Israel's history: a state whose frontiers came from armistices

Who lived in the land before the modern state

The archaeological record is long. Ubeidiya in the north shows archaic humans about 1.5 million years ago, and Egyptian and Near Eastern texts name Canaanite city-states around 2000 BCE. The earliest known artefact to use the name Israel for a people is the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt, dated to the late 13th century BCE.

Historians and archaeologists agree that a northern Kingdom of Israel existed by about 900 BCE and a Kingdom of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem, by about 850 BCE. Assyria conquered Israel around 720 BCE. In 587 or 586 BCE Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and its temple and exiled much of the Judean elite. Cyrus the Great allowed the exiles to return after taking Babylon in 539 BCE, and the Second Temple was finished around 520 BCE.

A revolt against Seleucid rule in 167 BCE led to the Hasmonean kingdom, which ended with the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 63 BCE. Rome made the area the province of Judaea in 6 CE. The First Jewish-Roman War of 66 to 73 CE ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple, and after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 136 Rome renamed the province Syria Palaestina and expelled Jews from the districts around Jerusalem. Galilee became the centre of the Jewish presence that remained.

A Christian majority had formed by the middle of the fifth century. The Rashidun Caliphate conquered the Levant between 634 and 641, and the Crusades of the end of the eleventh century set up Crusader states until the Mamluk sultans of Egypt fully restored Muslim rule in 1291. The Ottoman Empire took the region in 1516. By the 1800s, according to Britannica, fewer than 25,000 Jews lived there, most of them in Jerusalem.

How Zionism and the British mandate collided

The First Aliyah, the first wave of modern Jewish migration to Ottoman Palestine, began in 1881 as Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. About three million Jews left the Russian Empire between 1882 and 1914, and about 1% of them went to Palestine. Theodor Herzl argued for a Jewish state as the political answer to antisemitism and took his case to the First Zionist Congress in August 1897. The Second Aliyah of 1904 to 1914 brought some 40,000 settlers, nearly half of whom later left; its socialist groups founded the first kibbutzim, and Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 as the first planned Jewish town.

In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, backing a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. The League of Nations gave Britain the Mandate for Palestine in 1922 on terms that included it. Jews were then about 11% of the population and Arab Christians about 9.5%, the rest mostly Arab Muslims. Britannica gives the Jewish community as fewer than 100,000 in 1919 and some 600,000 by the end of the Second World War, while the Arab population grew from about 440,000 to roughly 1,000,000 by 1940.

Arab leaders opposed the goal of a Jewish state, and the mandate saw riots in 1920 and 1929 and the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939, in which 5,032 Arabs were killed. A British proposal to partition the country was rejected by the Arab side, and the White Paper of 1939 restricted Jewish immigration severely as refugees fled Nazi Europe. About 30,000 Jews from Palestine served in the British forces during the war, and some 12,000 Palestinian Arabs did too.

After 1945 the Haganah joined the Irgun and Lehi in an armed campaign against British rule. The Irgun bombed the British administrative headquarters in the King David Hotel on 22 July 1946, killing 91 people. Britain referred the question to the United Nations in February 1947 and decided that September to leave.

What the first Arab-Israeli war settled and left open

UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 recommended partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under an international regime. The plan gave the Jewish state 55 to 56% of the territory at a time when Jews were about a third of the population and owned about 6 to 7% of the land. The Jewish leadership accepted it. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League rejected it, arguing that it violated the self-determination of the Arab majority.

Fighting began at once. On 9 April 1948 Irgun and Lehi forces attacked the village of Deir Yassin, killing about 100 villagers by Britannica's count, and days later Arab forces attacked a convoy to Hadassah Hospital and killed 78. On 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the State of Israel, and the United States recognised it the same day. Armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon entered the territory the next day. By early 1949 Israel held the Negev up to the old Egypt-Palestine frontier, except the Gaza Strip.

