The history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict traces back to the late 19th century when Zionists sought to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, issued by the British government, endorsed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which led to an influx of Jewish immigrants to the region. Following World War II and the Holocaust, international pressure mounted for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, leading to the creation of Israel in 1948.
The establishment of Israel, and the war that followed and preceded it, led to a major demographic change in the form of displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, sparking a decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. In the 1967 war, Israel expanded its borders to include, among others, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories that in 1948 absorbed a large part of the displaced Palestinian population. The Palestinians seek to establish their own independent state in at least one part of historic Palestine. Israel cites defense of its own borders and Palestinian internal political violence as reasons why a Palestinian state is not feasible. A majority of United Nations member states recognise Palestine as an independent state, but this does not currently reflect the situation on the ground; Israel maintains effective control over the West Bank, while the Gaza Strip, despite not being under direct Israeli control since 2005, has been under a blockade by Israel and Egypt.
Numerous peace negotiations have taken place over the years, but a long-term settlement has not been reached. The conflict has been marked by violence, including Palestinian political violence and Israeli military operations. The United States and other countries have played a role in attempting to broker peace, although Israel views the United States as its strategic ally rather than a neutral third party. Numerous obstacles remain, including the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the status of Jerusalem, and the ultimate fate of Palestinian refugees.
Background
National movements
Before World War I, the region regarded as Palestine, then the southern part of Ottoman Syria, was under the control of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 400 years, and under the control of Muslims for about 1250-1300 years, minus the roughly 200-year intervening period of the Crusades.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Palestine, which was divided between the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, Syria Vilayet and Beirut Vilayet, was inhabited predominantly by Arab Muslims, both farmers and Bedouin (the latter living principally in the Negev and Jordan Valley), with smaller numbers of Christians (mostly Arabs), Druze, Circassians and Jews (predominantly Sephardic).Sephardi & Mizrahi
At that time most of the Jews worldwide lived outside Palestine, predominantly in eastern and central Europe,The Jewish Diaspora
with significant communities in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Americas.
The roots of the conflict can be traced to the late 19th century, with the rise of national movements, including Zionism and Arab nationalism. Though the Jewish aspiration to return to Zion had been part of Jewish religious thought for more than a millennium, the Jewish population of Europe and to some degree Middle East began to more actively discuss immigration back to the Land of Israel, and the re-establishment of the Jewish Nation, only between 1859 and the 1880s, largely as a solution to the widespread persecution of Jews, and antisemitism in Russia and Europe. As a result, Zionism was established as a political movement in 1897.
The Zionist movement called for the establishment of a nation state for the Jewish people in Palestine, which would serve as a haven for the Jews of the world and in which they would have the right of self-determination.Sela, ed. (2002). Hattis Susan (Sheila) and Avraham Sela. "Zionism". p. 127. pp. 928–932. Zionists increasingly came to hold that this state should be in their historic homeland, which they referred to as the Land of Israel. The World Zionist Organization and the Jewish National Fund encouraged immigration and funded purchase of land, both under Ottoman rule and under British rule, in the region of Palestine. Meanwhile, Arab nationalism, at least in an early form, and Syrian nationalism were the dominant tendencies, along with continued loyalty to the Ottoman state, in the area.
According to Benny Morris, among the first recorded violent incidents between Arabs and the newly immigrated Jews in Palestine was the accidental shooting death of an Arab man in Safed, during a wedding in December 1882, by a Jewish guard of the newly formed moshava (Jewish agricultural settlement) Rosh Pinna. In response, about 200 Arabs descended on the Jewish settlement throwing stones and vandalizing property. Another incident happened in Petah Tikva (the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement, moshava, in Palestine), where in early 1886 the Jewish settlers demanded that their Arab tenants vacate the disputed land and started encroaching on it. On March 28, a Jewish settler crossing this land was attacked and robbed of his horse by Yahudiya Arabs, while the settlers confiscated nine mules found grazing in their fields, though it is not clear which incident came first and which was the retaliation. The Jewish settlers refused to return the mules, a decision viewed as a provocation. The following day, when most of the settlement's men folk were away, fifty or sixty Arab villagers attacked Petach Tikva, vandalizing houses and fields and carrying off much of the livestock. Four Jews were injured and a fifth, an elderly woman with a heart condition, died four days later.
