A Brief History of Israel: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Land Both Call Home

A note on how this piece is written: almost every word in this history is disputed, starting with the name of the land. Where Israelis and Palestinians use different names for the same thing, both are given. Where international bodies such as the UN or the International Court of Justice have made findings, they are reported as findings, with dates, alongside the response of whoever disputes them. Casualty figures are attributed to whoever produced them. The aim is that an Israeli Jew, a Palestinian, and a supporter of either could each read the account of their own history and recognise it as fairly told.

Every spring, Israelis celebrate their Independence Day with fireworks, flags and barbecues in the parks. It marks the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, the return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancestral land after nearly two thousand years, three years after the Holocaust. The day before, sirens sound across the country and Israelis stand in silence for soldiers and victims of terrorism who died so that the state could exist.

On 15 May, Palestinians mark Nakba Day, al-Nakba, "the catastrophe". It remembers the same war, in which more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, about half of the Arab population of the land, fled or were driven from their homes and were never allowed to return. Many families still keep the iron keys of houses that no longer stand.

Both memories are true. They are memories of the same events, seen from opposite sides, and most of the history of this land since 1948 has been shaped by the collision between them. This is that history, told at length, and beginning long before either modern people existed.

In this history

1. The land and ancient Israel (to 586 BCE)
2. Exile, Rome and the empires (586 BCE–1516)
3. Ottoman Palestine and two national movements (1516–1917)
4. The British Mandate (1917–1947)
5. 1948: Independence and Nakba (1947–1949)
6. The new state, 1967 and the occupation (1949–1987)
7. Intifadas, Oslo and the Gaza stalemate (1987–2023)
8. 7 October and the Gaza war (2023–2026)
9. How to understand Israel and Palestine today

Part 1 — The land and ancient Israel (to 586 BCE)

The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is small. From the coast to the river it is a morning's drive. Yet within it are coastal plains and citrus groves, the green hills of Galilee, the stony uplands where Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus stand, the Negev desert in the south, and the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the surface of the earth. It sits on the land bridge between Africa and Asia, which is why every empire of the ancient and medieval world wanted it, and why so many peoples passed through.

Its names are themselves a history.

Some terms in this piece need defining at the start, because they are contested:

• Israel means the State of Israel within the lines where the fighting stopped in 1949, often called the Green Line, unless stated otherwise.
• The West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip are the territories Israel captured in 1967. The UN, the International Court of Justice and most governments call them the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel's government disputes that description for the West Bank, which many Israelis call Judea and Samaria, and regards East Jerusalem as part of its capital.
• Palestinians means the Arab people of this land and their descendants, Muslim and Christian, wherever they now live, including the Arab citizens of Israel, many of whom call themselves Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Ancient Israel and Judah (c. 1200–586 BCE)

Two kinds of evidence

There are two main sources for ancient Israel, and they need to be kept apart. One is the Hebrew Bible, the sacred scripture of Judaism and the Old Testament of Christianity, which tells a story running from Abraham through the exodus from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan under Joshua, and the kingdom of David and Solomon. The other is archaeology and inscriptions from the region and its neighbours. Sometimes they agree; often they do not; and the question of how far to trust the Bible as history is one of the oldest debates in scholarship (see this library's How the Sacred Texts Were Written).

Most archaeologists today think the Israelites did not arrive as a conquering army from Egypt. The evidence suggests instead that they emerged from within the Canaanite population itself, in hundreds of small new highland villages that appear in the central hills around 1200 BCE. Those villages have one striking feature: almost no pig bones, unlike nearby Canaanite and Philistine sites. That dietary rule would become one of the markers of Jewish identity for the next three thousand years.

The first mentions

The earliest known mention of Israel outside the Bible is on a granite slab carved for the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah around 1208 BCE, which lists peoples he claims to have defeated in Canaan and says, in a standard translation, "Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more". The stele was discovered by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1896. The hieroglyph used marks Israel as a people, not a city or country.

Around 300 years later, an Aramaic inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Israel in 1993–94 mentions the "House of David", the first reference outside the Bible to a royal dynasty of that name. It is dated to the ninth century BCE.

David, Solomon and the debate over the kingdom

The Bible describes a great united kingdom under David and Solomon, around the tenth century BCE, with a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem. Here archaeologists divide. Scholars such as Israel Finkelstein argue that tenth-century Jerusalem was a modest highland town and that the kingdom of the Bible is a later idealisation; others, such as Amihai Mazar, defend a more modest but real united monarchy. What is not in doubt is that by the ninth century BCE there were two Israelite kingdoms: Israel in the north, with its capital at Samaria, and the smaller Judah in the south, with its capital at Jerusalem.

• The northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrian Empire; its capital Samaria fell in 722–720 BCE and much of its population was deported.
• Judah survived as an Assyrian vassal. In 587 or 586 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple and deported much of Judah's elite to Babylon.

In these centuries, many scholars believe, the core of the Hebrew Bible took shape, and with it monotheism, the belief in one God, which Judaism gave to Christianity and Islam.

The Merneptah Stele, about 3,200 years old, is the first time "Israel" appears in writing. It is a boast of destruction. The people it claimed to have wiped out are still here, and so is the argument about the land.

Part 2 — Exile, Rome and the empires (586 BCE–1516)

Return and the Second Temple

In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon (see this series' A Brief History of Iran). The Bible records that he allowed the exiles to return, and around 538 BCE some did, rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Many stayed in Babylon, where a Jewish community would flourish for 2,500 years. The diaspora, the Jewish people living outside the land, begins here, centuries before the Romans.

Judea was then ruled by the Persians, by Alexander the Great and his successors, and after a revolt in the 160s BCE that is still celebrated in the festival of Hanukkah, by a Jewish dynasty of its own, the Hasmoneans, from 164 to 37 BCE. Then came Rome. Herod the Great, a client king of Rome, rebuilt the Temple on a vast scale; its retaining wall, the Western Wall, is today the holiest place where Jews pray.

