The Modern State of Israel

Why this Chapter exists

A state again, after nearly two thousand years.

For nearly two thousand years, the Jews had no state of their own. In 1948 they had one again. The State of Israel was founded in the middle of a war. It began as a civil war after the United Nations voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine, and the day after the Declaration the armies of Arab states invaded. In that war more than half a million Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes. In its first years the new state took in Holocaust survivors from Europe and hundreds of thousands of Jews who left or were forced out of the Middle East and North Africa. By 1960 its Jewish population had nearly tripled.

Israel covers about 22,000 square kilometers (about 8,500 square miles), slightly smaller than New Jersey. That figure, from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, includes East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel borders Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. It has a long coast on the Mediterranean Sea and, at Eilat, a short one on the Gulf of Aqaba, an arm of the Red Sea. Jerusalem is the seat of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), the government, and the Supreme Court, and Tel Aviv is the country’s economic center. About 10.3 million people live in Israel.

Modern Zionism, 1880s–1940s

Modern Zionism, from the 1880s to the 1940s.

Modern Zionism is the movement that produced the modern State. It emerged in the late nineteenth century from several sources. The deep background is the long Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel, covered in the Continuous Presence Chapter. Modern Zionism was the specific political movement that turned that relationship into a project for a modern Jewish state. It grew through waves of immigration and a few decisive events.

• The First Aliyah, from the Hebrew for “ascent,” the term for a wave of Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel (1882–1903). About 25,000 Jewish immigrants came. Most came from the Russian Empire after the pogroms of 1881–82, waves of mob attacks on Jewish communities (covered in Unit 3, The Evolution of Antisemitism). A smaller number came from Yemen. They founded the first Zionist agricultural settlements, among them Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov, and Rosh Pinah.
• Theodor Herzl and political Zionism (1896–1904). The Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. It made the case for a modern Jewish state as the answer to European antisemitism, which he had seen up close as a journalist in Paris and Vienna. In Paris he covered the Dreyfus Affair, the 1894 case in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason during an antisemitic public frenzy. In August 1897 he organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. It built the movement’s structures: the Zionist Organization and the Congress itself. The Jewish National Fund followed at the Fifth Congress in 1901. Herzl died in 1904 at 44 and is buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, named for him.
• The Second Aliyah (1904–1914). About 35,000 to 40,000 more immigrants, mostly from the Russian Empire. They built the Zionist labor movement and founded the first kibbutz (collective farming community), Degania, in 1909–10. Among them were the figures who would lead the Yishuv, the Jewish community in the Land, for decades: David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.
• The Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917). British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s letter to Lord Walter Rothschild expressing British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The same sentence conditioned that support on “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” and on the rights of Jews elsewhere. Those communities, Muslim and Christian Arabs, were then the large majority of the population. The letter named their civil and religious rights but not their political or national rights. Issued during the First World War, it became the basis for the terms of the later British Mandate.
• The Third through Fifth Aliyot (1919–1939). The Third Aliyah (1919–1923) came from Russia and Eastern Europe after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Fourth (1924–1929) mostly from Poland. The Fifth (1929–1939) drew its largest numbers from Poland, with a large German influx after the Nazi takeover of 1933. The Fifth Aliyah brought a wave of physicians, scientists, academics, and cultural figures fleeing Nazi Germany.

The scholarship on modern Zionism is extensive. It runs from Walter Laqueur’s A History of Zionism (1972) and Shlomo Avineri’s The Making of Modern Zionism (1981) to Anita Shapira’s Israel: A History (2012) and Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). That scholarship documents a movement of many views. There were labor Zionists in Ben-Gurion’s tradition, nationalist Revisionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and religious Zionists. A small group, Brit Shalom, hoped for one state shared by Jews and Arabs.

Historians also disagree over whether Zionism belongs among the colonial movements of its time. Some, among them Rashid Khalidi, analyze it as settler colonialism. Others point to features that set it apart from European colonial projects: no sponsoring mother country, a people with long historical ties to the land, and founders who were often refugees. Derek Penslar argues that Zionism combined colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial elements rather than fitting a single model.

The British Mandate

British rule, 1920–1948, between the Ottomans and the State.

British forces took the territory from the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. In 1920 British civil administration replaced military occupation. In 1922 the League of Nations, the international body that came before the United Nations, formally confirmed the British Mandate for Palestine, a territory Britain was charged to govern. The Mandate was the framework within which the State eventually emerged. What the name Palestine and the word Palestinian meant under the Mandate is told in The Land of Israel.

