Israel and Palestine: A Comprehensive History of the World's Most Intractable Conflict

Ask some people, and it is a conflict as old as modern civilization. Ask others, and it is a conflict as old as time itself. The predominantly Jewish modern nation-state of Israel and the predominantly Muslim modern region of Palestine — sometimes called a stateless nation in its own right — have been locked together in struggle for longer than any living person can remember.

In the modern era, the two opposing entities have held the title of the most intractable conflict on the globe not for months, not for years, but for nearly a century. Both lay claim to a small stretch of arid land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and they share a history so complex that no single account can do it full justice.

This is a history told with a focus on the generations of ordinary people who have lived at the epicenter of the issue, and on the key factors that best explain how the region spiraled toward the crisis of 2023. It does not hold back in describing what either side has done, and it does not hold back the truth of the violence that either side has suffered.

There is no unimpeachably “right” side of this issue. There is instead one central truth: that it is always the innocent people of both Israel and Palestine who are trampled underfoot at every turn this conflict has ever taken. The thesis of this account is simple — that the modern catastrophe is the cumulative product of a century of imposed partitions, broken promises, demographic upheaval, and escalating cycles of violence in which the disparity of power has almost never favored the Palestinians.

Ottomans and Zionists

The modern conflict has its genesis in the waning years of Ottoman rule over the territory today called Israel, then part of Ottoman Syria, which also encompassed about half of modern Syria and parts of modern Jordan. The Ottoman Empire was a powerful, culturally Turkish organization, but from its territorial apex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had lost vast swathes of land by the late nineteenth century. As its influence waned at the edges, nationalist movements stirred — including two that began in the same stretch of land beside the Mediterranean.

The first was Zionism, a political ideology whose objective was to create and preserve a nation made by and for Jewish people. As the movement told it, that nation could not exist just anywhere; it had to be in the ancient homeland of the Jews, in and around Jerusalem. The movement’s name itself refers to Zion, one of the hills of ancient Jerusalem.

The intensity of that locational demand flows from the nature of Judaism, which incorporates physical locations into religious practice — Jerusalem functions not merely as a city but as a religious concept that transcends time. Add to that the destruction of Jerusalem several times across history and some two thousand years of exile, and the focus of the rising Jewish nationalist movement of the mid-1800s becomes legible.

When Zionism arose, most Jews lived outside Palestine, predominantly in Europe, where in many places — especially Tsarist Russia — the diaspora faced active, virulent persecution. The First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 with 208 delegates. Zionism was then a fringe idea that generated significant blowback, feeding antisemitic conspiracy theories, yet it gained momentum.

Britain offered the Zionists 6,000 uninhabited square miles of Uganda in 1903; they declined. A wave of Russian pogroms then drove Jewish exiles toward Palestine as pioneer settlers, building the Jewish population there to some 90,000 by the start of World War I.

Arab Nationalism and the Arab Revolt

The second budding independence movement was Arab nationalism, also centered on Palestine. Arabs in the region had historically faced little trouble under the Ottomans, who let Arabs fill local administrations and enjoy the peace of imperial rule. But from the mid-nineteenth century, some Arabs took inspiration from the predominantly Christian Slavic nationalist movements in the Balkans, who by the early 1910s had pushed the Ottomans out entirely and won independence. The Hejaz Railway, established in 1908, accelerated matters by letting the Ottomans extend administrative reach deep into the Arabian interior, where they had previously kept a light touch to avoid hostility with ruling tribes.

What turned disillusionment into action was the rise of the Young Turks, Ottoman reformers who revolted against the Sultan in 1908 and seized power that same year. The victorious faction evolved into a Turkish nationalist project that sought to extend pan-Turkic ideals across Arab lands, ruffling feathers in Palestine, where Arab-nationalist intellectuals were positioned to seize on rising discontent. When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I in November 1914, Arab nationalism became a valuable asset for the Allies. Britain began sending weapons and money to Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, a respected tribal leader in central Arabia, and made contact with the pan-Arab al-Fatat group in Syria.

The revolt began on June 5, 1916, with an attack on the holy city of Medina. Rebels seized Red Sea ports with the help of a British naval flotilla, and an Arab nationalist army — relying on British guidance and Egyptian support — surged through the desert in what became a fair fight against Ottoman forces. By 1918 the leaders of the Arab Revolt could claim victory over the Ottomans, who were forced into armistice and made to negotiate on badly unfavorable terms.

Sykes-Picot, Balfour, and Their Repercussions

The end of World War I brought the long process of partitioning former Ottoman territory. In Palestine, both Arab nationalists and Zionists could pitch the European Allies, but neither had the military might to resist if Britain or France wanted a particular outcome.

Two years before the war’s end, Britain and France — with Italy and Tsarist Russia aware of the deal — signed the 1916 Asia Minor Agreement, known today as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Drawn up in secret with no input from the region’s people, it divided control of the former empire. Britain would take control or influence over territory including modern southern Iraq, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, a stretch of the Persian Gulf, southern Israel, and Palestine, plus Mediterranean ports.