In this Roman province, a Jewish preacher from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed around the year 30. The movement his followers founded became Christianity, and made this small land holy to billions more people.

Revolt and destruction

Two great Jewish revolts against Rome ended in catastrophe.

The destruction of the Temple is still mourned by Jews on the fast of Tisha B'Av. Judaism survived it by transforming itself: rabbis replaced priests, prayer and study replaced sacrifice. In Galilee, around 200 CE, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah, the foundation of rabbinic law, and later the Jerusalem Talmud was produced there too. Jewish communities remained in the land, especially in Galilee, through every century that followed, though for long periods they were a minority.

The question of what happened after 135 matters politically today. Jewish tradition and Zionism emphasise exile and the continuous longing for return ("Next year in Jerusalem", recited each Passover). Many Palestinian historians emphasise that the land's population never disappeared: farmers stayed, converted to Christianity and later mostly to Islam, adopted Arabic, and many of today's Palestinians are, in part, their descendants. Both continuities are real, and both peoples' ancestry runs deep in the region.

A land of many rulers (135–1516)

Christian Holy Land

After the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, the land was transformed into the Holy Land of the Byzantine Empire. Churches rose over the sites of Jesus's life and death, among them the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Pilgrims came from across the Christian world. During the Byzantine centuries much of the population became Christian, and Palestinian Christians today, though now a small minority, belong to some of the oldest Christian communities on earth.

The Islamic conquest

In 636 Arab armies of the early caliphate defeated the Byzantines at the Yarmuk river, and Jerusalem surrendered to the caliph Umar shortly afterwards. Jerusalem, al-Quds, "the Holy", became Islam's third holiest city, associated with the Prophet Muhammad's night journey. Around 685–692 the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, the plateau Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary; the al-Aqsa Mosque stands beside it. The same platform is the holiest place in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam. Much of the conflict's emotional charge sits on those few hectares.

Over the next centuries the population gradually became Arabic-speaking and mostly Muslim, though Christian and Jewish communities remained. Under the caliphates, Jews and Christians lived as protected but subordinate dhimmi communities, paying a special tax, generally freer than Jews in much of medieval Christian Europe, but never equal.

Crusaders, Mamluks

In 1099 the armies of the First Crusade took Jerusalem after a five-week siege and massacred many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. For almost two centuries a Crusader kingdom held much of the land. The Kurdish-born sultan Saladin destroyed the Crusader army at Hattin in July 1187 and retook Jerusalem the same year. The Mamluks, a dynasty of slave soldiers ruling from Cairo, stopped the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in Galilee in 1260 and captured Acre, the last major Crusader stronghold, in 1291.

Under the Mamluks, Palestine was a provincial backwater of the Egyptian state, but Jerusalem was filled with Islamic schools, hostels and endowments that still stand in the Old City. These are the centuries in which the Arab Muslim society of Palestine, with its villages, its holy places and its scholarly families, took the shape it would keep into modern times.

Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans all ruled this land as part of someone else's empire. For most of the last two thousand years, the people living here did not govern themselves. That changed only in the twentieth century, and two peoples tried to do it at once.

Part 3 — Ottoman Palestine and two national movements (1516–1917)

Four centuries under the sultans

The Ottoman Turks took the land from the Mamluks in 1516–17 and held it for four hundred years. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem's Old City that visitors walk today. "Palestine" was not one Ottoman province: it was divided into districts governed from Damascus, Sidon or Beirut, with Jerusalem eventually made a special district answering directly to Istanbul.

In the sixteenth century the Galilee town of Safed became a great centre of Jewish learning, home to mystics of the Kabbalah and to Joseph Karo, whose law code is still used today. Small Jewish communities lived in the four "holy cities" of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias, many supported by charity from abroad.

Arab Palestinian society

Most of the population were Arab peasants, fellahin, living in hundreds of villages, growing olives, wheat and fruit. Nablus was famous for its olive-oil soap; Jaffa exported oranges to Europe. Bedouin tribes grazed the Negev. In the towns, notable families such as the Husseinis, Nashashibis and Khalidis of Jerusalem held religious offices, land and influence; they would lead Palestinian politics into the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century brought change. Ottoman reforms (the Tanzimat) and a land law of 1858 required land to be registered; many peasants registered land in the names of urban notables to avoid tax and conscription, which later allowed absentee owners to sell land out from under the villagers who worked it. Steamships and railways linked Palestine to world markets. Christian missions, schools and consulates multiplied. By 1896 Jews made up an absolute majority in Jerusalem itself, while across the whole land the population was overwhelmingly Arab: about 88 per cent Muslim and 9 per cent Christian by one late-Ottoman estimate.

A distinctly Palestinian Arab public sphere was emerging. In January 1911, two Christian Arab cousins in Jaffa, Issa and Yousef El-Issa, founded the newspaper Filastin, which became a leading voice of Palestinian identity and of opposition to Zionist land purchases.

Two national movements (1880s–1917)

Zionism

In 1881–82 a wave of anti-Jewish violence, the pogroms, swept the Russian Empire, followed by discriminatory laws. Millions of Jews left for America. A small number, inspired by groups such as the Lovers of Zion, went to Ottoman Palestine to farm: the First Aliyah ("ascent") began in 1882.

In 1896 a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, shaken by antisemitism in supposedly enlightened Western Europe, including the Dreyfus affair in France, published Der Judenstaat, "The Jewish State". He argued that assimilation had failed and that Jews needed a state of their own. In 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which declared the aim of a publicly recognised home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Zionism was the national movement of the Jewish people: the belief that Jews were a nation, not only a religion, and needed self-determination in their historic homeland. It took many forms, socialist, liberal, religious, revisionist. Its pioneers drained swamps, founded collective farms called kibbutzim, built the new Hebrew city of Tel Aviv (1909) beside Arab Jaffa, and revived Hebrew as a spoken language, an achievement with almost no parallel.

