On October 7th, Hamas invaded Israel and brutally massacred 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians. On a per capita basis, the attack amounted to twelve 9/11s (per The Economist). It also marked the single bloodiest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Faced with an existential threat, Israel has launched its own devastating invasion of Gaza, with the goal of destroying Hamas leadership. Already, the assault has left 9,000 civilians dead and tipped the population into a humanitarian crisis. Barring a ceasefire, the casualties will almost certainly mount from here.

This explosion of violence represents the latest chapter in a century-long struggle between Jews and Arabs in the region. For those who have a tenuous grasp of the history of this conflict (it’s admittedly long and complicated), we’ve pulled together some helpful resources that explain key turning points in the struggle. Overall, these resources strive to offer a balanced account of the conflict, meaning they try to recognize the perspective of both sides and avoid offering a nakedly partisan account. While not perfect or comprehensive, the resources offer a starting point for putting today’s events in historical context.

To start, the Vox primer above traces the arc of the conflict, starting with the rise of nationalism and Zionism in the early 20th century, and the Balfour Declaration (1917) that announced support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. From there, the video covers the rising tension between Jews and Arabs during the 1930s, then the Holocaust and the United Nations’ plan (1947) to divide the contested territory into two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs didn’t and launched an attack on the Jewish population, starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Israel won, achieved statehood, seized lands originally delegated to the Palestinians and expelled residents, sometimes violently, from their homes. Next comes the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War (oddly not mentioned by Vox). Then, we have the rise of the PLO and later Hamas (two organizations that have denied Israel’s right to exist); the vexing Israeli settler movement; the start of the first Intifada in 1987; attempts to make peace culminating in the Oslo Accords in 1993; and finally the breakdown of those peace efforts, thanks to extremists on both sides. Vox ends the narrative in about 2015, wondering about the future–the future we’re experiencing right now.

Immediately above, you can listen to a recent podcast hosted by The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson. Featuring a conversation with two historians (Benny Morris and Zachary Foster), the podcast walks us through “the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from antiquity to October 7”–reinforcing and elaborating on points made in the Vox video. Eventually, the host and historians also “share their thoughts on Israel’s military response, the future of the conflict, and the ‘missing moderate middle’ on both sides.”

We come next to a New York Times interview with David K. Shipler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. Here, the conversation focuses on the pivotal events of 1948, and how the Israelis and Palestinians have developed their own narratives of the events that took place that year. As Shipler explains, these narratives have shaped the Israeli-Palestinian struggle ever since, and they continue to shape the events on the ground in Gaza today. To understand the narratives is to understand why the conflict has endured for so long.

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Finally, we’re adding a video designed for a younger audience from John Green’s World History Crash Course. Completed in 2015, the video doesn’t cover the current crisis. But it provides another overview of the deeper historical conflict, while touching on the same narratives that Shipler outlines above.

We’ll try to post more resources as we find them…

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This is the first era of human history when more of us live in cities than not. That’s what we’ve often been told in recent years, at least, though the specifics do depend on what kinds of urbanized areas  you count as proper cities. Still, this would seem to mark an important inflection point in human history, the past five millennia of which has also been the history of great cities rising and falling, in absolute terms but also relative to one another in size, power, and influence. You can see this animated in the video above from cartographical-historical Youtuber Ollie Bye, previously featured here on Open Culture for his visualizations of the history of London, of the British Empire, and of the entire world.

Here, Bye charts the largest cities in the world between the year 3000 BC and today, indicating their size on the map while also ranking them on an ever-changing leaderboard below. Out front in the very beginning was Uruk, capital of the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization (and a prominent location in the Epic of Gilgamesh).

A thousand years later, it was the Egyptian capital of Thebes; a thousand years after that, it was the later Egyptian capital of Alexandria. From that point on, the shuffle at the bottom of the screen grows more and more rapid: the title of largest city in the world is lost by Constantinople to Ctesiphon; by Lin’an, briefly, to Cairo, and then to Hangzhou; by London to New York.

It was in the nineteen-fifties that Tokyo — a city left in shambles by the Second World War a decade earlier — overtook New York for the top spot. There it has remained ever since, seeing off such different challengers in different eras as Osaka, Mexico City, and New Delhi. When Bye’s animation leaves off, in 2021, that last has a population of 31.1 million against Tokyo’s 37.3 million. Whether the Japanese capital has proportionately more power or influence in the world today than Beijing, São Paulo, or Los Angeles is, of course, a separate and less objective question. But no visitor to Tokyo can deny that it must have achieved something like the pinnacle of urban civilization per se — and has somehow kept the rents reasonable to boot.

Related content:

Timelapse Animation Lets You See the Rise of Cities Across the Globe, from 3700 BC to 2000 AD

The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Animated Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

The Entire History of the British Isles Animated: 42,000 BCE to Today

The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

A Wonderful Archive of Historic Transit Maps: Expressive Art Meets Precise Graphic Design

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.