by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Peter Hinchcliffe

About the authors: Beverley Milton-Edwards is a professor of Middle Eastern politics at Queen’s University in Belfast and the author of Contemporary Politics in the Middle East. Peter Hinchcliffe is an honorary fellow at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

The conflict between those regularly referred to as the Jews and the Arabs has been well under way for nearly a century. While major military confrontation between Israel and its Arab neighbours has not occurred since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the absence of meaningful peace and the maintenance of conflict continued to the end of the twentieth century. Within its confines the differences between these peoples, religions and attitudes has at times manifested itself in...