How to describe Zionism is itself contested:

• For most Israelis and most Jews, it is a liberation movement, the return of an indigenous people to its homeland after centuries of persecution, and the reason Jews survived the twentieth century at all.
• For most Palestinians, it was a movement of European settlers that took land from the people already living on it, a form of settler colonialism, backed by the imperial power of the day.
• Many historians argue that it was, in different ways, both: a national movement of a persecuted people that also, inevitably, came into conflict with the people already in the land.

The Arab national movement

At the same time, Arabs across the Ottoman Empire were developing their own national consciousness, in literary clubs, newspapers and secret societies. In Palestine, opposition to Zionist immigration and land purchase began early: from the 1880s and 1890s, villagers clashed with new colonies over land, and notables petitioned Istanbul to restrict Jewish immigration. A distinct Palestinian identity, tied to the land, to Jerusalem and to the Arab world, grew alongside a wider Arab nationalism.

The war and the promises

In the First World War the Ottomans joined Germany. Britain, fighting them, made promises in three directions that historians still argue over:

The Balfour Declaration, a letter from the foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, is 67 words long. Its key sentence:

"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."

Zionists saw it as a charter. Palestinians note that it was issued by a foreign power about a land it did not yet control, and that it referred to the great majority of the population, then about nine in ten people, only as "existing non-Jewish communities", with civil and religious, but not political, rights. In December 1917 British forces took Jerusalem.

Part 4 — The British Mandate (1917–1947)

A mandate with two promises

In 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain a Mandate for Palestine, incorporating the Balfour Declaration. Its Article 4 recognised a "Jewish agency" to cooperate with the administration; Article 6 required Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage "close settlement by Jews on the land", while ensuring that "the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced". Transjordan, east of the river, was separated from the Jewish national home provisions and became an Arab emirate.

In 1922 Palestine had about 750,000 people, of whom Jews were about 11 per cent. By 1946, after waves of immigration, especially of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, there were about 608,000 Jews out of a population of about 1.85 million, according to figures compiled for the UN. Jewish-owned land remained a small share of the total, about 7 per cent by 1947 in the estimate most often cited, but it was concentrated in the most fertile coastal plains and valleys, and Zionist land purchase, often from absentee landlords, sometimes displaced the tenant farmers who worked it.

The Jewish community, the Yishuv, built a state in all but name: elected institutions, the Jewish Agency, a labour federation (the Histadrut), schools, the Hebrew University (opened 1925) and an underground militia, the Haganah. Palestinian Arabs, led by divided notable families and refusing institutions that accepted the Mandate's terms, did not build equivalent structures; the British offered a legislative council, but Arab leaders rejected it as an arrangement that would legitimise Jewish immigration.

Violence

The Mandate was punctuated by violence, at first mostly between communities, later against the British.

Figures from the standard historical record as summarised in recent scholarship; Arab-revolt deaths are approximate.

The Arab revolt was the great formative event of Palestinian nationalism, and its defeat left Palestinian society disarmed and its leadership exiled or divided on the eve of 1948. Its most prominent leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, fled, and in 1941 met Hitler in Berlin, collaborating with the Nazis for the rest of the war. Israelis often cite that collaboration; Palestinians often point out that the Mufti did not speak for all Palestinians, many of whom had opposed his faction, and that Palestinian Arabs, like Palestinian Jews, also served in the British forces in the same war.

In 1937 a British commission under Lord Peel proposed for the first time to partition the land into a small Jewish state and a larger Arab state joined to Transjordan. Zionist leaders reluctantly accepted the principle; Arab leaders rejected it. Then, in May 1939, with war coming and Arab goodwill needed, Britain reversed course. Its White Paper limited Jewish immigration to "some 75,000 immigrants over the next five years", after which further immigration would require Arab consent, and set the objective of "an independent Palestine State" within ten years.

The Holocaust

The White Paper closed the doors of Palestine just as the Jews of Europe were trapped. Between 1933 and 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews, about two out of every three Jews in Europe, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Ships carrying refugees to Palestine were turned away. After the war, hundreds of thousands of survivors were in displaced persons' camps, many wanting to go to Palestine.

For Jews, the Holocaust is the final proof of Zionism's argument: that a people without a state of its own could be destroyed while the world watched. Palestinians reply that they bore no responsibility for European antisemitism, yet were asked to pay for it with their land.

The UN steps in

In 1947 an exhausted Britain handed the problem to the new United Nations. A UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) of 11 countries visited the land; a majority of seven recommended partition, and a minority proposed a federal state. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, the Partition Plan, by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions.

The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. Many Zionist leaders saw it as a starting point; some opposed the borders. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it, arguing that the UN had no right to divide a country against the will of its majority, and that it gave more than half the land to a third of the population, who then owned about 7 per cent of it. Each side still cites the other's response in 1947 as proof of who was to blame for what followed.

Part 5 — 1948: Independence and Nakba (1947–1949)

The civil war

Fighting began the day after the vote. From December 1947 to May 1948, Jewish and Palestinian Arab militias fought a civil war, with bombings of markets and buses on both sides, ambushes on the roads, and a siege of Jewish Jerusalem. In April 1948 the Haganah went on the offensive under a strategic plan known as Plan Dalet. On 9 April, fighters of the Irgun and Lehi killed about a hundred or more villagers, including women and children, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (estimates range from about 93 to 140); the Jewish Agency condemned the killings. Four days later, Arab fighters ambushed a Jewish medical convoy to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus, killing 79 Jews, among them doctors and nurses, and a British soldier. Arab towns, among them Haifa and Jaffa, fell, and their populations fled or were expelled.