France would take southeast Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Kurdistan, and a pocket of northern Iraq. Italy was promised southern Anatolia; Russia, Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and Western Armenia. A majority of Palestine was to be administered internationally — not by Palestinians, but by international powers working together.

Sykes-Picot managed the remarkable feat of pleasing almost no one. The Arab leadership of the revolt had been made aware of parts of it but had little choice but to accept, dependent as they were on British supplies. It drew fury from the Bolsheviks, written out after overthrowing the Tsars, and from Woodrow Wilson, who favored open diplomacy. Even the defeated Central Powers argued the region’s stateless peoples should have a chance at independence, and even Sykes himself, by 1918, was arguing his own agreement needed serious revision.

Then there is the Balfour Declaration, a 64-word statement issued by the British government in 1917, written by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the Zionist leader Lionel Walter Rothschild. It read: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The declaration was the product of a years-long effort by Zionist members of the British War Cabinet. It was the first time a major political power had endorsed Zionist ideology, yet it was riddled with holes: it did not specify whether it advocated a Jewish state, did not define what “in Palestine” meant, called for the protection of Palestinian Arabs’ civil and religious rights without ever consulting them, and pointedly never mentioned their political rights. None of that mattered to its immediate effect. It was a massive boost to Zionism worldwide, and when Britain gained its League of Nations mandate over Palestine, it administered the territory as informed by the Balfour Declaration, which all the Allied Powers had by then endorsed.

In practice, Britain showed strongly preferential treatment to the Zionist Organization while giving little attention to the rights or wishes of the Arab locals. The Zionist claim, rooted in ancient Jewish habitation, was treated with gravity; the Palestinian claim — that they had lived there for two thousand years — was not. The mandate was meant to transition toward independent statehood, but Britain had little experience helping create states rather than colonizing them, and it lacked support from the Palestinian majority. With Zionists determined not to remain a minority and importing thousands of settlers, the region drifted toward a powder keg.

A Brit Named Peel: Riots, Revolt, and Partition

The first major riots of the era were the 1921 Jaffa Riots, which began after the Jewish Communist Party distributed fliers calling for a Soviet Palestine; a week of violence left 47 Jews and 48 Arabs dead and about 220 injured. The 1929 Buraq Uprising killed over a hundred on each side, fueled by Arab frustration at the lack of political and economic opportunity and fear of continued Jewish settlement. Throughout, settlers kept arriving — some drawn by Zionist ideals, others pushed out by Soviet antisemitism and the rise of Nazism — and they received land grants far more generous than the depleted fields worked by the Palestinian fellahin, many of whom were forced into slums. British policy that Arab workers be paid less than Jewish ones widened the divide, pulling some Arabs toward anti-Zionist militias like the Black Hand.

These tensions exploded in the Great Palestinian Revolt, which lasted from 1936 to 1939 — a year that also saw sixty thousand Jewish settlers arrive. The spark was the murder of two Jews by Arab nationalists, answered by the Jewish militant group Haganah-Bet killing two Arab laborers. The revolt opened with a general strike and a tax boycott, then escalated to armed attacks on Jewish farms, railways, and a strategic oil pipeline. Britain flooded Palestine with troops who brought night raids, flogging, deportation, and torture, while training and equipping Jewish paramilitaries — a strategy that only consolidated support for the revolt.

The strike was called off in October 1936 in hope of a political solution, embodied in the commission led by Lord William Robert Wellesley Peel. The Peel Commission found that high Arab political and judicial society had unanimously backed the revolt, and that it had drawn volunteers from neighboring countries. Peel’s preferred answer was to partition Palestine into three entities: a small Jewish state on the most agriculturally productive land, a small British-controlled zone, and a larger Arab state tied to Transjordan.

His alternative proposed transferring nearly a quarter-million Palestinian Arabs out of the Jewish state. It was, in effect, an early two-state solution — and it was seen as unthinkable on all sides. Major sections of the Jewish public opposed it, though Zionists coalesced around David Ben-Gurion’s endorsement; the Arab community rejected forced relocation and the loss of the best land.

With war brewing in Europe, Britain rejected the Peel plan and left the mandate in place. None of the underlying grievances were addressed, and the revolt resumed. On September 26, 1937, Galilee’s District Commissioner Lewis Andrews was assassinated for supporting partition.

Hundreds of Arab suspects were rounded up, many tortured, with documented rapes among captured women. The British opened a concentration camp for detainees, and the Jewish breakaway militia Irgun launched indiscriminate attacks on Arab civilians it framed as “active defense.” British forces destroyed entire villages, practiced torture and summary execution, and on documented occasions forced Arab villagers to ride on the front of trucks and trains as human shields, then deliberately killed them.

This phase saw the British develop close air support to a new degree, with the Royal Air Force ending street battles decisively. They transformed some Jewish militias into the Special Night Squads, deeply involved in the torture and killing of Arabs, and laid groundwork — through cooperation and competition between Jewish and British intelligence — for what became Mossad. On the Palestinian side, seeds were planted for organizations that would grow into groups like Hamas.