• The wartime promises. During the First World War, Britain made commitments that conflicted with one another. In letters of 1915 and 1916, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, wrote to Hussein ibn Ali, the emir (prince) of Mecca. He offered British support for an independent Arab state in return for Arab help against the Ottomans. Hussein launched an Arab revolt against the Ottomans in June 1916. The letters were ambiguous, and they have remained in dispute, above all over Palestine. In May 1916 Britain and France secretly agreed, in the Sykes–Picot Agreement, to divide Ottoman Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into French and British areas. Palestine was to be under an international regime. The Balfour Declaration followed in 1917 (above). In January 1919 Hussein’s son, Emir Faisal, and Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who later became Israel’s first president, signed an agreement on Arab–Jewish cooperation in London. Faisal wrote in a condition: he would be bound only if the Arabs won the independence he had asked for. That independence was not granted. In April 1920 the Allied conference at San Remo placed Syria under a French mandate and awarded the Palestine Mandate to Britain, confirming the Balfour Declaration.
• Transjordan. The Mandate also covered the land east of the Jordan River. In 1921 Britain made Emir (prince) Abdullah its ruler, and in 1922 Transjordan was excluded from the provisions for a Jewish national home. It became fully independent in 1946 and took the name the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1949. The 1947 partition plan (below) divided only the land west of the river.
• Demographic growth. The Jewish population of the Land grew from about 60,000 in 1918 to about 650,000 by May 1948. The growth came from the waves of immigration above, the German refugee Aliyah of the 1930s, and the post-1945 immigration of Holocaust survivors (much of it arriving despite British restrictions). The Arab population grew as well. The UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) estimated the population at the end of 1946 at about 1,203,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews. Counting only the settled population, as UNSCOP did, Jews had made up about 13 percent of the total in 1922 and about 33 percent by 1946. The 1922 census itself, which added an estimate of the Bedouin, put the Jewish share at 11 percent.
• Institutions. The Yishuv built the institutions of a state-in-waiting. They included the Jewish Agency, chaired by David Ben-Gurion from 1935, and the Histadrut, a federation of trade unions founded in 1920. They also included the Haganah, a self-defense force founded in 1920 that later became the basis of the Israel Defense Forces, and the Va’ad Leumi, a national council.
• Contested questions. The Mandate was contested on three fronts. The first ran between the Jewish community and the Arab population. Palestinian Arabs, who sought political self-rule, opposed the Mandate and the Jewish immigration it allowed. In one week of August 1929, Arab mobs attacked Jews across the country, and by the count of the British commission of inquiry 133 Jews were killed. Officials also recorded 116 Arab deaths, many of them caused by police and troops putting down the riots. In the Hebron massacre, rioters killed 67 Jews, most of them on August 24. Many of the survivors had been hidden by Arab neighbors. All of them were evacuated, and after a brief return the Jewish community of Hebron, many centuries old, was gone by 1936. That record is told in The Terror Record.
  
  The second front ran between the British and the Arab population, and it was fought most sharply in the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939. In July 1937 a British inquiry, the Peel Commission, judged the Mandate unworkable and first proposed dividing the country into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Britain dropped the plan in 1938.
  
  The third front ran between the British administration and the Jewish community, above all over immigration. From 1944 the Irgun and Lehi, two Jewish underground groups, turned to armed attacks on British rule, over the strong opposition of Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist leaders. On July 22, 1946, the Irgun blew up a wing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which held British government and military offices. The bombing killed 91 people, British, Arab, and Jewish.
• The 1939 White Paper. The British policy statement of May 1939 limited Jewish immigration to about 75,000 over five years and gave the High Commissioner power to prohibit and regulate land transfers. It also set the goal of an independent Palestine state within ten years. The limit closed much of a main route of escape for Jews fleeing Nazi rule, on the eve of the Second World War.
• After the war. Britain kept its limits on Jewish immigration after 1945, while Holocaust survivors waited in displaced persons camps in Europe. Ships carrying survivors tried to reach the coast anyway, and the usual British response was to hold their passengers in camps on Cyprus. In July 1947 the British navy stopped the Exodus 1947, which carried about 4,500 Jewish displaced persons, and sent them back to Europe on three prison ships. Reporters followed the ships across that summer. The story is told in the Liberation and Displaced Persons Chapter.

The 1947 Partition Plan

The UN vote of November 29, 1947.

