The Middle East conflict has been shaped by an array of complex historic events.
Some are the product of circumstances external to the will of the protagonists, while others are the result of specific choices and purposeful strategic decisions. Cumulatively, these and other factors add to the complexity of the conflict and the difficulties of Israelis and Arabs to find the common ground necessary for a peaceful accommodation that links their futures in mutually beneficial ways.
Admittedly, progress was made with the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement and the more recent peace settlement between Jordan and the Jewish state. The all-Arab peace initiative of 2002 should also be seen as a defining moment whereby the parameters for an end to the conflict were for the first time agreed upon by the entire Arab world. Alas, the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that is the question of Palestine, remains an open wound, and the main obstacle to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. Regardless of the progress that might have been made, some of the most essential traits of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the yet unsolved dispute between Israel and its northern neighbors, Syria and Lebanon, have not changed over the last sixty years, except for the relative positions of the parties. In fact, one can say that the conflict has been a constant variation of the same.Much depends on the sovereign decisions of the parties to the conflict, yet the Middle East has been and continues to be an elastic description of a region whose countries are too frequently shaped by the changing geopolitical and economic interests of major powers. In the late nineteenth century, the region was commonly referred to as the Orient or the Middle East because that was its location on a world map as viewed from London. If that same map had been viewed from New Delhi, however, instead, the same region would have been called the Middle West. But geography has only loosely defined this region because the areas it has been deemed to include have changed frequently to accommodate the West’s shifting strategic interests.
Since the nineteenth century, the region was defined and molded mostly by Great Britain and then the United States. To a lesser degree, France had an influence on the region, as did Czarist Russia and then the Soviet Union. The motivations of these major powers have been strategic, but their vision of the region has been narrow, rarely focusing on its long-term interests or its inhabitants. Not surprisingly, Western policies have bred considerable conflict in the region that, with few exceptions, they have been able to manage.