Would you like some pita with that Hamas?

Toute de suite, everyone’s all, “Hamas is going to destroy Israel!” and I’m all, “Take a chill pill xanax. Sure, olive oil has a deceivingly high fat content, but isn’t pita bread the real enemy–” OH.
19 oz of crushed chickpeas and 2 tbs of tahini do not a militant fundamentalist organization make, and Khaled Meshaal is not served with tapenade.
Nope. Malheureusement, Israel and Hamas are at it again in Gaza.

Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamia, or Hamas, is a Sunni Muslim Palestinian extremist group operating in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas is viewed as a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israel, the UK, and the European Union, and is considered an obstacle to the Arab-Israeli peace process and the goal of a two-state solution by most Western analysts.

Hamas wants to create an Islamic fundamentalist Palestinian state, which includes the destruction of the state of Israel.
Even Fatah became part of the PLO in the 1960s and recognized Israel’s right to exist in 1993.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking…

But I did read presque 15 articles and look at several color-coded timelines and maps regarding the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a (really small) nutshell, the Romans conquered Judah from the Jews in 1st century BCE and renamed it Palestine. Palestine was inhabited mostly by Jews and Arabs for the next 2,000 years, but controlled by outside governments. The Allied Powers took control from the Ottoman Empire in 1917. The League of Nations appointed Great Britain as Palestine’s caretaker in 1922. In 1947, the United Nations recommended dividing Palestine into two states, one Arabic and one Jewish. At this time, approximately 33% of the population in Palestine was Jewish and occupied about 7% of the Palestine Mandate land. The Jews accepted the two-state solution and created Israel in 1948. The Arabs, however, rejected this idea. According to a poll by the Jerusalem Post, 73% of 1,000 Palestinians in West Bank still reject a two-state system.

I’ve heard that this is one of the hardest conflicts in the world to understand. Instead, I would say it’s one of the hardest conflicts in the world to solve.