On 14 May 1948, as the British left, David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv. It promised that the state would "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex". The next day, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq, with contingents from Lebanon and elsewhere, entered the former Mandate.

The war

The new Israeli army held, then pushed forward. By the armistice agreements of 1949, Israel controlled about 78 per cent of Mandate Palestine, considerably more than the partition plan had allotted. Transjordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City, and annexed them in April 1950; in 1949 Transjordan had renamed itself the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Egypt held the Gaza Strip. No Palestinian Arab state was created.

The refugees

During the war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, about half the Arab population of Mandate Palestine, fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel. A UN estimate of the time put the number of refugees at about 726,000; the UN agency created for them, UNRWA, counted about 750,000 when it began work in 1950. Between about 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were depopulated and most were later destroyed. In July 1948, during the capture of the towns of Lydda and Ramle, Israeli forces expelled some 50,000 to 70,000 inhabitants. About 156,000 Arabs remained inside Israel and became its citizens.

On 11 December 1948 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which resolved "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date", with compensation for those choosing not to return. Israel did not allow the refugees to return, arguing that they would be a hostile population inside a state just attacked by its neighbours, and that the refugee problem had been caused by a war the Arab side had begun. Palestinians regard the right of return as a fundamental right that has never lapsed. In 1949 the UN created UNRWA (Resolution 302) to provide relief. Its definition covers Palestinians whose normal residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost home and livelihood in the conflict, and their descendants: about 5.9 million people today are eligible for its services.

The historians' argument

Why did the refugees leave? For decades the two sides told incompatible stories. The traditional Israeli account held that they left mainly at the urging of Arab leaders, expecting to return after an Arab victory. The Palestinian account, documented by historians such as Walid Khalidi (whose All That Remains, 1992, catalogues the destroyed villages), held that they were driven out under a deliberate plan.

From the late 1980s, Israeli "new historians" working in newly opened Israeli archives transformed the debate. Benny Morris found no evidence of a general Arab order to flee, and much evidence of expulsions, massacres and fear; but he concluded that the refugee problem was "born of war, not by design", the product of a war rather than a master plan. Others went further: Ilan Pappé argued that Plan Dalet amounted to a plan of ethnic cleansing. Palestinian historians such as Nur Masalha and Rashid Khalidi stressed the long Zionist discussion of "transfer" of Arabs before 1948. Israeli historians such as Efraim Karsh and Yoav Gelber criticised the new historians and emphasised Arab leaders' role, Arab violence and Palestinian society's collapse. Morris himself later said, in a 2004 interview with Haaretz, that if Ben-Gurion had carried out "a full expulsion, rather than a partial one, he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations", a view many of his former allies found shocking.

Israelis call it the War of Independence: a war of survival, fought by a people three years after the Holocaust, against neighbouring armies that rejected the UN plan. Palestinians call it the Nakba: the catastrophe in which they lost their homeland. This history uses both names, because both describe something that happened.

Part 6 — The new state, 1967 and the occupation (1949–1987)

Ingathering

Israel's population grew at extraordinary speed in its first years. Holocaust survivors came from Europe. And from 1948 onward, the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab world and Iran came too. About 900,000 Jews left, fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries over the twentieth century, amid hostility, legal discrimination and in some places violence that sharpened after 1948; about 650,000 of them resettled in Israel. These Mizrahi ("Eastern") and Sephardi Jews and their descendants are today a large part of the Israeli Jewish population. Many Israelis see their story as the other refugee story of 1948, rarely told abroad.

The Law of Return (1950) gave every Jew the right to immigrate and become a citizen. New immigrants were housed in tented transit camps; many Mizrahi Jews were sent to remote development towns and felt looked down on by the European-born Labour elite, a grievance that would reshape Israeli politics.

The young state was built on a pioneering, secular, social-democratic ideal: kibbutzim, a national water carrier, universal conscription, Hebrew as the common language of immigrants from a hundred countries. In 1961 the trial in Jerusalem of the Nazi organiser Adolf Eichmann made the Holocaust central to Israeli identity.

Arab citizens under military rule

The roughly 156,000 Arabs who remained became citizens with the vote, and Arab members sat in the Knesset from the first parliament. But until 1966 most lived under military rule, needing permits to travel, while much of their land was expropriated under laws that treated refugees and internally displaced people as "absentees". On 29 October 1956, the first day of the Suez war, Israeli Border Police killed 48 Arab citizens of the village of Kafr Qasim returning from work, unaware of a curfew imposed that day; the border policemen involved were tried and sentenced to prison terms, and the massacre remains a defining memory for Arab citizens.

The refugees and the rise of the fedayeen

The Palestinian refugees lived in camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, many in tents and later in concrete blocks. Jordan gave them citizenship; Lebanon and Syria did not. From the camps, armed infiltrators, fedayeen, crossed into Israel; Israel replied with reprisal raids.

In 1956 Israel joined Britain and France in attacking Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel captured Sinai and Gaza but withdrew under American and Soviet pressure. In 1964 the Arab League created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Meanwhile Yasser Arafat and others had founded Fatah, which insisted that Palestinians must liberate themselves rather than wait for Arab states.

1967, 1973 and the occupation (1967–1987)

The Six-Day War

In May 1967 Nasser expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and massed troops; Arab leaders spoke of destroying Israel. Israelis feared a second Holocaust. On 5 June 1967 Israel struck first, destroying Egypt's air force on the ground. In six days it took the Sinai and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

For Israelis it was a miraculous deliverance; soldiers wept at the Western Wall, which Jews had not been allowed to visit since 1948. For Palestinians it was the Naksa, "the setback", and the beginning of an occupation that would shape every Palestinian life for the next six decades.

