The history of Israel

The State of Israel was founded in 1948 on part of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, a land that Jews regard as their ancestral homeland and that Palestinian Arabs, who formed the large majority of its population until 1948, regard as theirs. Ancient Israel and Judah gave rise to Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, and after the Romans crushed Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries most Jews lived in a diaspora that lasted nearly two thousand years, while the land passed through Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman hands. The Zionist movement of the late nineteenth century sought to rebuild a Jewish national home there, and under British rule it came into conflict with Palestinian Arab nationalism. The war of 1948 established Israel and turned most of the Arab population into refugees, an event Israelis remember as the War of Independence and Palestinians as the Nakba. Since then Israel has fought repeated wars, made peace with Egypt and Jordan, occupied the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, and since October 2023 has been at war in Gaza and across the region. For the history of the same land from the Palestinian side, see History of Palestine.

The land is one of the oldest inhabited places outside Africa. Stone tools at Ubeidiya near the Sea of Galilee are about 1.5 million years old, a jawbone from Misliya Cave on Mount Carmel is among the earliest fossils of modern humans found beyond Africa, and the Carmel caves were occupied by Neanderthals and modern humans over hundreds of thousands of years. The Natufians of around 12,000 years ago lived in some of the first settled communities, and their successors took part in the Neolithic Revolution.

In the Bronze Age the land was Canaan, a country of walled city-states such as Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, which spoke Semitic languages close to Phoenician and Hebrew. Egypt's pharaohs repeatedly campaigned there, and under the New Kingdom, after Thutmose III's victory at Megiddo in 1457 BCE, Canaan was an Egyptian province. Egyptian rule ended in the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE, when the Philistines settled the southern coast and the cities of Phoenicia flourished to the north.

A victory stele of the pharaoh Merneptah from around 1208 BCE contains the first known mention of Israel, as a people in Canaan. Over the following centuries hundreds of small villages appeared in the central hill country, which most archaeologists associate with the early Israelites. The Hebrew Bible describes a united monarchy under David and Solomon in the tenth century BCE, with a temple in Jerusalem; how large and powerful that kingdom was is much debated, though a ninth-century inscription from Tel Dan refers to a royal "House of David". By the ninth century two kingdoms existed: Israel in the north, the larger and richer, with its capital at Samaria, and Judah in the south, centred on Jerusalem.

The worship of a single god, Yahweh, developed over these centuries into Judaism. Assyria destroyed the kingdom of Israel around 720 BCE and deported part of its population. Judah survived as an Assyrian vassal, and under King Hezekiah Jerusalem withstood Sennacherib's siege of 701 BCE. In 586 BCE Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple and carried many of Judah's people into exile, an experience that shaped the writing and editing of much of the Hebrew Bible.

After Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, the Achaemenid Empire allowed exiles to return, and the Second Temple was completed around 515 BCE in the small province of Yehud. Alexander the Great took the region in 332 BCE, and it passed between the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Seleucid Empire, which gained control in 200 BCE. Greek culture of the Hellenistic period spread through the towns.

When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV banned Jewish practices and rededicated the Temple to Zeus, the Maccabees rose in revolt in 167 BCE and recaptured Jerusalem in 164 BCE, an event commemorated by Hanukkah. Their descendants, the Hasmoneans, ruled an independent Jewish kingdom that expanded to cover most of the land, until internal feuds opened the way for Rome.

Pompey took Jerusalem in 63 BCE, and the Roman Empire ruled through client kings, above all Herod the Great, who rebuilt the Temple on a monumental scale, before making Judaea a province in 6 CE. Jesus of Nazareth preached in Galilee and was crucified in Jerusalem around 30 CE, and the movement of his followers grew into Christianity. Tensions with Roman governors erupted in the First Jewish–Roman War of 66 to 73 CE, in which Jerusalem and the Second Temple were destroyed in 70 CE. The last rebels died at the fortress of Masada.

A second great uprising led by Simon bar Kokhba from 132 to 136 was crushed with enormous loss of life. Emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as the pagan city of Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from entering it, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina. Jewish life shifted to Galilee, where rabbis compiled the Mishnah around 200 CE and later the Jerusalem Talmud, and to the communities of the diaspora, from Babylonia to Rome.

Under the Byzantine Empire the land became the Christian Holy Land, filled with churches and monasteries, and Jews lost their majority during the fourth century. Soon after the death of Muhammad, the Rashidun Caliphate conquered the region in the 630s, and under the Umayyad Caliphate the Dome of the Rock was built on the Temple Mount, which Muslims know as the Haram al-Sharif. Jerusalem became the third holiest city of Islam, Jews were allowed to live there again, and over the following centuries most of the population came to speak Arabic and adopted Islam.