The armistices of 1949 left the Green Line. Jordan annexed the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Egypt held Gaza. Israelis call the war the War of Independence. In the Arab world it is the Nakba, the catastrophe, because more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled; some 156,000 Arabs stayed and became Arab citizens of Israel. The UN admitted Israel as a member on 11 May 1949. In December 1949 Ben-Gurion declared West Jerusalem the capital, and the Knesset affirmed it on 24 January 1950. The declaration was not recognised internationally, because the UN had envisaged Jerusalem as an international city.

How immigration remade the new state

The Central Bureau of Statistics puts the population at the founding of the state at 806,000. Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab and Muslim countries doubled the Jewish population from 700,000 to 1,400,000 within three years, and the total passed two million in 1958. Over 200,000 people were living in the tent and hut camps called ma'abarot by 1952, food and clothing were rationed, and the Law of Return of 1950 gave every Jew the right to immigrate and take citizenship. Jews from Europe were often favoured over Jews from the Middle East and North Africa in the allocation of housing, and the second group stayed longer in the camps.

Immigration has kept the same weight since. Ethiopian Jews arrived in several waves from the 1980s, and arrivals from the former Soviet states raised the population by 12% between 1990 and 1994. The CBS counted more than 3.5 million immigrants between 1948 and April 2026, about 1.68 million of them since 1990, and a population more than 12.5 times its size at independence.

Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and kept Israeli shipping out of it and out of the Straits of Tiran. In October 1956, in a secret arrangement with Britain and France, Israel invaded Sinai, then withdrew in March 1957 after a UN Emergency Force was posted on the frontier.

Why the Six-Day War still decides the map

In May 1967 Soviet officials told Syria and Egypt, falsely, that Israel had massed troops on the Syrian border. Egypt moved troops into Sinai, demanded the withdrawal of the UN force on 16 May and closed the Straits of Tiran on 22 May; Jordan signed a defence pact with Egypt on 30 May. On 5 June Israel struck first from the air and destroyed more than 90% of Egypt's air force on the ground. By 10 June it held Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Britannica gives Arab losses as more than 11,000 Egyptian, 6,000 Jordanian and 1,000 Syrian casualties against 700 Israeli, and records that the war created hundreds of thousands of refugees and put more than a million Palestinians under Israeli rule.

Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967 called for Israeli withdrawal from "territories occupied in the recent conflict" in exchange for an end to belligerency and recognition of every state's right to live within "secure and recognized boundaries". Israel and the Arab states read it differently, and it became the basis of every later land-for-peace negotiation.

What Israel did with each territory differed. It extended Israeli law to East Jerusalem on 27 June 1967 and passed the Jerusalem Law in July 1980, calling the city the "complete and united" capital; Security Council Resolution 478 declared that law null and void on 20 August 1980, and 22 of the 24 states with embassies in Jerusalem moved them to Tel Aviv. A law of 1981 effectively annexed the Golan Heights, and the Security Council rejected that too. The West Bank and Gaza were placed under military administration. Israel's stated position, in the Jerusalem Law, is that the whole city is its capital; the Palestinian Authority regards East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, and most of the international community regards it as occupied territory. The United States recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital on 6 December 2017 and opened its embassy there on 14 May 2018.

Which wars ended in treaties and which did not

Egypt and Syria attacked on 6 October 1973, the holy day of Yom Kippur, and Israel took heavy casualties before crossing the Suez Canal and pushing into Syria. Ceasefire agreements followed with Egypt on 11 November 1973 and with Syria on 31 May 1974. Public anger over the failures forced Golda Meir to resign.

In May 1977 Likud won the Knesset election, the first defeat for Labour in the state's history. That November the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat travelled to Jerusalem and spoke before the Knesset. At Camp David from 5 to 17 September 1978, Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter produced two framework documents, and the peace treaty was signed on 26 March 1979. Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai in April 1982.