At Khartoum in September 1967, Arab leaders declared "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it". In November the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, still the foundation of every peace plan. It called for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and for the "acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries", and for "a just settlement of the refugee problem". The English text says "territories", not "the territories", and Israel and the Arab states have argued ever since over whether it requires withdrawal from all of them.

Black September, Munich, Yom Kippur

After 1967 the PLO, now led by Arafat, became the voice of Palestinian nationalism. Its factions carried out hijackings and attacks. In September 1970, Jordan's army turned on the PLO in a war Palestinians call Black September; by July 1971 the last fighters had been driven out of the kingdom, and the PLO moved to Lebanon. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, gunmen from a group named after it killed eleven Israeli athletes and coaches.

On 6 October 1973, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria attacked in a coordinated surprise. Israel recovered and counter-attacked, but lost between about 2,500 and 2,800 soldiers. The shock of being caught unprepared brought down Prime Minister Golda Meir and, eventually, the Labour party's long dominance. In 1977 Menachem Begin's Likud won power, carried by many Mizrahi voters.

Peace with Egypt

In November 1977 Egypt's president Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset. The Camp David Accords of 1978, brokered by US President Jimmy Carter, led to the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, signed in Washington on 26 March 1979. Israel returned all of Sinai by 1982. Sadat was assassinated by Islamist officers in 1981; the peace held, cold but unbroken, through every war since.

Settlements and annexation

After 1967 Israel began building settlements in the occupied territories: first mainly for security in the Jordan Valley, then, especially after 1977, across the West Bank, driven by a religious-nationalist movement, Gush Emunim, which saw settling the biblical heartland as a religious duty, and by governments offering cheap housing. In 1980 the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law declaring "Jerusalem, complete and united" the capital of Israel; the UN Security Council declared it null and void in Resolution 478. In December 1981 Israel applied its law to the Golan Heights, which most of the world regards as annexation.

The legal status of the settlements is one of the sharpest disputes in the conflict. The Fourth Geneva Convention bars an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into occupied territory; the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice and most governments regard the settlements as illegal on that basis. Israel argues that the West Bank was not the sovereign territory of any state when it was captured (Jordan's annexation was recognised by almost no one), that it is "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory, and that Jews have a historic right to live there.

Lebanon

In June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the PLO, which had been firing on northern Israel. Israeli forces besieged Beirut; the PLO leadership was evacuated to Tunis. In September, Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacred between about 1,300 and 3,500 or more Palestinians and Lebanese Shi'a, by differing estimates. An Israeli commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found that Israel bore indirect responsibility and that Defence Minister Ariel Sharon should resign, which he did. The occupation of southern Lebanon helped give birth to Hezbollah, a Shi'a militia backed by Iran, founded in 1982.

Part 7 — Intifadas, Oslo and the Gaza stalemate (1987–2023)

The first intifada

On 9 December 1987, the day after an Israeli truck collided with cars in Gaza, killing four Palestinians, protests erupted and spread across the territories. The intifada, "shaking off", was a popular uprising: stone-throwing youths, strikes, boycotts and local committees, along with some armed attacks. Israel, with Yitzhak Rabin as defence minister, responded with mass arrests, curfews, deportations and beatings. By its end in 1993, about 1,962 Palestinians had been killed, including several hundred killed by other Palestinians as suspected collaborators, and about 179 to 200 Israelis.

The intifada had lasting consequences. In 1987, a new Islamist movement, Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. Its 1988 charter sought a state in all of former Mandatory Palestine and was widely described as antisemitic; a new charter in 2017 removed the antisemitic language, declared Zionists rather than Jews the target of its struggle, and signalled acceptance of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, without recognising Israel. Meanwhile, on 15 November 1988 in Algiers, the PLO proclaimed a State of Palestine, in a declaration written by the poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Oslo

Secret talks in Norway produced the Oslo Accords. On 13 September 1993, on the White House lawn, Rabin, now prime minister, and Arafat shook hands. The PLO recognised Israel's right to exist; Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. A Palestinian Authority (PA) took over Gaza and Jericho in 1994 and later the main West Bank cities. The hardest issues, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and security, were postponed to "final status" talks within five years. The West Bank was divided into Areas A (Palestinian civil and security control), B (Palestinian civil control, Israeli security control) and C (full Israeli control, about 60 per cent of the West Bank). In October 1994 Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel.

Oslo was attacked from both sides. On 25 February 1994, an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, shot dead 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Hamas and Islamic Jihad began suicide bombings of Israeli buses and cafés. On 4 November 1995, after a peace rally in Tel Aviv, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist opposed to giving up land. Settlement building continued throughout the Oslo years.

Camp David and the second intifada

In July 2000 US President Bill Clinton brought Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat to Camp David. The summit failed. Israelis, and the American negotiators, largely blamed Arafat for rejecting what they saw as the most generous offer any Israeli leader had made. Palestinians and many analysts replied that the offer fell short of a viable, contiguous state with East Jerusalem as its capital and did not address the refugees.

On 28 September 2000, Sharon, then opposition leader, visited the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif escorted by more than a thousand police. Protests the next day were met with lethal fire, and the second intifada (the al-Aqsa intifada) began. It was far deadlier than the first: Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel and Israeli military reoccupation of West Bank cities. By its end in early 2005, about 1,000 Israelis and between about 3,200 and 3,350 Palestinians had been killed.

The second intifada broke the Israeli peace camp. Most Israelis concluded that Palestinians did not want peace; most Palestinians concluded that Israel did not want a Palestinian state. Israel built a separation barrier, part fence and part wall, which it credits with stopping suicide bombings. Much of its route runs inside the West Bank, and on 9 July 2004 the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, found that its construction in the occupied territory and "its associated régime are contrary to international law". Israel rejected the opinion. Arafat died in November 2004 and was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas.