The Crusades brought a Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1099, whose conquerors massacred Muslims and Jews in the city, until Saladin retook it in 1187. The Mamluk Sultanate expelled the last Crusaders in 1291, and in 1516 the Ottoman Empire took over. Small Jewish communities persisted throughout, concentrated in the four holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 helped make sixteenth-century Safed a centre of Kabbalah and Jewish law. Meanwhile most of the world's Jews lived in Europe and the Islamic world, where they produced scholars such as Maimonides and endured cycles of tolerance, discrimination and persecution.

In the nineteenth century Jewish nationalism grew in response to European nationalism and antisemitism, especially the pogroms in the Russian Empire after 1881. The first organised wave of Jewish immigration, the First Aliyah, began in 1882, and in 1897 the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which called for a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Immigrants of the Second Aliyah from 1904 founded collective farms such as Degania, the first kibbutz, and the city of Tel Aviv in 1909, and Hebrew was revived as a spoken language. At the time the Jewish population was a small minority among a mostly Arab population of Muslims and Christians, who increasingly opposed land purchases and immigration.

During World War I, Britain made conflicting promises to Arab leaders, to France and, in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, to the Zionist movement, and its forces captured Jerusalem that December. The League of Nations confirmed the British mandate over Palestine in 1922 with the Balfour commitment written into it. Under the mandate the Jewish community, known as the Yishuv, built its own institutions, including the Histadrut labour federation, the Hebrew University and the Haganah militia. Arab riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929, when Jews were massacred in Hebron, and the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939 expressed growing Arab resistance to British rule and Zionist immigration.

The rise of Nazi Germany sent tens of thousands of Jewish refugees to Palestine in the 1930s. The Peel Commission proposed partition in 1937, which Arab leaders rejected, and a British White Paper in 1939 sharply limited Jewish immigration just as Jews most needed refuge. During World War II about six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, the Jewish underground groups Irgun and Lehi attacked the British, including the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 that killed 91 people, while ships carried Holocaust survivors in defiance of the immigration limits. In 1947 Britain handed the problem to the United Nations.

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly recommended partition into a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international zone around Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan; Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab states rejected it as a violation of the majority's right to self-determination. Fighting between Jewish and Arab forces began at once. On 14 May 1948, as the mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel, and the next day armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq, with smaller Lebanese and other forces, invaded.

For Israelis this was the War of Independence, fought for survival by a community of about 650,000 that lost some 6,000 people, around one per cent of its population. By the armistice agreements of 1949 Israel held about 78 per cent of the former mandate, while Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Egypt held the Gaza Strip. For Palestinians the war was the Nakba, the catastrophe: more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, around half the Arab population, fled or were expelled, and between 400 and 600 villages were depopulated and later destroyed. The causes remain disputed. The traditional Israeli account emphasises that the war was launched by the Arab side and that many Arabs left of their own accord or at their leaders' urging; Palestinian historians, and Israeli historians working from opened archives since the 1980s, have documented expulsions and massacres such as those at Deir Yassin and Lydda, and many scholars describe what happened as ethnic cleansing, a characterisation others reject. Israel did not allow the refugees to return, and their descendants now number in the millions.

Israel's first years were dominated by mass immigration. Under the Law of Return of 1950 any Jew could settle, and Holocaust survivors from Europe and Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, many of whom left or were driven out amid hostility after 1948, doubled the Jewish population within three years. Nearly the entire Jewish communities of Iraq and Yemen moved to Israel, and later large numbers came from Morocco. Immigrants lived for years in tent camps and transit towns, and tensions between European and Middle Eastern Jews shaped Israeli politics for decades. About 160,000 Arabs who remained became Israeli citizens but lived under military rule until 1966. The Labour movement of Ben-Gurion dominated government, building a strong army, a welfare state and kibbutz agriculture.

Conflict with neighbours continued. In 1956, in secret coordination with Britain and France, Israel invaded the Sinai after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and blockaded Israeli shipping, withdrawing in 1957 under American and Soviet pressure. The trial in Jerusalem of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1961 confronted a new generation with the Holocaust.