The revolt ended in September 1939, just as World War II began, with a death toll of over five thousand Arabs, over three hundred Jews, and over two hundred and fifty Britons. It established a grim pattern: when violence erupts en masse, it is almost always the Palestinian side that sustains far heavier losses.

During the War and After: The Road to 1947

The Great Palestinian Revolt was functionally a victory for the area’s Jewish settlers, who welcomed some fifty thousand new arrivals during the violence and established dozens of new villages. It led to the construction of a seaport in Tel Aviv, the basis of Jewish economic independence, and the arms industry born in the insurrection diversified into other sectors. With Palestinian Arabs largely out of Jewish-run companies, the new settlers gained near-total control of their own transport, trade, finance, and machining. The Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, suffered a collapse in military strength they would not recover, lost many intellectuals and leaders to fighting and assassination, and faced economic ruin — ensuring that both sides would rebuild from radically unequal starting points.

The revolt did force Britain to issue the White Paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration and called for both a Jewish state and an independent Palestine within ten years. But with World War II underway, Britain largely declared the Palestine question unsolvable and turned to the Nazi threat. Hostilities inside Palestine decreased during the war; the Zionist movement, shocked by the White Paper, realized its reliance on British aid had ended.

Ben-Gurion captured the posture for the Jewish Agency: “We shall fight in this war as if there was no White Paper and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war.” Cooperation was incomplete — Britain sank two ships carrying Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust in 1940 and 1942 — even as tens of thousands of Jews enlisted with British forces, joined by tens of thousands of Arabs.

Everything changed in the war’s final months, when the Allied advance revealed the full extent of the Holocaust. Sympathy for the Zionist movement surged, especially in the United States. In August 1945, President Harry Truman requested that a hundred thousand Holocaust survivors be admitted to Palestine, and the US legislature pushed Britain to abolish its immigration caps.

Arab heads of state consolidated their own approach: sympathetic to Jewish suffering in Europe but opposed to conflating it with Zionist aims. As the Alexandria Protocol argued, solving the plight of Holocaust survivors by increasing settlement would address injustice against Jews by inflicting new injustice on Palestinians. The Arab League formed in March 1945 with direct emphasis on representing Palestinian Arabs.

Despite restrictions, Jewish survivors kept arriving, and the Zionist underground attacked British targets — most infamously the Irgun’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which claimed 91 lives. Facing a situation spiraling out of control, and amid the broader collapse of British authority worldwide, Britain passed the Palestine question to the United Nations in 1947 and began bringing its troops home. The UN’s plan was a two-state solution, one Arab and one Jewish, economically intertwined, endorsed in a rare joint move by the US and Soviet Union and accepted by a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly. But it was a geographic patchwork: the Jewish state spread across three barely connected chunks; Jaffa became a Palestinian exclave next to Tel Aviv; Jerusalem and Bethlehem were set aside under UN control; and the Jewish state would contain a population nearly half Arab.

Civil War, 1948, and the Nakba

By the time it was formally accepted, the UN partition was already dead in the water. Arab guerrilla forces launched shootings, rioting, and attacks on the consulates of states that had voted for the resolution. Jewish businesses and synagogues were firebombed, and snipers in Jaffa fired on Tel Aviv.

Jewish militias answered with large-scale reprisals, culminating in the Deir Yassin Massacre, in which at least 107 Palestinian Arabs — including women and children — were slaughtered in a village of about six hundred. The massacre became a rhetorical tool for both sides, and a reprisal a few days later on a medical convoy killed seventy-eight Jews. Within weeks Zionist brigades took Haifa and Jaffa and began a campaign of psychological warfare to drive out the Arab population.

No outside peacekeeping force came; instead the Arab League threw in 3,000 volunteer fighters as the British rushed to leave.

Britain’s exodus was set for May 15, 1948. One day prior, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a new Jewish state, Israel, promising — at least in theory — equal rights to all, with freedom of religion, language, and culture. On its first full day, Israel was attacked from all sides by Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq, soon joined by Lebanon.

The invaders boasted a numerical advantage, but both sides underestimated the fighting will of the Israelis and overestimated the Arab coalition’s preparedness. On the southern front Israelis held back Egyptian columns with inferior armament; the Iraqi advance was blunted; the Syrian and Lebanese efforts accomplished little. Israel rallied thousands of new recruits monthly, the Haganah evolved into the Israel Defense Forces, weapons streamed in from across the world, and Israel acquired serious air power with the help of World War II veterans.

After ceasefires that repeatedly collapsed, a final peace was arranged some nine months in, in 1949. The Israeli side lost 6,374 people, including some two thousand Holocaust survivors; estimates of the combined Arab death toll range from seven to twenty thousand. Israel emerged with 78 percent of former Mandatory Palestine.

Two areas fell under Arab control: the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean coast, and the West Bank, which then included East Jerusalem. These 1949 lines established the broad shape of territorial control that endures, with vast numbers of Palestinian Arabs pushed into the two zones where they remain concentrated.

The war’s immediate aftermath saw the expulsion of between 600,000 and 800,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes — over half of those who had lived in the British Mandate. This mass displacement, the Nakba, forced Palestinians into refugee camps across the Arab world, where neighboring states provided safe haven but generally withheld citizenship. It led to the creation of the UN Relief and Works Agency and to generational refugee status.