Gaza, Hamas and the long stalemate (2005–2023)

Disengagement and the Hamas takeover

In August and September 2005, Prime Minister Sharon, the patron of the settlement movement, withdrew all 21 Israeli settlements and more than 8,000 settlers from Gaza, along with four small settlements in the northern West Bank. Many Israelis remember it as a painful sacrifice for peace that was answered with rockets. Palestinians and the UN note that Israel kept control of Gaza's airspace, sea and most of its borders, which is why the UN continued to regard Gaza as occupied.

In January 2006 Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections, taking 74 of 132 seats. Israel, the US and the EU refused to deal with a Hamas government unless it recognised Israel, renounced violence and accepted past agreements. In June 2006 Hamas fighters captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years. In June 2007, after fighting between Hamas and Fatah, Hamas seized control of Gaza; Abbas dismissed the Hamas-led government and the Palestinian territories split in two, Fatah ruling parts of the West Bank, Hamas ruling Gaza. No national Palestinian election has been held since.

Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza, restricting movement of people and goods. Israel said it was necessary to stop weapons reaching Hamas; the UN and humanitarian groups called it collective punishment of two million people. Gaza became one of the most densely populated places on earth, with high unemployment and repeated wars:

Figures as summarised from UN and Israeli sources in the historical record; Palestinian figures from the Gaza Health Ministry and the UN.

Israel transformed

Inside its own borders, Israel became wealthier and more powerful. A high-tech boom earned it the nickname "Start-up Nation"; by 2025 its income per person, about $60,000 by World Bank figures, was among the highest in the world. Its population passed 10 million: at the end of 2025, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, 10.18 million people, of whom 76.3 per cent were Jews and "others" (the bureau's category for non-Arab Christians and people with no recorded religion), 21.1 per cent Arabs and 2.6 per cent foreign nationals. Its politics moved right. Benjamin Netanyahu, first elected in 1996 and prime minister again from 2009 to 2021, became the longest-serving leader in its history, arguing that the conflict could be managed while Israel made peace with Arab states over the Palestinians' heads.

That bet seemed to pay off. In 2018 the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem. In 2020 the Abraham Accords normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by Morocco and Sudan. Talks on Saudi recognition were reported to be advanced in 2023.

But other trends ran the other way. In 2018 the Knesset passed the Nation-State Law, by 62 votes to 55, declaring that the right to national self-determination in Israel is "unique to the Jewish people" and downgrading Arabic from an official language; Arab and Druze citizens protested that it made them second-class. In June 2021 the Islamist Arab party Ra'am became the first independent Arab party ever to join a governing coalition (small Arab lists allied to Labour's forerunner, Mapai, had sat in coalitions until 1977). The settler population kept growing: by the mid-2020s more than 500,000 Israelis lived in West Bank settlements outside East Jerusalem, and about 246,000 in East Jerusalem, in a West Bank of more than three million people, 85 per cent of them Palestinian (Peace Now, from Israeli and Palestinian statistics, end of 2023). After a year in opposition, Netanyahu returned to power in 2022 with far-right partners, and in 2023 his government's plan to curb the Supreme Court's powers brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets in some of the largest protests in the country's history.

Human rights organisations, including the Israeli group B'Tselem in 2021 and Amnesty International in 2022, began describing Israel's rule over Palestinians as a system of apartheid. The Israeli government and many of its supporters rejected the term as false and defamatory, pointing out that Arab citizens of Israel vote, sit in parliament and serve as judges, and that the West Bank's status is a consequence of an unresolved conflict, not racial ideology.

Part 8 — 7 October and the Gaza war (2023–2026)

7 October 2023

Early on the morning of 7 October 2023, a Jewish holiday, thousands of Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence around Gaza under cover of thousands of rockets. They attacked army posts, border towns and kibbutzim, and the Nova music festival. About 1,200 people were killed in Israel, the large majority of them civilians: by a tally based on Israeli official figures, 1,195 people, including at least 828 civilians, among them 36 children and 71 foreign nationals, and 364 people at the festival. 251 people were taken into Gaza as hostages, from babies to people in their eighties. Survivors and investigators documented killings of families in their homes and burnings, and a UN team led by Pramila Patten reported on 4 March 2024 "reasonable grounds to believe" that conflict-related sexual violence had occurred.

Many, including then-US President Joe Biden, called it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. In October 2026, on the third anniversary, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it an "abhorrent, large-scale terror attack" and said: "Nothing can justify these atrocities." Hamas described the attack as a response to the occupation, the blockade and threats to al-Aqsa; Israel, the US, the EU, the UK and many other governments designate Hamas a terrorist organisation.

The war in Gaza

Israel declared war, with the stated aims of destroying Hamas's military and governing capacity and bringing the hostages home. Its bombing and ground offensive over the next two years devastated Gaza.

How to read the Gaza figures. The death toll in Gaza comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which operates under the Hamas-run authorities. UN agencies use its figures, which they attribute to it and describe as reported by the ministry; the BBC notes they are "considered reliable by the UN". Israel says the ministry is a Hamas instrument whose figures do not distinguish combatants from civilians, and it has claimed to have killed many thousands of fighters. Independent researchers, including studies in The Lancet, have concluded that the ministry's counts of the identified dead are broadly accurate and that the true toll is likely higher, because thousands remain under rubble. In March 2026 the ministry published a list of more than 72,000 named dead. All these figures remain disputed in their details, especially the share of combatants.

In August 2025 the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared famine in Gaza Governorate. Israel disputed the finding and blamed Hamas for diverting aid.

International courts and findings

Israel's position is that its war was one of self-defence against an enemy that deliberately embedded itself among civilians, that it warned and evacuated civilians on a scale unmatched by other armies, and that accusations of genocide invert the meaning of a word coined to describe the murder of Jews. Palestinians and many international lawyers and human rights groups argue that the scale of killing, the destruction of homes, hospitals and food systems, and statements by Israeli officials show intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group. The genocide question is before the ICJ and has not been decided.