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, the Partition Plan for Palestine. It recommended dividing the Mandate territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration. The vote was 33 in favor, 13 against, 10 abstentions.

The plan allotted about 56 percent of the territory to the Jewish state. By UNSCOP’s estimate for the borders it proposed, the Jewish state would have held about 498,000 Jews and 407,000 Arabs and others, plus about 90,000 Bedouin, and the Arab state about 725,000 Arabs and others and 10,000 Jews. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. The Arab Higher Committee, the leading body of the Palestinian Arab national movement, and the states of the Arab League rejected it. Arab leaders considered it an injustice to the Arab majority. In the Arab case as UNSCOP summarized it, the Mandate itself had violated “the principle and right of national self-determination.”

Anti-Jewish violence followed at once beyond the Mandate. Within days of the vote, rioters in Aleppo, Syria, damaged or destroyed about 150 Jewish buildings. They burned the synagogue that housed the Aleppo Codex, a thousand-year-old manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. In the British colony of Aden, rioting killed at least 82 Jews (both told in The Departure from MENA).

Within the Mandate itself, fighting began the morning after the vote, when Arab gunmen attacked two Jewish buses near Fajja and killed seven passengers. It grew into a civil war between the two communities that lasted until the British withdrawal in May 1948, with massacres on both sides. On April 9, 1948, fighters of the Irgun and Lehi attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem and killed about 100 of its people. The Haganah’s Jerusalem commander, David Shaltiel, had approved the attack in writing, on condition that the attackers could hold the village. Four days later, Arab forces attacked a convoy bound for Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital and killed 78 Jews, among them the hospital’s director, Chaim Yassky, doctors, nurses, and the Haganah men guarding the convoy.

May 14, 1948

May 14, 1948, the founding.

The British Mandate was set to expire at midnight on May 14, 1948. That afternoon at 4:00 p.m., hours before it expired, David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum (now Independence Hall). He read it on behalf of the Jewish People’s Council.

The Declaration is the founding document of the State. Eretz-Israel is Hebrew for the Land of Israel. Its published English text reads in part:

“ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books…”

“WE … HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.”

The same Declaration set out how the new state would treat its people and its neighbors.

Thirty-seven members of the People’s Council signed, among them two women. One of them was Golda Meir. Born in Kyiv in 1898, she carried a childhood memory of her father boarding up the doorway against an expected pogrom, a memory she recorded in her autobiography. Her family emigrated to Milwaukee in 1906. She moved to British Mandate Palestine in 1921, and in 1969 she became Israel’s first, and so far only, woman Prime Minister, one of the first women to lead any modern state. She led the country through the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In January 1948 she toured the United States asking American Jews for money for arms, and by most accounts she raised about $50 million. Days before independence she crossed into Transjordan, disguised as an Arab woman, to meet King Abdullah. She was Israel’s first minister to the Soviet Union, where, she later recalled, a crowd of close to 50,000 Jews filled the street outside the Moscow synagogue on Rosh Hashanah in 1948. As minister of labor (1949–1956) she oversaw housing and work for the new immigrants. As foreign minister (1956–1966) she built ties with newly independent African states. She resigned in April 1974, after the first report of the inquiry into the war, and died in 1978. Her own words on Israel’s hardest choices are quoted below, in In their own words. (Golda Meir, My Life, 1975.)

The war and the armistice

The war, the armistice, and the contested record.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War grew out of the civil war that followed the November 1947 vote. On May 15, the day after the Declaration, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan (later Jordan), Syria, and Iraq, with Lebanon playing a smaller part, invaded the former Mandate territory. Israelis remember the war as the War of Independence. Palestinians remember it as al-Nakba (“the Catastrophe”). The war ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and Egypt (February 24), Lebanon (March 23), Jordan (April 3), and Syria (July 20). The armistice lines, the “Green Line,” became Israel’s working borders until the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel captured territory beyond them. The one break came in 1956. After Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, Israel invaded the Sinai on October 29, 1956, in secret coordination with Britain and France. Under American and UN pressure, Israel withdrew by March 1957, and UN peacekeepers took up positions on the border. The Arab state proposed in the partition plan was never established. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem and annexed them in 1950, a step few states recognized, and Egypt held the Gaza Strip. In May 1948 Jordan’s army, the Arab Legion, took the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the ancient walled center of the city. It expelled the Quarter’s Jewish residents and destroyed the Hurva Synagogue. Israel’s Foreign Ministry holds that Jordan demolished most of the rest of the Quarter and its synagogues in the years that followed. The armistice with Jordan promised “free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives.” In practice, from 1948 to 1967 Israelis could not reach the Western Wall or the Temple Mount above it. The Western Wall is one of the walls that supported the ancient Temple Mount platform, and the holiest place where Jews pray.