Today the Nakba is remembered as an ethnic cleansing across most of the Arab world, while in Israel the war is remembered as the first of many Arab efforts to erase the state entirely. It also ended, for the time being, the idea of a cohesive Palestinian Arab national identity for a state that had never been achieved.

Suez and the Six-Day War

The years after 1949 were not peaceful. Palestinians who remained inside Israel received civil and religious rights with citizenship but lived under martial law for over a decade. In the Jordanian-administered West Bank, Palestinians were offered Jordanian citizenship but grew more anti-Israel and pro-pan-Arabism than the rest of Jordan. Gaza had it worst: under Egyptian rule, its Palestinian population was repressed and denied citizenship, leaving them citizens of no nation, packed into a strip no more than forty kilometers long and eight wide, building upward against overcrowding amid poverty and unemployment.

Palestinian militants periodically massacred Israeli civilians during the 1950s, and Israel retaliated in kind — most notoriously the Qibya massacre, in which the IDF killed sixty-nine Palestinians, mostly women and children, drawing condemnation from the US, the UN, and the global Jewish community. Israel’s reputation also suffered from the Lavon Affair, a false-flag operation in which Israeli military intelligence planted bombs in American, British, and Egyptian civilian targets, exposed by Egyptian intelligence. The cycle it kicked off led Israel to raid an Egyptian outpost in Gaza, killing 37 soldiers; Egypt responded by sponsoring Palestinian militias to strike inside Israel. Yet this was also a prosperous era — Israel’s economy grew about 13 percent annually from 1950 to 1955, tapering to a still-impressive 10 percent through the late 1960s.

The Suez Crisis arrived in November 1956. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, a veteran of the 1948 Faluja Pocket who had seized power in a coup and won a one-candidate election with 99.95 percent of the vote, nationalized the Suez Canal after the US and Britain backed out of a dam project. Britain and France conspired with Israel, which was eager to act after years of Egyptian-sponsored raids.

Israel invaded with ten brigades and routed Egypt’s defenders; Britain and France then occupied the canal as planned. But the United States, fearing Soviet intervention, ordered Britain and France to back off — and this time they did, leaving Israel to withdraw within months. The episode emboldened Nasser.

In 1964, a Cairo meeting produced the Palestine Liberation Organization, bringing together Palestinian factions under leader Ahmad Shuqayri, who had close ties to Egypt.

By 1967, Israel had developed two crucial military elements. The first was its nuclear program; Israel is estimated to have built its first device around 1966 and has never admitted possessing nuclear weapons — a deliberate ambiguity meant to deter without provoking. The second was a conventional doctrine shaped by the country’s small size: strike first against an obvious threat, and if attacked, stonewall completely, because a single lost battle could mean losing the entire nation.

When Syria began diverting the River Jordan and sheltering Palestinian raiders, tensions climbed. The Soviet Union falsely warned Nasser that Israel planned to attack Syria within a week. Egypt moved to full war readiness, expelled UN peacekeepers, massed troops in the Sinai, and banned Israeli shipping from part of its waters.

After confirming the US would not intervene, Israel launched its attack. In a decisive surprise operation informed by detailed intelligence, Israeli warplanes destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan on the tarmac, seizing complete air superiority. In six days Israel outclassed all three rivals. Its spoils were territorial — East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt — and reputational, scrubbing away old stereotypes of Israeli weakness and confirming Israel as a regional power in its own right.

Interlude, the PLO, and the Yom Kippur War

Palestine’s burgeoning leadership played no significant role in the Six-Day War; the PLO was vastly underpowered, and Israel’s defeat of its backers forced it to abandon hope in pan-Arab nationalism. Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem turned the city’s Palestinians into permanent residents subject to tight control, and Israel now held the entirety of the former British Mandate, along with more than a million Palestinian refugees and stateless people. The Arab world’s leaders met at Khartoum and resolved on no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel — a largely symbolic gesture that left the PLO without tangible support.

The PLO’s charter sought a single Palestinian state within the former mandate’s borders, with the area’s Zionist population purged, alongside self-determination for Palestinian Arabs and the return of exiles. From 1969 its leader was Yasser Arafat, founder of Fatah, who had argued that Palestinian liberation was Palestine’s own business. He merged the PLO with Fatah and spawned a terrorist wing in 1970, Black September, named for the conflict that drove Fatah out of Jordan. The rise of terrorist tactics, the account argues, must be understood as a utilitarian decision by a vastly weaker party — not justified, but explicable through the same logic seen from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan to the rise and fall of the Islamic State, in which attacks on civilians, improvised explosives, assassination, and rocket fire let a weak organization pose a disproportionate threat.

After moving to Lebanon in 1970, Arafat operated with impunity, raising and training militias. Black September hijacked a flight to Tel Aviv, bombed a bus station killing eleven, and in 1972 kidnapped and killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics — an attack condemned globally that led Arafat to restrict operations to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, though his groups remained willing to attack Jewish civilians anywhere. Meanwhile Israel enjoyed a diplomatic renaissance under Prime Minister Golda Meir, who oversaw the Mossad response to Munich and made herself deeply unpopular with Palestinians.

