gil Merom, an international security expert at the University of Sydney, told SBS News.
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The roots of the conflict go back to biblical times, but from a modern historical point of view, the late 1800s and early 1900s were at the heart of the current situation.
Between 1882 and 1948, a series of Aliyah (large-scale movements of Jews from around the world to what was then Palestine) took place.
The push for a Jewish state intensified after the holocaust. On the photo: the Auschwitz concentration camp.
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In 1917, Britain – the colonial power of Palestine at that time – published the Balfour Declaration which declared the intention to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Palestinians rejected this decision but history was not favorable to them.
In the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of six million Jews in Europe, the pressure for the creation of a Jewish state has become even stronger.
The Israeli-Arab wars
In 1947, the United Nations voted in favor of splitting the contested territory into two parts, one for Jews and one for Arabs.
The Arabs did not accept the agreement, saying the UN did not have the right to surrender their land. The war broke out.
The Palestinian narrative says that the Zionists (those who support the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Israel) then began to expel people from their homes.
The Israeli version indicates that Arab leaders encouraged the people to leave.
Around 1948: A prisoner of war camp outside Jerusalem was built to house Arab prisoners during the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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The bloody Arab-Israeli war of 1948 saw 700,000 Palestinians flee their homes – a mass exodus known as "Nakba", which means "catastrophe" in Arabic.
But there were also Palestinians who remained in Israel and by 2013, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics estimated the number of Israel's Arab population at more than 1.6 million, about 20 percent of the population. Israeli.
The 1948 war is important because it remains a central and unresolved part of the ongoing conflict.
Israel has taken control of all disputed territories, with the exception of the West Bank (East Jerusalem (controlled by Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt), and the descendants of these 700,000 Palestinians, who have been living for generations in refugee camps, are now about 4.5 million, according to UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees.
"It's a battle of territory": Dr. Gil Merom.
SBS News
Palestinians' central demand in the peace talks is a "right of return" for these descendants in the homes that their families abandoned in 1948.
There was another major war in 1967, in which Israel defeated Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian forces in a six-day conflict and led Israel to take the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Jordan.
It controls from these territories and the United Nations considers them as occupied territories. Israel sees things differently.
Why has not peace been achieved?
After years of violent conflict, the two sides reached an agreement in 1993 that the Palestinians would recognize the State of Israel and the Israelis would recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a legitimate representative. of the Palestinian people.
Called the Oslo Accords, this agreement also created a Palestinian Authority with limited powers of autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was an interim agreement ahead of what was supposed to be a comprehensive peace agreement in the next five years.
This did not happen. The United States failed at the 2000 peace summit, and the visit of future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem resulted in the Palestinians' second intifada (violent uprising).
Over the next five years, there were approximately 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis, including many civilians killed in suicide attacks.
April 2013: Victims of an attack during the second Intifada are commemorated during a ceremony at the memorial of terror victims in Jerusalem.
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The consequences were profound. The Israelis withdrew from Gaza, and in the mid-2000s, Hamas, a Sunni Palestinian fundamentalist faction considered a terrorist organization by many countries, seized the coastal territory.
Fatah, the most dominant Palestinian organization, remained under the control of the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank.
Hamas used Gaza as a launching pad to launch intermittent rocket or mortar attacks across the border, hardening the views of the Israeli public. "This has made Jewish Israelis even more opposed to any kind of agreement with the Palestinians," said Dr. Merom.
"The logic was: if we gave them a territory and everything they did, it was a base to attack or attack Israeli settlements, so what kind of agreement is it?"
As a result, Gaza was subjected to a blockade imposed by the Israeli army, which limited supplies of food, water and energy for its 1.8 million inhabitants. The living conditions of these Palestinians have been described as the largest open-air prison in the world.
In the mid-1980s, Israel became an undeclared nuclear power and, with the support of the United States, was one of the most formidable defense forces in the world.
Assistant Professor Maha Nassar, of the Middle East and North Africa School of Studies at the University of Arizona, says that US support for Israel is one of the main reasons why the conflict has been revealed so difficult to resolve.
"The most powerful party involved – the United States – has always stood alongside Israel against the Palestinians and lobbied them for that they give up their fundamental right to freedom." Self-determination, "she told SBS News.
"They did it in different ways, including offering the Palestinians a" statelet "with no real control over their borders, water, defense or population. Palestinians have never been offered a viable, contiguous and fully sovereign State. "
The UN fears that the Gaza Strip is "unbearable".
What about a two-state solution?
Israelis will never accept the right of return to Israel from the diaspora of Palestinian refugees, as this would fundamentally change the nature of Israel to the benefit of a Jewish minority state. This has caused uncomfortable comparisons with South Africa under apartheid, notably in a 2017 report of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia and even in the past of 39, former Israeli politicians.
Israelis have criticized the comparison of apartheid made in the report. Emmanuel Nahshon, spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, compared the project to a Nazi tabloid and said UN Secretary-General António Guterres had not approved the report.
A two-state solution is generally considered the only viable long-term solution. But there are many obstacles to that.
The problem of Jerusalem
The first of these is Jerusalem, and the recent decision of the Trump government to move the US embassy to the country further complicates the situation by symbolically recognizing that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, in accordance with its description by Israel. Some of the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are in East Jerusalem.
"This decision marks the end of the two-state solution," said Professor Nassar.
"That's because one of the fundamental principles [on the Palestinian side] is that East Jerusalem would be the capital of a future Palestinian state. "
But the Israeli government Netanyahu says Jerusalem is "the indivisible capital of Israel".
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government maintain that Jerusalem is "the indivisible capital of Israel".
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"Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, in violation of international law," said Professor Nassar.
"With this gesture, the United States has clearly sided with Netanyahu's position, putting an end to any hope of a Palestinian state having its capital in East Jerusalem."
But Jerusalem and its status are not the only hurdle, though, said Dr. Merom, virtually all stakeholders, with the exception of Hamas, are in principle committed to a two-state solution. Other major obstacles include the precise location of the border; the plight of Palestinian refugees (whether or not they have the right of return); and the issue of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories – where nearly half a million Jewish Israelis have now built homes in what the UN and most of the international community consider illegal settlements.
What does the future hold?
Israeli policy could be an additional obstacle. Dr. Merom said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was the subject of four corruption investigations, ideologically opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. According to Dr. Merom, he adheres to his right-wing political base against any compromise on the Palestinian question. .
However, Netanyahu has won four elections, three consecutively, and remains popular in polls despite corruption issues. He is about to become the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israel's history if he considers his term until November 2019.
With regard to prospects for future peace, no one is overly optimistic in the short and medium term.
Dr. Merom points out that the ranks of the secular moderates on both sides have been reduced and that the radicals have gained ground after years of fighting and casualties on both sides, although a significantly higher number of dead on the Palestinian side.
"Jewish settlers and Hamas, both say" everything is mine, "he said.
Professor Hassar said peace would be impossible until Palestinians are "treated on an equal footing with the same rights to freedom and dignity as everyone else".