Lebanon went the other way. Israel invaded on 6 June 1982 to drive out the PLO, whose fighters left Beirut under a multinational force. After Christian militiamen massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, in areas under Israeli control, an Israeli inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found that the defence minister Ariel Sharon bore personal responsibility, and he resigned. Israeli forces left most of Lebanon by June 1985 but held a strip along the border until May 2000, fighting Hezbollah, a militia formed against the invasion. The war of July and August 2006 left more than a thousand Lebanese dead and about a million displaced, by Britannica's count.

Jordan signed a peace treaty in October 1994. Talks with Syria in the 1990s stalled on where a withdrawal from the Golan would end: Syria wanted the line of 4 June 1967, which reached the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and Israel the international border of 1923, which kept the lake on its side. A round in January 2000 foundered on the same line.

What Oslo promised and what followed it

The First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, began in 1987, and more than 1,000 people were killed over the following six years. A peace conference met in Madrid in 1991. On 13 September 1993 Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO negotiator Mahmoud Abbas signed the Declaration of Principles at the White House: Israel accepted the PLO as the Palestinians' representative, the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist and renounced terrorism, and a Palestinian Authority would govern parts of the West Bank and Gaza for five years before talks on borders, refugees and Jerusalem. The Oslo II agreement of September 1995 divided the West Bank into areas under Israeli control, Palestinian control and shared responsibility.

Yigal Amir, an Israeli opposed to the accords, assassinated Rabin in November 1995. The Hebron Protocol of 1997 and the Wye River Memorandum of 1998 moved further areas to Palestinian control. At Camp David in July 2000 Ehud Barak offered a state on all of Gaza and over 90% of the West Bank, with Jerusalem as a shared capital; the talks failed over borders, Jerusalem and the right of return, accounts differ on why, and Bill Clinton blamed Yasser Arafat. Riots followed Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount on 28 September 2000 and became the Second Intifada. Between 2000 and 2008, 1,063 Israelis, 5,517 Palestinians and 64 foreign citizens were killed.

Israel began a separation barrier in 2002, which the International Court of Justice condemned in a non-binding opinion, and withdrew from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Hamas won the Palestinian election of 2006 and took Gaza in 2007, after which Israel and Egypt blockaded the strip; wars with Hamas followed in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. In the West Bank, Britannica records that the number of Jewish settlers tripled between 1995 and 2015. The Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised relations with further Arab states.

How the war in Gaza has been counted

On 7 October 2023, the festival of Shemini Atzeret, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired at least 2,200 rockets and sent at least 1,500 fighters across the Gaza boundary. About 1,200 people were killed, most of them Israeli civilians, and more than 240 were taken into Gaza as hostages, by Britannica's count. Israel declared a state of war the next day, for the first time since 1973, and sent ground forces into Gaza on 27 October.

The death toll in Gaza is counted by the Ministry of Health there. As reported by the Health Cluster and published by UNRWA, its figure for 7 October 2023 to 9 August 2026 was 73,386 Palestinians killed and 174,256 injured. A study in The Lancet estimated 64,260 deaths from traumatic injury by June 2024. A UN Satellite Centre assessment reported in August 2026 found about 82% of structures in Gaza damaged.

The legal claims are attributed by the parties who make them. South Africa brought a case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent acts contrary to the Genocide Convention without ordering it to stop the campaign. A UN report of September 2025 found reasonable grounds that Israel had committed four of the five acts the Genocide Convention defines. Israel and its allies, the United States among them, deny that the campaign is genocide. The International Criminal Court issued warrants for leaders of both Israel and Hamas.

A ceasefire agreed on 15 January 2025 broke down in March. Another took effect on 10 October 2025, the last 20 living hostages were freed on 13 October in exchange for about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, and the last remains were returned by January 2026. The war spread beyond Gaza: fighting with Hezbollah, direct exchanges with Iran in April and October 2024, a twelve-day war with Iran in June 2025 and, from late February 2026, a further campaign against Iran launched with the United States.