In May 1967 Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran. On 5 June Israel launched a pre-emptive strike, and in six days it took Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel extended its law to an enlarged East Jerusalem, later declaring the united city its capital in 1980, and applied its law to the Golan in 1981; most states recognise neither move. UN Security Council Resolution 242 set out the principle of land for peace. Israel began building settlements in the occupied territories, which most of the international community regards as illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, a view Israel disputes, citing historical and security claims and arguing that the territories were not under any recognised sovereign.

On 6 October 1973, the holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack. Israel recovered and pushed into Egyptian and Syrian territory, but some 2,600 Israeli soldiers died, and the shock helped end Labour's dominance. In 1977 Menachem Begin of the right-wing Likud became prime minister, and the same year Egypt's president Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem. The Camp David Accords of 1978 led to a peace treaty in March 1979, the first between Israel and an Arab state, and Israel returned all of Sinai by 1982. In the Cold War, the United States became Israel's principal ally.

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO left Beirut, but the massacre of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Christian militiamen in an area under Israeli control caused an outcry, and an Israeli inquiry held defence minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible. Israel kept a zone in southern Lebanon, fighting the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, until 2000. In December 1987 the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the occupation, broke out in Gaza and the West Bank. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, nearly a million immigrants arrived from the former Soviet states in the 1990s, transforming Israel's economy and society.

Under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, recognising each other and creating a Palestinian Authority with limited self-rule, and Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan in October 1994. Opposition was fierce on both sides: Hamas carried out suicide bombings, and on 4 November 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish Israeli extremist. Negotiations at Camp David in 2000 failed, with each side blaming the other, and the Second Intifada that began in September 2000 brought suicide bombings in Israeli cities and large military operations in Palestinian towns; some 1,000 Israelis and over 3,000 Palestinians were killed. Israel built a separation barrier in and around the West Bank, which it says stopped attacks and which Palestinians and the International Court of Justice, in a 2004 advisory opinion, considered unlawful where it ran inside occupied territory.

In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew all Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip, but after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel, with Egypt, imposed a blockade that it defends as necessary for security and that critics call collective punishment. Wars with Hezbollah in 2006 and with Hamas and other groups in Gaza in 2008 and 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 killed far more Palestinians than Israelis, while rockets from Gaza struck Israeli towns. In the West Bank, the settler population kept growing, to more than 700,000 including East Jerusalem in recent estimates. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion that the occupation is unlawful and that settlement activity must cease; Israel rejected it.

Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, prime minister from 1996 to 1999, returned in 2009 and governed until 2021, presiding over a booming technology economy. In 2020 the Abraham Accords normalised relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by Morocco and Sudan, without resolving the Palestinian question. Five elections between 2019 and 2022 reflected deep political division, and after a brief government under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Netanyahu returned at the end of 2022 at the head of a coalition with religious and far-right parties. Its plan to curb the powers of the judiciary provoked some of the largest protests in Israel's history through 2023.

On 7 October 2023 Hamas and allied groups attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,195 people, most of them civilians, and taking 251 hostages, the deadliest day in Israel's history and the worst single day for Jews since the Holocaust. Israel launched an air campaign and, from 27 October, a ground invasion of Gaza with the declared aims of destroying Hamas and returning the hostages. The war became by far the deadliest for Palestinians in the history of the conflict: according to Gaza's health authorities, over 74,000 Palestinians had been killed by 2026, nearly all of the Strip's 2.3 million people were displaced, most of its buildings were destroyed, and parts of Gaza suffered famine. South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a UN commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide, and in November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for the Hamas commander Mohammed Deif. Israel rejects the genocide charge and the court's jurisdiction, says it acts in self-defence against an enemy that hides among civilians, and calls the allegations antisemitic.

The war spread across the region. Israel fought Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2024, exchanged direct strikes with Iran in 2024, and in June 2025 bombed Iran's nuclear and military sites in the Twelve-Day War, during which Iranian missiles killed dozens of Israeli civilians. After short truces in November 2023 and early 2025, a ceasefire under an American peace plan took effect on 10 October 2025, and on 13 October the last 20 living hostages were released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. In September 2025 the United Kingdom, France and Canada were among the states that recognised Palestine, bringing the total to 157 of the 193 UN members. From 28 February 2026 Israel and the United States waged a new war on Iran, and Israeli forces again occupied part of southern Lebanon. In Gaza, talks on Hamas's disarmament and Israel's withdrawal stalled, Israeli strikes continued, and by October 2026 Israeli forces controlled about two-thirds of the Strip. Israel's parliament was dissolved in July 2026, and a general election was scheduled for 27 October 2026, with Netanyahu seeking another term.