The war changed the map and the region in several lasting ways. Israel emerged from it holding about 77 percent of the former Mandate territory, against the 56 percent the plan had allotted to the Jewish state. Roughly 1 percent of each population was killed: between 5,700 and 6,400 Jews and between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinian Arabs. Historians’ estimates of how many Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes differ. Efraim Karsh puts the number at 583,000 to 609,000, Benny Morris at 600,000 to 760,000, and Rashid Khalidi at “probably over 750,000.” Some 250,000 to 300,000 had fled or been expelled before the Arab armies entered on May 15, 1948. The counts made at the time ran wider, from Israel’s official figure of about 520,000 to the Arab governments’ 900,000 or more. The UN’s Economic Survey Mission put it at 726,000 in December 1949. Scholars count roughly 370 to more than 400 Arab towns and villages emptied in the war, depending on how they are counted. Benny Morris counts 369, and Walid Khalidi 418. The displacement is the core of the Palestinian refugee question.

In December 1948, UN General Assembly Resolution 194 declared 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.” It called for compensation for those choosing not to return. Most refugees did not return.

The causes differed from place to place. The best-documented expulsions came at Lydda and Ramle, two Arab towns near Tel Aviv, in July 1948. In his memoir, parts of which were censored and reported in 1979, Yitzhak Rabin, then an operations officer, recalled Ben-Gurion signaling “Drive them out,” and his command then ordered the expulsion. Yigal Allon, the operation’s commander, disputed that account. Many people fled the fighting itself. Benny Morris documents orders from the Arab Higher Committee and local Arab committees to send women, children, and the elderly away, and in some cases to evacuate whole villages. Historians dispute how far Plan Dalet, the Haganah’s military plan of March 1948, aimed at expulsion.

How and why the displacement happened is the subject of a large and continuing scholarship. In Israel it is often called the “New Historians” debate, after Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, and others who used newly opened Israeli archives from the 1980s on. Morris challenged both the view that the refugees left voluntarily and the view that they were systematically expelled, documenting flight and expulsion together. Pappé’s book calls the events “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” Efraim Karsh disputes the New Historians’ use of the evidence. Rashid Khalidi and other Palestinian historians tell the story from the Palestinian side.

UN General Assembly Resolution 302 of December 8, 1949 created the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). UNRWA defines Palestine refugees as people whose normal residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who lost their homes and livelihoods in the 1948 conflict. The agency says it began work in 1950 serving about 750,000 refugees. Its own first report, in October 1950, said the ration lists it inherited from earlier relief agencies held more than 950,000 names. Those lists included dead people, duplicate ration cards, and needy people who were not refugees. UNRWA also registers the refugees’ descendants through the male line, citing the principle of family unity that it says applies to other long-term refugee situations. Critics dispute that comparison. By its own count the registered total stood at about 5.9 million in 2022. In Jordan, most registered refugees are also full citizens of the country. In the same years, Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) left their countries in large numbers, most of them for Israel. About 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of the Arab world between 1945 and 1972, and about 600,000 of them settled in Israel. That departure is told in full in the MENA Departure Chapter.

From defenselessness to defense

What an army meant.

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish communities almost never had a sovereign army of their own. Their safety depended on whoever ruled them: a charter that could be revoked, a protection tax that could be raised, a ruler whose mood could turn. In 1903, in Kishinev, a city in the Russian Empire (today’s Chișinău, Moldova), a mob murdered 49 Jews over two days while the authorities stood by. The Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik was sent to document the pogrom. The poem he wrote afterward, “In the City of Slaughter,” turned its anger on the killers and also on the helplessness of their victims.

Jewish self-defense leagues formed across the Russian Empire after Kishinev. In Ottoman Palestine, the watchmen of Hashomer began guarding Jewish farming settlements in 1909. The Haganah, the Yishuv’s self-defense organization, was founded in 1920, after the Nebi Musa riots against Jews in Jerusalem that April (documented in The Terror Record). Some 5,000 volunteers of the Jewish Brigade fought in the British Army in the Second World War. On May 26, 1948, twelve days after independence, the provisional government ordered the creation of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was to be a single army under civilian government that would absorb the militias that came before it.