Ceasefires, hostages, and the plan

A first ceasefire in January 2025 collapsed in March. On 29 September 2025 US President Donald Trump announced a 20-point plan, and its first phase took effect on 10 October 2025. On 13 October the last 20 living hostages were released, in exchange for about 1,968 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. In November 2025 the UN Security Council, in Resolution 2803, endorsed the plan, including a US-chaired Board of Peace to oversee Gaza's transitional administration and an International Stabilization Force. The remains of the last hostage held in Gaza, Ran Gvili, were recovered in January 2026.

The second phase, the disarmament of Hamas, Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction, has stalled. In July 2026 Hamas announced the resignation of its civilian administration, and Trump announced an agreement for Hamas's "complete disarmament"; Hamas said it agreed, but tied the handover of heavy weapons to an Israeli withdrawal. Israel rejected the Board of Peace's disarmament roadmap and said its troops would not pull back without "genuine" disarmament (BBC, July–August 2026). As of late October 2026, Israeli forces held a large part of Gaza behind a demarcation known as the "yellow line"; the UN human rights office reported that Israel had said it aimed to extend its military deployment to 70 per cent of the territory. More than 1,400 Palestinians had been killed since the ceasefire, by Gaza ministry figures cited at the UN Security Council on 15 October 2026, and the UN said around two-thirds of Gaza's two million people were living in tents or makeshift shelters (August 2026).

The West Bank, Lebanon and Iran

The West Bank saw its worst violence in decades. Between January 2025 and September 2026, according to UN OCHA, 331 Palestinians, including 77 children, were killed, more than 42,000 people were displaced, 21 Israelis were killed, and 3,684 attacks by settlers were recorded. In late October 2026, after two Israeli soldiers were killed in a shooting in Hebron, an Israeli military operation in the city led the UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, to warn of ethnic cleansing, as more than 3,000 people were evacuated from their homes by Israeli forces.

The war also spread. Israel fought Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2024, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah; it struck Iran directly in 2024 and in the Twelve-Day War of June 2025; and from 28 February 2026, with the United States, it fought a much larger war against Iran (see this series' A Brief History of Iran), in which Iranian missiles hit Israeli cities and the Lebanese front reopened. In September 2025, the UK, France, Canada, Australia and other states recognised the State of Palestine; by then 157 of the 193 UN member states had done so.

The election of October 2026

On 27 October 2026 Israelis voted in the first general election since the war began, called after the Knesset dissolved in July. Turnout was 77.7 per cent, the highest in more than twenty years. Partial results reported by the BBC the next day put Netanyahu's Likud-led bloc on about 53 of the Knesset's 120 seats, a bloc of Jewish opposition parties led by the former army chief Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party on about 48, and Arab-led parties on an unprecedented 19, leaving no bloc with a majority. Likud figures claimed the election had been "stolen by Arab parties"; the Central Elections Committee rejected claims of fraud. As of 31 October 2026, final results were due the following week, and coalition talks had not begun.

Three years after 7 October, Israel is a country still grieving and divided, Gaza is a wasteland where two million people live in tents, and the West Bank is more violent than at any time in decades. No one, on either side, has a plan that the other side accepts.

Part 9 — How to understand Israel and Palestine today

Many peoples, many stories

There is no single Israeli story or single Palestinian story. Here are the main ones, as their own adherents would tell them.

Israeli Jews. We are an ancient people who never forgot our land. After two thousand years of exile, persecution and finally genocide, we came home, bought land, drained swamps, revived our language and built a democracy. We accepted the UN's partition plan in 1947; the Arab states rejected it and invaded. Half of us descend from Jews driven out of Arab countries and Iran. We have offered to share the land repeatedly, in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, and have been answered with war and terror; when we left Gaza in 2005 we got rockets, and on 7 October we got a massacre. We want peace, but we cannot risk our survival on the promises of people who celebrate our deaths. Israeli Jews themselves are deeply divided: secular and religious, left and right, settlers and those who would give up the settlements, and they argued fiercely over judicial reform, the war's conduct and the hostages.

Palestinian citizens of Israel. About one in five Israeli citizens is Arab, Muslim, Christian or Druze. Our families stayed in 1948 while our relatives became refugees; we lived under military rule until 1966 and lost much of our land. We vote, we are doctors and judges and members of the Knesset, but we live with discrimination in land, housing and budgets, and the Nation-State Law told us this country belongs to someone else. We are Palestinian by identity and Israeli by citizenship, and we are often distrusted by both. In the 2026 election, we voted in record numbers.

Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We have lived under military occupation since 1967, longer than most of us have been alive. Our lives are governed by permits, checkpoints, a separation barrier and settlements that grow on our land, while the Palestinian Authority, which many of us see as weak and corrupt, administers our cities without sovereignty. Settler violence has become a daily fear. We were promised a state at Oslo; instead the settlements kept growing. Many of us have lost faith in negotiations, in our own leadership, and in the world's promises.

Palestinians in Gaza. Most of us are refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948. We lived under blockade from 2007, then through war after war, ruled by a Hamas government many of us did not choose or no longer support. Since October 2023 we have lost tens of thousands of family members, our homes, our schools, our hospitals and our universities. We want to live, to rebuild, and not to be driven out again.

The Palestinian diaspora and refugees. About 8 million Palestinians live outside historic Palestine, about 6.8 million of them in Arab countries, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (end of 2025). For many, the right of return to the homes their grandparents left in 1948 is the heart of the cause: a matter of justice that no agreement can sign away. Others, especially younger diaspora Palestinians, increasingly frame the struggle as one for equal rights in one land.