In a 1969 exchange with reporter Frank Giles, she declared: “There was no such thing as Palestinians… They did not exist.” The claim overwrote the nuance of Palestinian history — no Israeli administration had ever asked the people of Palestine whether they considered themselves a people — yet it would shape Israel’s long-term response.

The Yom Kippur War, also called the October War, grew from tensions over the Sinai. Nasser had died and been replaced by Anwar Sadat, who offered peace and formal recognition of Israel in exchange for the Sinai’s return. Meir refused, despite her own committee’s endorsement — and Sadat, facing low domestic morale, did not necessarily mind the alternative of war.

He stockpiled weapons and ran enough training exercises that Israel dismissed his real preparations as routine drills, even waving off a Syrian buildup and a personal warning from Jordan’s King Hussein. On the afternoon of October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked across the Suez Canal and into the Golan Heights, breaking through Israel’s first-line defenses. The Soviets resupplied Egypt and Syria; the US set up direct resupply to Israel.

The IDF stabilized, won the Battle of the Sinai, charged across the Suez Canal, and pushed toward Damascus before a UN-brokered ceasefire took hold on October 26.

If the Six-Day War rewrote the military balance, the Yom Kippur War rewrote Israel’s international status. Negotiations eventually returned to Sadat’s pre-war proposal. By January 1974 Israel was withdrawing from part of the Sinai, and in March 1979 Egypt and Israel agreed to permanent peace — the Camp David Accords — after which Israel withdrew fully from the Sinai and conducted its first normalization with an Arab nation.

Normalization, Lebanon, and the Settlements

Normalization with Egypt was a leap forward in Israel’s perceived legitimacy, setting an example its other Arab neighbors had to reckon with: that no amount of rhetoric, military power, or sponsorship of Palestinian resistance would remove Israel. For Yasser Arafat, it demonstrated that violence alone would not force a change in the regional order. In 1974 the Arab League deemed the PLO the sole representative of the Palestinian people, and that year Arafat became the first representative of a non-sovereign organization to address a plenary session of the UN General Assembly, speaking with an empty holster on his hip to symbolize the choice between peace and violence.

Arafat’s attention was soon consumed by Lebanon, where the PLO was based. Over years of the Lebanese Civil War, the PLO suffered thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths and carried out massacres of its own, including 684 killed at Damour. Unknown numbers of unarmed Palestinians, possibly thousands, were killed by Israel-allied Christian militias in the Beirut neighborhood of Sabra and the Shatila refugee camp.

PLO raids continued into Israel, including the Coastal Road Massacre that killed thirty-seven civilians. Israel eventually invaded Lebanon to expel the PLO and besieged Beirut; this time it was the US Marines who arranged Arafat’s safe transfer to Tunisia, where Fatah and the PLO based themselves for the following decade, sharply reducing their ability to strike Israel.

It was in these years that Israel settled into the situation seen today, including the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The rise of the Likud party in 1977 dramatically accelerated settlement, mostly in the West Bank and some in the Golan Heights. Some settlements were built for strategic reasons, others for ideological or religious ones, and still others to reclaim land lost at the mandate’s end.

Most are legal under Israeli law, though a smaller proportion are regarded as illegal outposts even by Israel. By 2023 there were well over a hundred such settlements in the West Bank, with over half a million people, ushered along by Israeli financial incentives.

The legal status of the captured territories shifted over time. They were administered by the Israeli military through 1981 and treated internationally as occupied lands. After Egypt normalized relations, the northern Golan Heights were effectively annexed — a term Israel took pains to avoid.

The West Bank passed largely to the Palestinian Authority. Gaza was under Israeli military administration through 1993, then under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction, until in 2005 Israel disengaged, dismantled its settlements, and withdrew its troops — leaving Gaza outside the claimed territory of any nation, though, as later events showed, the reality was far more complicated.

The Intifada and Oslo

In the mid-1980s, Israeli commissions investigating the Lebanese Civil War found that senior personnel — including future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — had known massacres of Palestinians were taking place but failed to stop them. Israel left most of Lebanon by 1985, but in Operation Wooden Leg, Israeli F-15s struck Arafat’s headquarters in Tunis, killing seventy-three; Arafat, out jogging, missed the attack.

In December 1987 the world learned the word “intifada” — roughly, an uprising or shaking-off. After a decade of settlement construction and land appropriation, the mood had turned murderous, compounded by a generational struggle over PLO leadership, increased repression, and the rise of an Israeli pro-peace faction. The last straw came when an Israeli was stabbed in Gaza and an Israeli tank transporter then struck two vans of Palestinian workers, killing four.

The next day a petrol bomb thrown at a patrol car drew live fire that killed a 17-year-old woman and injured sixteen. Protests across Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem turned violent, carried out by tens of thousands including many women and children.

