One way to understand this conflict is by seeing how the maps of antiquity evolved to the present day, as well as studying the ancestry of both peoples.
We begin:
Most Israelis and Palestinian Arabs share the same DNA. They are direct descendants of at least three prehistoric ancestors from the Neolithic period 8,000 years ago. This was shown in a study conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The entire region of Palestine was formerly called Canaan, which appears on the map of 1200 BC, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River; it encompassed what is now part of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, with the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Canaan was formed by the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, and in the south by Philistia which had population coming from Crete (Greece) and Aegean islands. Nowadays in the Gaza Strip where the Palestinians are, Philistia was before.
The Philistines and Israelites were enemies.
The Kingdoms of Judah and Israel fell in 721 and 587 B.C. Israel against the Assyrians of Mesopotamia, and Judah against the Chaldean ruler of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed Jerusalem the capital of Judah, expelled the Jews and took their leaders to Babylon.
Subsequently, the Israelites returned and took their land some 48 years later. However, their territory changed hands several times during wars of their successors.
Babylon and Mesopotamia are today Iraq (Baghdad) and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey.
In 333 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Israel. And, in 63 B.C., Israel was incorporated into the Roman Empire (up to this point Palestine had not appeared, it did not exist as such), but the Romans began to call the territory of Canaan occupied by Israelites "Palestine".
In the year 135 A.D., the rebellion of Bar Kojba took place. The Jews tried to free themselves from the Romans, but failed and were expelled; and Hadrian, the emperor of the day, built on the ruins of Jerusalem a pagan city (non-Christian or without monotheistic religion).
The Romans did not want to leave traces of the Israelites in Canaan, and renamed it "PALESTINE", thus giving birth in 135 AD to the current region, which continued to be ruled by the Romans until 330 AD, when it came under the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire (Constantinople).
The Byzantines ruled Palestine for some 308 years, until in 638 a Caliph named Omar Al-Khattaab, successor of the founder of Islam Muhammad, conquered them by taking Jerusalem. From then on, Islam spread throughout the Middle East thanks to this Caliph.
Thus began the Arab-Islamic era and Jerusalem acquired a sacred character for the 3 main monotheistic religions:
For Islam, it was in Jerusalem that Muhammad ascended to heaven. For Judaism, it is the land chosen by God (Yahweh) and where the first temple was built. And for Christianity, it was where Jesus Christ was crucified, buried and resurrected.
The Islamic religion and the Arabic language unified the Semitic peoples or descendants of Shem son of Noah (Arabs, Arameans, Hebrews, Phoenicians, etc), but not the Jews who went into exile.
Here we must pay close attention because this is where the definitive rupture between the Jewish Israelites and the Palestinian Arabs, who were of different ethnicities, but mostly of Islam or Muslims, really took place.
When the Caliph Al-Khattaab took power, in Palestine and mainly Jerusalem, already considered the holy city, he told its Israelite inhabitants through a covenant that they could practice their Jewish or other religion, but with limitations so as not to grow any more. For example, they could not build more temples..
Thus 878 years passed and Palestine was ruled by Arabs and Islam until 1516 when Jerusalem was conquered by the Ottoman Empire (Turks).
The Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine until the end of World War I when they were defeated by the British Empire in the Battle of Jerusalem 1917, but already before that in 1878 Jews were returning to Palestine driven by a movement called Zionism, which means fighting for an independent Jewish state.
By 1895, the population in Palestine was 500,000, of which 453,000 were Palestinian Arabs who occupied 95% of the land, and 47,000 Jews owned the remaining 5%.
The Jews united as a bloc. They created a fund led by the French baron of Jewish origin Edmond Rotschild to continue buying land in Palestine, and in 1909 the 2nd wave of migration to Palestine took place, installing a collective farm (kibbutz) in Yaffa.
The British, seeing that Palestine was being repopulated by Jews, they asked for support to defeat the Turks who were allied with Germany.
In return they promised to liberate Arab lands from the Ottoman Empire,including Palestine.
In 1917 the Jew W. Rotschild received Balfour's declaration. In that declaration, the British pledged to return the country to the Jews if they would help them fight against the Turks and their German allies. For almost a millennium they had been in exile, but the Palestinian Arabs did not like this declaration at all.
But the Jews, unlike the Palestinian Arabs, had not sat idly by during all that time in exile. They prepared and progressed both economically and intellectually and were vital to the British defeat of the Germans. They contributed money, intelligence, technical expertise, soldiers, among others.
The war ended and in 1920 the British officially took control of Palestine (San Remo conference).
Two years later, the Council of the League of Nations (the UN of that time) enacted a mandate promoting the re-establishment in Palestine of a country for the Jews. The Palestinian Arabs rose up because the British were allocating land to the Jews who were arriving en masse.
The Palestinian Arabs never ceased their protests until finally the British annulled the mandate and issued a new one in 1939 called The White Paper, which restricted Jewish migration to Palestine and delayed their independence and new home.
Furthermore, the White Paper discarded the option of dividing Palestine into two regions, one for Jews and the other for Muslim Arabs.
Palestine would remain a single region governed jointly by Jews in minority and Arabs who would maintain a demographic majority.
World War 2 came in 1939 we already know what happened to the Jewish community that was exterminated by the Nazis in the holocaust.
When the war ended, the UN approved the partition of Palestine almost as a debt to the Jews after the slaughter they had.
The Palestinians, who constituted 70% of the population with 92% of the land, were reduced to 43% of the territory. The other 57% was given to the Jews, who were 30% with only 8% of the land. Jerusalem was considered within the 1% that would remain as an international zone.
In 1948 the Jews proclaimed Israel as a state and the Arab-Israeli War broke out. Palestine was divided into 3: Israel, the West Bank, which passed to Jordan, and Gaza, which remained with Egypt. Some 700,000 Palestinians fled to neighboring countries or to refugee camps.
In 1964 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created to defend the interests of the Palestinians at the regional and international level. In 1969 Yasser Arafat was elected chairman of the organization, but many Palestinians did not want a peaceful solution.
In 1965, an underground Palestinian group called Fatah attacked Israel for the first time.
In 1967 the 6-Day War broke out. Israel occupied Jerusalem, the Golan, Sinai, part of the West Bank and Gaza. The UN called on Israel to withdraw from the territories but Israel refused.
It was not until 1979 that Israel, through the intermediation of the U.S., returned the Sinai to Egypt and in 2005 Gaza to the Palestinians under strong international pressure.
Sinai to Egypt and in 2005 Gaza to the Palestinians under strong international pressure.
Since the 6-day war, this conflict has not ceased on either side.
Currently the war has escalated as you may have read in the news.
Hamas, an Islamic resistance movement that started in 1987, and declared as terrorist is the one attacking Israel from Gaza, an area it de facto controls.
I hope I have clarified a little about the reason for the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Of course it is a small summary and I´obviated events.
The conclusion as to who is right I leave to each one's discretion.
Thanks for reading and if you found it useful, share it and send a few of sats. xD.