By 1908, thirteen Jews had been killed by Arabs, with four of them killed in what Benny Morris calls "nationalist circumstances", the others in the course of robberies and other crimes. In the next five years twelve Jewish settlement guards were killed by Arabs. Settlers began to speak more and more of Arab "hatred" and "nationalism" lurking behind the increasing depredations, rather than mere "banditry".
Zionist ambitions were increasingly identified as a threat by the Arab leaders in Palestine region. Certain developments, such as the acquisition of lands from Arab owners for Jewish settlements, which led to the eviction of the fellaheen from the lands which they cultivated as tenant farmers, aggravated the tension between the parties and caused the Arab population in the region of Palestine to feel dispossessed of their lands. Ottoman land-purchase regulations were invoked following local complaints in opposition to increasing immigration. Ottoman policy makers in the late 19th century were apprehensive of the increased Russian and European influence in the region, partly as a result of a large immigration wave from the Russian Empire. The Ottoman authorities feared the loyalty of the new immigrants not so much because of their Jewishness but because of concern that their loyalty was primarily to their country of origin, Russia, with whom the Ottoman Empire had a long history of conflicts: immigrant loyalty to Russia might ultimately undermine Turkish control in the region of Palestine. This concern was fomented by the example seen in the dismantling of Ottoman authority in the Balkan region. European immigration was also considered by local residents to be a threat to the cultural make-up of the region. The regional significance of the anti-Jewish riots (pogroms) in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and anti-immigration legislation being enacted in Europe was that Jewish immigration waves began arriving in Palestine (see First Aliyah and Second Aliyah).Russian Pogroms, Demonstrations, anti-immigration legislation and emigration
As a result of the extent of the various Zionist enterprises which started becoming apparent, the Arab population in the Palestine region began protesting against the acquisition of lands by the Jewish population. As a result, in 1892 the Ottoman authorities banned land sales to foreigners. By 1914 the Jewish population in Palestine had risen to over 60,000, with around 33,000 of these being recent settlers.
World War I and aftermath (1917–1920)
As a result of a mutual defense treaty that the Ottoman Empire made with Germany, during World War I the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers opposed to Great Britain and France. The possibility of releasing Palestine from the control of the Ottoman Empire led the new Jewish population and the Arab population in Palestine to support the alignment of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia during World War I. In 1915, the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence was formed as an agreement with Arab leaders to grant sovereignty to Arab lands under Ottoman control to form an Arab state in exchange for the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. However, Palestine was "ambiguously omitted" from the Arab state and the Balfour Declaration in 1917 proposed to "favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, but that nothing should be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." In 1916, the Anglo-French Sykes–Picot Agreement allocated to the British Empire the area of present-day Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the area of present-day Iraq. The Balfour Declaration was seen by Jewish nationalists as the cornerstone of a future Jewish homeland on both sides of the Jordan River, but increased the concerns of the Arab population in the Palestine region.
In 1917, the British succeeded in defeating the Ottoman Turkish forces and occupied the Palestine region. The land remained under British military administration for the remainder of the war.
On January 3, 1919, future president of the World Zionist Organization Chaim Weizmann and the future King Faisal I of Iraq signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement in which Faisal provisionally accepted the Balfour Declaration conditional on the fulfillment of British wartime promises of Palestine being included in the area of Arab independence.
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles, Turkey's loss of its Middle East Empire was formalized.
Intercommunal violence in Mandatory Palestine
Before World War II After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in April 1920 the Allied Supreme Council meeting at San Remo granted to Britain the mandates for Palestine and Transjordan (the territories that include the area of present-day Israel, Jordan, West Bank and the Gaza Strip), endorsing the terms of the Balfour Declaration. Historian Laura Robson has described this as part of the "colonial practice of territorializing sectarian identity" whereby the "designation "Jewish" would carry with it all sorts of political baggage totally absent from the prior experience of the many Jewish communities of the Arab Ottoman world and their Muslim and Christian compatriots".