Israeli forces shifted to containment, including live ammunition. More protesters were killed; mass arrests followed; neighborhoods were rotated through curfews, blackouts, and cutoffs of water and fuel; over a thousand Palestinian homes were demolished. Though initially leaderless, the uprising was soon directed by the PLO, while ordinary Palestinians — especially women coordinating demonstrations, boycotts, and underground hospitals and schools — sustained it.

The intifada eventually petered out under rising poverty and competent Israeli anti-riot efforts, its final months marked by suicide bombings. The casualties were far worse on the Palestinian side: 1,962 dead, compared to slightly under two hundred Israelis.

The First Intifada prompted Arafat to lead the PLO in recognizing Israel’s legitimacy and working toward a two-state solution — a massive break from prior policy. He secured UN recognition of the PLO as Palestine’s voice, while Israel got recognition of its right to exist and a condemnation of terrorist tactics. When a new Israeli government was elected in 1992 on a mandate to pursue peace, secret negotiations from 1993 to 1995, aided by Norway, produced the Oslo Accords.

Both sides made concessions: Israel recognized the PLO and agreed to withdrawals from parts of Gaza and the West Bank, while the PLO reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist and disavowed terrorism. The accords created the Palestinian Authority to govern Palestinian areas ahead of a hoped-for lasting settlement.

The Rise of Hamas

By this point the history of the conflict had become much more a history of Palestinians than of Israelis. For many ordinary Israelis, the question was seen as settled; kept largely from the violence in Lebanon and the First Intifada, Israeli citizens enjoyed greater prosperity and the protection of a sovereign state, while it was predominantly events in Palestine that broke their sense of normalcy. The First Intifada had taken steps toward reconciliation — but it also incubated a new player: Hamas.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian religious leader tied to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded Hamas — “Islamic Resistance Movement” — when the First Intifada began, partly to outflank the rival Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Its charter declared Hamas to be Muslims who “fear God and raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors,” with the goal of an Islamic state on the land then occupied by Israel and Palestine, achieved through the complete obliteration of Israel. It dismissed diplomacy and peace initiatives as “a waste of time and vain endeavors.” Reflecting a Salafi-jihadist ideology and a far harder line than the PLO, the charter was — and is — widely condemned as an attempt to incite genocide against Jews.

Hamas entered the First Intifada violently, alienating most other resistance groups and drawing the attention of Israeli security forces, who arrested early leaders including Yassin. The group quickly learned to survive by decentralizing command, hiding leaders, and diversifying finances. It opposed the Oslo Accords and stepped up its violence, and was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States as early as 1997. The PLO struggled to counter it, hampered by the need to maintain a friendly Western face and by funding cut off after Arafat backed Saddam Hussein in the 1990–91 Gulf War.

In February 1994 a far-right American Israeli, Baruch Goldstein, carried out the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, killing 29 worshippers and wounding 125 in a Hebron mosque on the fifteenth day of Ramadan. When over a dozen Palestinians were then killed by Israeli riot police, Hamas answered with suicide attacks framed as eye-for-an-eye retaliation — and crossed a threshold from which there was no easy return, abandoning distinctions between military and civilian targets. A Tel Aviv bus bombing killed 22 and injured 45.

Even so, the PLO reached out to rein Hamas in, and Hamas promised in late December 1995 to cease militant activity. Days later, on January 5, 1996, Israel’s Shin Bet assassinated the leader of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades; nearly eleven percent of Gaza’s entire population marched in the funeral, and a series of retaliatory bombings followed. Arafat was elected president of the Palestinian Authority but could not stop the violence, and Israel ushered in Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who campaigned on “peace with security” and gained leeway to suspend or delay aspects of Oslo.

The Second Intifada

Tensions escalated again with a failed 1997 Mossad attempt to assassinate Hamas politburo chairman Khaled Mashal in Jordan, an embarrassment for Netanyahu that ended with Mashal saved and Sheikh Yassin released as a concession. Hamas was not particularly popular in Palestine at the time; most Palestinians favored Fatah and the Palestinian Authority reining it in. But discontent ran deep, as the Oslo Accords delivered little practical change, and a Camp David summit between Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and US President Bill Clinton collapsed, fracturing the PLO and driving hardliners toward Hamas.

What did not need to happen at that moment was a provocation at the site known as both the al-Aqsa Mosque and Temple Mount — Islam’s third-holiest site and Judaism’s holiest. On September 28, 2000, a prominent Israeli politician — the same leader implicated in failing to stop the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which Palestine had just commemorated — visited the site with hundreds of riot police. The visit kicked off riots; the next day, after Jerusalem’s police chief was knocked out by a thrown stone, his forces switched to live ammunition and killed several Palestinians.

By week’s end fifty or more Palestinians were dead and some two thousand wounded, most of them unarmed. The situation worsened catastrophically when two Israeli reserve soldiers mistakenly entered Ramallah and were captured, then beaten, stabbed, and disemboweled — an affair filmed and broadcast that confirmed, for many Israelis, their darkest fears.

Daily battles ran through late 2000 and into 2001, a year of suicide bombings, sniper attacks, and reprisals. A suicide bomber killed twenty-one Israelis, mostly high-school students, and injured 132 at a dance club. By year’s end, 199 Israelis and 469 Palestinians had been killed, and both sides had adopted far more demonized views of the other.

