The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know by Dov Waxman aims to educate readers on one of the longest ongoing wars ever. Rather than retelling stories and interviews from both sides of the war, the book is rather much more simple in nature: answering some of the most asked questions about the war without any bias. Certainly a tall order, but as someone who is mainly clueless as to how this war started and as to why exactly it is still ongoing today, I think this format worked really well. After having finished the book, I can now more confidently dive into more advanced and specific topics related to the war, as well as into the politicians and related groups. If you’re basically like myself, looking to get a good and solid base understanding of this conflict, this book is definitely the one to read first.

I learned so much about the conflict from just this one book. I also believe the author did it in a way that left out a lot of bias out. We live in a society today where people can just about turn any issue into a political one, regardless of how it started or what the actual facts are. To be able to present just the information and facts without any political agenda, especially on such a politically charged topic, can seem neigh impossible. But as the author warned, readers can still find ways to interpret things however they want to regardless of how impartial one presents the information.

As someone who only got information about this war from news channels on television, it can be frightening to learn that so much more goes on underneath than what is shown on air. Having a better understanding of the conflict also allows me to interpret the news a lot better than before. Sadly, the day prior to finishing this book, it was reported that a rocket fired by the group militant group Hezbollah struck a soccer field in the Golan Heights killed 12 people, most of them children and teenagers. Having just read the book, I understood a little more of who Hezbollah is, where they operate out of, along with many of the territories that Israel controls.

With the initial conflict entering almost the century mark, it’s really hard to see how peace can be established when parties on both side not being able to agree on anything. It feels like it’s a battle of opinions, with each side not relenting the least. Each side have their cases to present, and each side believe their side to be just. The UN seems to be incapable of doing anything other than issuing condemnations while the United States, the really only country and superpower that have tried for decades and are still trying to broker a peace agreement between the two, are seen as biased. Go ahead and read this book if you want to catch up with just how and why this war is still going today, as well as one of the hardest one to solve, if that’s even possible at all.