In June 1948, during the war’s first UN truce, a ship called the Altalena arrived carrying arms for the Irgun. The Irgun was a Jewish underground militia that had fought the British outside the Haganah’s command. Ben-Gurion ordered the army to take the weapons. When the Irgun refused, the army shelled the ship off the Tel Aviv shore. Nineteen men died in the affair, sixteen of them Irgun members and three IDF soldiers. By the end of 1948 the Irgun had disbanded, and its veterans had founded a political party, Herut.

The IDF is a conscript army, and military service is part of the life of most Israeli Jewish families. For the Jews of the new state, protection no longer depended on a foreign ruler, as it had through the history documented in Units 3 and 4. The historian Anita Shapira traces the Zionist movement’s path from reliance on peaceful settlement to the use of armed force in Land and Power. (The IDF was established by Ordinance No. 4 of May 26, 1948; the Altalena record is held by the Israel State Archives.)

The army works under a written code and under the courts. On December 26, 1994, the IDF issued The Spirit of the IDF, an ethics code drafted by a committee chaired by the philosopher Asa Kasher. In the code’s published English text, the value of “purity of arms” holds that a soldier “will use force of arms only for the purpose of subduing the enemy to the necessary extent.” It adds that he will limit force “so as to prevent unnecessary harm to human life and limb, dignity and property.” Israel’s Supreme Court rules on security conduct, and has ruled against the state. In 1999 it held that the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, had no authority to “shake” a detainee or deprive him of sleep beyond what interrogation requires. In 2004 it voided most of the orders covering about forty kilometers of the West Bank security barrier, because their harm to Palestinian villagers was disproportionate. The army’s conduct in war is also examined by its own Military Advocate General, who decides whether reported incidents warrant a criminal investigation. In May 2016 the Israeli rights group B’Tselem stopped filing complaints with that system, calling it a “whitewash mechanism.” The army rejected the charge. (Hauser, Azure 2, 1997; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 29, 1994; the 1994 text as published by the Jewish Virtual Library; HCJ 5100/94, September 6, 1999; HCJ 2056/04, June 30, 2004; Israel Democracy Institute, February 11, 2015.)

The achievement and its costs

A population more than doubled in five years.

One task dominated the State’s first decade (1948–1958): absorbing refugee populations. Within about five years, the Jewish population of the founding year more than doubled. The newcomers did not all come for the same reasons. Many had nowhere else to go. Many had been driven out of countries where their families had lived for centuries. Others came by choice, and the Law of Return of 1950 promised every one of them citizenship. Each group’s story is told in its own Chapter.

• Holocaust survivors from Europe. Most could not go home. Their communities had been destroyed, their houses were often occupied by former neighbors, and some who returned met violence. In Kielce, Poland, on July 4, 1946, Polish soldiers, police, and townspeople, roused by a false accusation drawn from the old blood libel, killed 42 Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors. For many survivors, the new state was the first country that would take them in as citizens rather than as displaced persons. About 136,000 came from the displaced-persons camps, by the count of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and many others came directly from Europe (told in Liberation and the Displaced Persons). Some of the youngest came through Youth Aliyah, founded by Recha Freier in 1933 to bring Jewish children out of Nazi Germany and directed from Jerusalem by Henrietta Szold (1860–1945). Szold, born in Baltimore, had founded Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist organization, which paid for most of the work. Youth Aliyah brought about 5,000 teenagers before the war and about 15,000 more after it, most of them survivors, and it kept receiving children after 1948.
• Yemenite Jews (1949–1950). In December 1947, after the UN partition vote, a pogrom in Aden left scores of Jews dead, and inside Yemen the imams had long restricted Jewish life. From June 1949 to September 1950, Operation Magic Carpet flew about 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel from a camp in Aden. About 14,000 more came by other routes, nearly the entire community in all (MENA Departure Chapter). Yemenite Jews had been arriving in smaller waves since the 1880s.
• Iraqi Jews (1950–1952). After Iraq joined the war against Israel in 1948, its government made Zionism a crime and arrested hundreds of Jews. In September 1948 it publicly hanged Shafiq Ades, one of the wealthiest Jews of Basra. In March 1950 a new law let Jews leave if they gave up their Iraqi citizenship, and most of the community registered to go. Their property was later frozen. Operation Ezra and Nehemiah flew roughly 120,000 to 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel, ending a community more than 2,500 years old (MENA Departure Chapter, The Jews of Iraq).
• Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, and Syrian Jews across the 1950s and 1960s, each community for its own reasons. In Libya, pogroms in Tripoli in 1945 and 1948 drove most of the community to Israel by 1951. In Egypt, the government interned Jews and froze bank accounts in 1948, and after the 1956 Suez war it stripped citizenship and forced out some 25,000 to 30,000 more. In Syria, a pogrom in Aleppo in December 1947 was followed by laws that made leaving hard. Morocco’s community, the largest of all, left more slowly, under a monarchy that mostly protected it, for Israel and for France. In all, about 600,000 Jews from Arab countries arrived in Israel between 1948 and 1972. By the early 1960s, roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population had roots in the Middle East and North Africa. The balance has shifted since, above all with the arrival of more than 900,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 2001, by the count of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. The categories themselves have blurred as a growing share of Israeli Jews are Israeli-born children of Israeli-born parents.