In 2002, the worst year saw a Passover celebration in Netanya killed thirty Israelis, part of 130 killed that March. Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, forcing into the West Bank and Gaza, besieging Arafat in his compound, killing almost five hundred Palestinians, and arresting over four thousand. The siege of Jenin saw urban warfare and the use of armored bulldozers, and a standoff in a Bethlehem church ended with eight militants killed by IDF snipers.

In 2003, amid a scandal over alleged payments to terrorists, Arafat was sidelined under US pressure. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, brokered a temporary armistice among Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad that collapsed when a Jerusalem bus bombing killed 23, including seven children. The IDF then moved to capture every Hamas leader in Gaza and Hebron, wiping out much of the leadership, and began constructing the Israeli West Bank Barrier separating Palestinian communities from Israeli cities.

In 2004, Israel announced it would withdraw from Gaza and conducted raids that killed Sheikh Yassin and his planned successor. Violence continued into 2005, with children killed on both sides, repeated Israeli operations, and continued Hamas suicide bombings.

Elections and the Battle of Gaza

Of all the deaths of 2004, none was more consequential than that of Yasser Arafat, who died on November 11 in Paris, leaving a power vacuum in Fatah, the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority. The January 2005 election to replace him was won by Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, all but guaranteed after Hamas and Islamic Jihad boycotted. Abbas called on Hamas to stop its attacks, dispatched Palestinian police to Gaza, and eventually negotiated a ceasefire that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other factions endorsed, drawing down hostilities by mid-2005.

In September 2005 Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza, dismantling settlements and withdrawing troops — but immediately imposing a blockade. Israel controlled Gaza’s airspace, supply of goods, and territorial waters, relied on Egypt to keep the southwest border closed, and reserved the right to enter militarily whenever it felt threatened. Israel’s official position is that because it does not exercise authority over Gaza’s land or institutions, it does not occupy the territory; much of the world, including the UN, rejects this, noting that the control Israel exerts is more devastating than that experienced in many occupied territories.

The blockade came down in full force in 2007, after an intra-Palestinian battle consolidated Gaza under one authority. Hamas had won a legislative majority in the 2006 Gaza election — a free and fair vote, despite Israel’s detention of hundreds of Hamas candidates in late 2005 — surging to power without the international support Fatah enjoyed and troubling Western leaders who openly admitted training and equipping Fatah. In June 2007 Hamas moved for full control, ousting Fatah and Palestinian Authority leaders.

The fighting was brutal: Hamas threw a Palestinian Presidential Guard officer off Gaza’s tallest building; Fatah killed the imam of Gaza City’s Great Mosque and threw a Hamas militant off a tall building in turn. Hamas attacked the Fatah headquarters with RPGs and machine guns, and after capturing the Palestinian Authority’s security headquarters, Fatah withdrew. Whether the Battle of Gaza was a coup or a preemptive strike against a US-backed effort to overturn the elections remains hotly debated; what is clear is the abundance of war crimes, from the deliberate killing of civilians to fighting in hospitals to combatants masquerading as press and relief workers.

Two Palestines: West Bank and Gaza

After Hamas’s victory, Palestine fractured into two distinct parts: the Gaza Strip under Hamas and the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority. In 2022 the West Bank had about 3.9 million people, including 3.6 million Palestinians and roughly three hundred thousand Jewish settlers. It is reasonably developed and agriculturally self-supporting; West Bank residents can acquire permits to work in Israel and receive support in medicine and education, along with international aid and direct Israeli assistance. But it hosts many Israeli settlements that Palestinians see as a violation of their sovereignty, maintained with extensive Israeli civilian and military infrastructure kept out of Palestinian reach.

The Palestinian Authority has struggled financially for years and is, in practice, an authoritarian government known for arbitrary detention, torture, and execution. Like other “friendly” dictatorships, its repression is tolerated so long as it remains a stabilizing force. Many Palestinians regard it as a collaborator with — or outright puppet of — Israel, given its close cooperation on internal security and economic survival.

Gaza is a very different story. On a plot no bigger than 365 square kilometers and six kilometers wide at points, it holds nearly 2.4 million people, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Hot and desolate, it cannot sustain itself; its people survive largely on food, water, electricity, and fuel from Israel.

Work is scarce, a large share live in poverty, and nearly fifty percent of the population is under fifteen. The UN bears much of the burden of education, international organizations of medical care, while psychological support is scarce for a population carrying generational trauma. Though Israel claims it does not occupy Gaza, it blockades the territory in near-totality, and the UN and others have called it an open-air prison, occupied in every functional metric except the presence of boots on the ground.

Hamas administers Gaza as a militant organization first and foremost, one that does not claim to represent the interests of its population in any meaningful way. It treats the local population in two intertwined ways: as people to be fed and placated through ministries that route foreign aid, and as human shields, hiding bases, command posts, and weapons stockpiles in mosques, schools, day-cares, and hospitals. Backed by Iran, Hamas places its militant operations first, leveraging its civilians to put Israel between a rock and a hard place.