Supporters abroad. Supporters of Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish, see a small democracy and refuge for a persecuted people, defending itself against enemies who reject its existence, and judged by standards applied to no other country; many see much criticism of Israel as tipping into antisemitism, which rose sharply worldwide after 7 October. Supporters of the Palestinians see a people dispossessed, occupied and besieged, whose suffering is ignored or excused by powerful governments; many describe Israel's rule as colonial or as apartheid, and see accusations of antisemitism used to silence them, while Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism go unremarked. Many people, including many Jews and Palestinians, hold parts of both views.

Ideas that unlock the conflict

1. Two peoples, one land, and both are indigenous to their own story. The deepest source of the conflict is not a misunderstanding. Two national movements claim the same land, each with real historical and emotional ties to it. Any honest account begins there.

2. 1948 is the core. The 1967 occupation dominates the news, but for Palestinians the wound is 1948, the loss of the homeland and the refugee question; for Israelis, the core is the Arab world's refusal in 1948 to accept a Jewish state at all. Every negotiation that has tried to solve 1967 without touching 1948 has failed.

3. Security and fear shape everything. Israelis remember the Holocaust, the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, the suicide bombings and 7 October; Palestinians remember the Nakba, Deir Yassin, Sabra and Shatila, the occupation and Gaza. Each side's fear of the other is grounded in real events, and each side's actions confirm the other's fears.

4. The two-state solution is official policy almost everywhere, and has rarely looked further away. A Palestinian state alongside Israel, roughly on the 1967 lines, has been the basis of international diplomacy since the 1990s. Settlement growth, Palestinian division, the collapse of trust after the second intifada and 7 October, and the destruction of Gaza have led many on both sides to doubt it, while the alternatives, one state for both peoples or permanent control, satisfy neither.

5. International law and power pull in different directions. The UN, the ICJ and most governments regard the occupation and settlements as unlawful and have recognised Palestine; the United States, Israel's main ally, has repeatedly shielded it. Much of the diplomacy of 2026 is about which matters more.

Key dates

Who's who

The takeaway

The land between the river and the sea has been home to Israelites and Judeans, Romans and Byzantines, Arab Muslims and Christians, Crusaders and Ottomans, and for the last century to two modern national movements, Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, which each claim it as a homeland. The war of 1948 created Israel and a Palestinian refugee people at the same moment; the war of 1967 put millions of Palestinians under an occupation that still continues; and the attack of 7 October 2023 and the Gaza war that followed produced the worst suffering on both sides in generations. In 2026, with Gaza in ruins, the West Bank in turmoil, the ICJ still weighing genocide allegations and Israel choosing a new parliament, the conflict's oldest question, how two peoples can live in one small land, remains unanswered.

Try this: read two short first-person accounts of 1948, one by an Israeli who fought in the War of Independence or arrived as a refugee, and one by a Palestinian who left a village that year. Note the places that appear in both, the events each leaves out, and the words each uses for the same people. Then do the same for 7 October 2023. You will not need anyone to tell you why the conflict is so hard to end.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- The Avalon Project (Yale Law School): texts of the Balfour Declaration (1917), the Mandate for Palestine (1922), the British White Paper of 1939, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948), and UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967).
- United Nations: General Assembly Resolutions 181 (1947), 194 (1948) and 302 (1949); Security Council Resolutions 242, 478 and 2803; UN Division for Palestinian Rights, The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem (a study produced for a UN committee mandated to support Palestinian rights; used here for Mandate-era population and land figures and the 1947 vote).
- UNRWA, "Palestine Refugees" definition and figures (archived copy, May 2026).
- International Court of Justice, case pages: Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall (Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004); Application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), orders of 26 January, 28 March and 24 May 2024 and procedural orders of 2025–26; Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024).
- International Criminal Court, Situation in the State of Palestine, warrants of 21 November 2024 (archived press release).
- UN News and UN OCHA, 2025–26: Guterres anniversary message (5 October 2026); Security Council briefing (15 October 2026); West Bank figures (27 October 2026); OHCHR on Gaza and Hebron (26 and 30 October 2026); OCHA humanitarian situation report (29 October 2026).
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Introduction to the Holocaust".
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians at the end of 2025 / World Population Day release (11 July 2025).
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, end-of-2025 population estimate, as reported by JNS, "Israel's population hits 10,178,000" (end-of-year release).
- Peace Now, settlement data (Israeli and Palestinian CBS figures, end of 2023); World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 8 October 2026).
- BBC News reporting, 2025–26: UN Commission of Inquiry report (16 September 2025); hostage remains recovered (January 2026); Board of Peace disarmament plan (30–31 July 2026); Board envoy at the Security Council (27 August 2026); Israeli election partial results (28 October 2026).
- Casualty figures for 1929, 1936–39, 1948, 1967, 1973, the intifadas, the Gaza wars and 7 October as summarised in the scholarly and official record; ranges given where sources differ.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris (the most influential archival study of 1948, by an Israeli historian)
- 📘 The Hundred Years' War on Palestine — Rashid Khalidi (a Palestinian historian's account of the conflict since 1917, partly through his own family's story)
- 📘 My Promised Land — Ari Shavit (an Israeli journalist's honest, conflicted portrait of Zionism, including Lydda in 1948)
- 📘 Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History — Nur Masalha (the long history of the land from a Palestinian perspective)
- 📘 The Lemon Tree — Sandy Tolan (one house in Ramle, one Palestinian family that lost it and one Jewish family from Bulgaria that moved in)
- 📘 A History of Modern Israel — Colin Shindler (a clear single-volume history of the state)
- 🌐 UN OCHA, occupied Palestinian territory (current humanitarian data, updated weekly)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: How the Sacred Texts Were Written; The World's Religions, One Page Each; The 1970s: Malaise, Punk, Détente, and the Rise of Personal Computing (Sadat and Begin); A Brief History of Iran (this series)