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.

About a decade and a half ago, The Lost City of Z seemed to have been placed front-and-cen­ter in most book­stores of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. It was the first book by jour­nal­ist David Grann, and it hand­i­ly proved that he knew how to deal with his­to­ry in a way that could cap­ture the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. (His sec­ond, Killers of the Flower Moon, pro­vid­ed the basis for the acclaimed Mar­tin Scors­ese film now in the­aters.) Sub­ti­tled A Tale of Dead­ly Obses­sion in the Ama­zon, the book tells of British explor­er Cap­tain Per­cy Faw­cett, who went miss­ing with his son in that vast jun­gle back in 1925. They’d been look­ing for the “lost city” of the title, of whose exis­tence Faw­cett had been con­vinced by what may now strike us as rather scant evi­dence.

“The idea was based on rumors that had cir­cu­lat­ed for cen­turies that there were once large cities, filled with peo­ple, deep in the Ama­zon,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Vox Atlas video above, fired by the dis­cov­ery of grand cap­i­tals like Tenochti­t­lan in mod­ern-day Mex­i­co and Cus­co in Peru. Experts, for their part, “believed that this rain­for­est was sim­ply too hos­tile and too remote to ever have sup­port­ed cities.”

More recent­ly, sci­en­tists start­ed iden­ti­fy­ing man-made ditch­es and mounds all over the Ama­zon, which com­pli­cat­ed the pic­ture con­sid­er­ably. Instead of the extrav­a­gant metrop­o­lis inti­mat­ed by explor­ers in the cen­turies before him, Faw­cett only encoun­tered small groups of natives liv­ing in sim­ple vil­lages. The con­sen­sus came to hold that a host of envi­ron­men­tal, geo­log­i­cal, and bio­log­i­cal fac­tors con­spired against the growth of large-scale civ­i­liza­tions in the rain­for­est.

But “it turns out, Faw­cett was look­ing in the right place, just for the wrong thing.” He nev­er took note of patch­es of inten­tion­al­ly cul­ti­vat­ed fer­tile soil, ditch­es where once stood walls lead­ing to a plaza, and “delin­eat­ed areas for gar­dens and orchards.” Though none of this quite sug­gest­ed the fabled El Dora­do, “over the past few decades, experts have uncov­ered evi­dence of large set­tle­ments all over the Ama­zon,” a sin­gle one of which could have had up to 60,000 inhab­i­tants. By the time Faw­cett arrived in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, most of those locals had long since died of Euro­pean-import­ed dis­eases, leav­ing their wood- and-Earth struc­tures to decom­pose. Giv­en how far trans­port and con­struc­tion tech­nolo­gies have come since then, per­haps it’s time to try out a dif­fer­ent obses­sion: not over find­ing old Ama­zon­ian cities, but build­ing new ones.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sis­tine Chapel of the Ancients: Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er 8 Miles of Art Paint­ed on Rock Walls in the Ama­zon

Tour the Ama­zon with Google Street View; No Pass­port Need­ed

Explor­er David Livingstone’s Diary (Writ­ten in Berry Juice) Now Dig­i­tized with New Imag­ing Tech­nol­o­gy

Hear Ernest Shack­le­ton Speak About His Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in a Rare 1909 Record­ing

Lis­ten to Pla­to Invent the Myth of Atlantis (360 B.C)

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.