Clash

Daniel Lozano
5/13/2009
Political Science 204 – International Relations
2nd
Paper Assignment
In late December 2008 and early January 2009 there was an attack at Gaza which
involved Israel. This short war first started off when Hamas started occupying the majority of
the Gaza strip. This was due to the election and them being the winning Palestinian faction.
Before this there were problems going on but not much since there was a cease-fire that, with
the help of Egypt, calmed the fighting between Hamas, which the US claims to be a terrorist
group, and Fatah. Everything was going good until the truce ended which caused the feud
between the two groups to become much bigger and devastating. This lead to the group
smuggling weapons into Gaza and it also resulted in shootings to the southern part of Israel.
When this happened, the Fatah did not want this to happen so they tried to stop it. There was a
lot of tension between the two groups.
This caused various airstrikes going back and forth between the Gaza strip and Israel.
Over the course of this time tens of thousands of Palestinians were left homeless and it also
result in a lot of casualties. Throughout this whole time Egypt was trying to get both groups to
renegotiate and try to create a truce but this did not really happen in the beginning. It took a
while until Egypt was able to get the Hamas and Fatah to call a cease-fire. In return for the
cease-fire, Hamas demanded the lifting of Israel’s economic embargo on Gaza. They also agreed

with opening the borders between the two areas. After this was all said and done, there were
various places destroyed and large amounts of people dead. The destruction of this war results
in millions of dollars lost in physical damage.
There are 3 perspectives that we can take a look act. One is the Fukuyama’s perspective
which basically explains that it is the “end of history”. Meaning that there will be no conflict due
to the fact that everyone is going to try and universalize Western liberal democracy and not
have any other form of government. In the article Fukuyama went on to explain that after the
Cold War, everyone is trying to make their nations into liberal nations. What he refers to as the
end of history is the fact that in the end there would be no differences between people because
everyone would be in the mindset of Western liberal democracy.
The second perspective refers to Barber’s article, Jihad vs. McWorld. In this article
Barber talks about how two types of struggles are going on in the world right now. One struggle
is the globalization and control from corporations. The other type of struggle is the struggle of
cultures and beliefs. This type of struggle would be various groups fighting over various things
while the first one would be the uniformity and globalization of corporations over all nations.
Barber explains that in some situations both of these struggles are occurring in the same area.
Overall Barber thinks that it will be a stalemate between the two and eventually “McWorld”
would win over “Jihad”.
Finally, the third perspective that we looked at referred to Huntington’s article, “The
Clash of The Civilizations”. In this article Huntington explained about how there will be conflicts
with groups because of different cultures. He believes that with all of the different cultures and

beliefs that there are in the world, there is going to be conflict between them resulting in
various wars and arguments between nations and states. He also states that the world used to
be divided into First, Second, and Third Worlds but now with different cultures rising he
believes that now countries are being grouped by their culture and civilizations. He believes
that a civilization is the highest culture grouping because this could classify so many people. He
believes that this grouping will increase through time.
The best perspective of the three that could explain what was going on in Israel and
Gaza is Huntington’s theory. The reason that I picked this perspective is because the main issue
between the two groups is their beliefs are contradicting to each other. This has a lot to do with
the Fatah’s and Hamas’ cultural and religious identities. There has always been conflict in this
area because there are various beliefs living in one area and according to Huntington, if there
are various cultures there would be conflict.
While doing my research I looked into the groups and found out that there has always
been conflict between these groups. In a BBC article entitled, “Gaza crisis”, it went to talk about
how there have been different military organizations in the Gaza strip, including the Islamic
Jihad. It goes into deeper discussion about how Fatah has tried to go into the Gaza strip to try
to stop these resistant groups they have been stopped by these groups. In a NY Time Article
entitled, “Gaza Strip News” it went more into detail about the election of 2006 which changed
the political parties and caused these problems in the first place. When there was a change of
political parties this caused uproar because people thought that Fatah was still going to be in
charge while Hamas got a surprising victory. With Hamas in charge they started to remove all of

the people that belonged to the Fatah party. In Huntington’s theory you can say that this has to
do with civilization identity. He states that a “civilization identity will be increasingly important
in the future”. We see this with Hamas and their ruling over Gaza.
Huntington stated that “differences…generated the most violent conflicts”. As we see
this has already begun and this will not stop because there is always going to be some sort of
difference between people. One thing that Huntington talked about that we also saw with Gaza
and Israel was about “the fault lines between civilizations”. He explains that these lines are
replacing the political and ideological boundaries. With these lines increasing there is going to
be more conflict especially in areas like Israel, Palestine and other areas of the Middle East. As
we see Israel and Gaza are going through a “clash of civilizations” though it might have stopped
recently with a cease-fire, there is always going to be tension between this area due to various
ideas and beliefs that are happening in that area.

Works Cited
"BBC NEWS | Middle East | Gaza rebuild 'to cost billions'" BBC NEWS | News Front Page. 20 Jan. 2009. 3
May 2009 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7839075.stm>.
"BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel 'expands' Gaza offensive." BBC NEWS | News Front Page. 6 Jan. 2009.
2 May 2009 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7812979.stm>.
"BBC NEWS | Middle East | Profile: Gaza Strip." BBC NEWS | News Front Page. 6 Jan. 2009. 2 May 2009
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5122404.stm>.
"Gaza Strip News - Breaking World Gaza Strip News - The New York Times." Times Topics. 2 May 2009
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/gaza_strip/index.ht
ml>.
KERSHNER, ISABEL, and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY. "Israeli Troops Launch Attack on Gaza." The New York
Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 3 Jan. 2009. 8 May 2009
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/world/middleeast/04mideast.html>.
Makovsky, David. "Gaza: Moving Forward by Pulling Back | Foreign Affairs." Home | Foreign Affairs. June
2005. 13 May 2009 <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/60797/david-makovsky/gaza-
moving-forward-by-pulling-back>.

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