The most recent estimates place Gaza’s poverty rate as high as eighty percent, with clean water unavailable for up to 95 percent of the population, and over 80 percent of Gazans fully dependent on foreign aid. In 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described conditions for children in Gaza as “Hell on Earth.”

Recent Developments and October 2023

The bulk of hostilities in recent years has been between Israel and Gaza — a reality that predated the catastrophic attacks of October 2023. Hamas and Israel have swung from peace to open hostility since the end of 2008, when a fragile ceasefire could not be renewed. Since then Hamas has launched thousands of deliberately indiscriminate rocket and mortar attacks, condemned worldwide as war crimes; while the death toll from rockets alone has been relatively low, they instill fear and disrupt daily Israeli life. Israel deployed the Iron Dome missile defense system for the first time in 2011, though even it is not fully effective.

In late 2008, a wave of rocket fire prompted Israel to bombard Gaza, and in early 2009 it invaded with ground troops in the Gaza War. Between 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinians were killed, including many minors and civilians, against ten Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians. Israel withdrew after fifteen days and refused to cooperate with later investigations; a UN fact-finding mission documented 36 instances in which Israel violated international law, including two separate massacres of more than twenty members of the same families.

In the following years, the Obama administration pushed against West Bank settlements, achieving little beyond a 2010 construction freeze. A 2011 Palestinian Authority effort to win recognition with East Jerusalem as its capital had still not been voted on by the UN Security Council twelve years later, though Palestine was recognized as a non-member observer state in 2012.

Gaza weathered further air assaults, beginning with the targeted killing of Hamas’s military chief and a sustained strike on over 1,500 sites. Here Israel used “knocks on the roof” — dropping non-explosive or low-yield munitions to warn occupants before an airstrike — a practice that remains highly controversial for its tendency to kill civilians and the minimal time it gives people to flee. In the years since, rockets and airstrikes have continued, West Bank settlements have only expanded, and work programs and humanitarian concessions in Gaza were thought to be keeping Hamas in check, perhaps even blunting its appetite for violence.

That assessment shattered on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a massive rocket attack combined with an assault by militant forces via air, land, and sea. After over a thousand Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed, the tide turned and thousands of Palestinians were killed in kind. Israeli troops massed on the Gaza border in the wake of some six thousand airstrikes launched in just a couple of days, and Gaza — already blockaded — had its food, water, and electricity unilaterally cut off in response. What comes next is guaranteed to be the latest in a painful series of massacres, retaliations, and spiraling escalations that have characterized Israel and Palestine for a century — and a reminder that no account of reasonable length can do this history full justice.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where did political Zionism formally begin?

Political Zionism was formalized at the First Zionist Congress, convened in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 with 208 delegates representing Jews who favored the movement. At the time, Zionism was a fringe idea, far from ubiquitous among Jews, and most of the diaspora lived in Europe, predominantly in places like Tsarist Russia where they faced active antisemitic persecution.

What was the Balfour Declaration and why was it significant?

The Balfour Declaration was a 64-word statement issued by the British government in 1917, written by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the Zionist leader Lionel Walter Rothschild. It expressed favor for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” It was the first time a major political power endorsed Zionist ideology and became a cornerstone of British administration of Palestine, yet it never defined a Jewish state or its boundaries, never consulted the Palestinian Arab population, and pointedly omitted any mention of their political rights.

What was the Nakba?

The Nakba refers to the expulsion of between 600,000 and 800,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War — over half of those who had lived in the British Mandate. Displaced Palestinians were forced into refugee camps across the Arab world, where neighboring states generally provided safe haven but withheld citizenship. It led to the creation of the UN Relief and Works Agency and is remembered across most of the Arab world as an ethnic cleansing.

How did Israel gain its current territory in the Six-Day War?

In June 1967, after Egypt massed troops in the Sinai and banned Israeli shipping, Israel launched a surprise attack that destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan on the ground, seizing complete air superiority. In six days, Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, taking control of the entirety of the former British Mandate.

How did Hamas come to control the Gaza Strip?

Hamas was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin during the First Intifada and rejected the Oslo Accords. It won a legislative majority in a free and fair 2006 election in Gaza, then, in June 2007, moved for full control in the Battle of Gaza, ousting Fatah and Palestinian Authority leaders in brutal urban fighting. After Fatah withdrew, Hamas held the Strip, which was then sealed off by an Israeli blockade.

Israel and Palestine: A Comprehensive History of the World's Most Intractable Conflict

Key Takeaways

Ottomans and Zionists

Arab Nationalism and the Arab Revolt

Sykes-Picot, Balfour, and Their Repercussions

A Brit Named Peel: Riots, Revolt, and Partition

Watch on WarFronts

During the War and After: The Road to 1947

Civil War, 1948, and the Nakba

Suez and the Six-Day War

Interlude, the PLO, and the Yom Kippur War

Normalization, Lebanon, and the Settlements

The Intifada and Oslo

The Rise of Hamas

The Second Intifada

Elections and the Battle of Gaza

Two Palestines: West Bank and Gaza

Recent Developments and October 2023

Simon Whistler

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

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