The absorption took place under severe economic strain. With limited resources, the new state struggled to provide housing, jobs, schooling, and health care. Many immigrants, a large share of them from MENA countries, lived in transit camps, the ma’abarot (Hebrew for “transit camps”), in some cases for years. Most had moved out by the mid-1950s, and the last camps closed by the early 1960s. The record of that period includes the disparities between how European-origin (Ashkenazi) and Middle Eastern and North African (Mizrahi) immigrants were absorbed. That record has been a major theme of later Israeli scholarship (Tom Segev’s 1949: The First Israelis, Yehouda Shenhav, Ella Shohat), and of Israeli political and cultural life since.

In 1961 the survivors’ own story entered Israeli public life at the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had organized the deportations to the killing centers. More than 100 witnesses testified, most of them survivors, and the sessions were broadcast on Israeli radio. For many Israelis it was the first time they had heard survivors speak at length in public (told in The Postwar Trials).

The people

Building a country together.

Much of the country was built by hand, by people who chose to live and work together. The first kibbutz grew from a small group of pioneers who settled near the Sea of Galilee in 1909 and 1910, at Degania. A kibbutz is “a voluntary collective community, mainly agricultural, in which there is no private wealth.” Its members held their property in common and shared the work. At their height in 1947, kibbutz members were about 7 percent of the Jewish population. In the state’s early decades they held a far larger share of army officer posts and Knesset seats than their numbers alone would suggest. The moshav took a different path. At Nahalal, founded in the Jezreel Valley in 1921, families farmed their own plots but bought and sold together. After an economic crisis in the 1980s, most kibbutzim introduced pay that differs by job, along with private homes. By 2014 about seven in ten had become “renewed” kibbutzim. Today about 200,000 people live on 266 kibbutzim, about 2 percent of Israelis.

The new state also remade the land and taught its newcomers a common language. In 1949 the first ulpan opened in an immigrant camp in Jerusalem, a school where adults studied Hebrew intensively. Draining the Hula swamp in the north in the 1950s opened farmland, but it damaged water quality and wildlife, and in the 1990s part of the valley was flooded again. In June 1964 the National Water Carrier began bringing water from the Sea of Galilee south toward the center of the country. Daily life was hard. In April 1949 the government began rationing food, clothing, and other essentials, a period remembered as the tzena (austerity), which eased from 1952 and formally ended in 1959. In the 1950s the state built development towns on the edges of the country, largely for new immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. Many struggled with few jobs and weak schools, and historians still debate whether the placement was deliberate.

About 156,000 Arabs remained within Israel’s lines after the 1948 war and became citizens. In April 1948, Haifa’s Jewish leaders, among them Mayor Shabtai Levy, urged the city’s Arab residents to stay. Most left, and historians still debate why. Benny Morris points to the decision of the local Arab leadership, and the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi to Haganah attacks and British conduct. Three Arab members sat in the first Knesset in 1949: Seif el-Din el-Zoubi, Amin-Salim Jarjora, and Tawfik Toubi.

Arab citizens have helped build the country’s institutions and services. In 2023 they were about a quarter of Israel’s physicians, nurses, and dentists, and about half of its pharmacists, according to a study in the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research. In 2010 they had been 8 percent of its physicians. Abdel Rahman Zuabi became the first Arab justice on the Supreme Court in 1999, for a nine-month term. Salim Joubran held the first permanent Arab seat from 2004, and in 2022 Khaled Kabub became the first Muslim justice with a permanent seat. Salah Tarif, a Druze, became the first non-Jewish cabinet minister in 2001, and Raleb Majadele the first Muslim Arab minister in 2007. Arab citizens describe themselves in different ways. In a 2019 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, 38 percent named “Arab” as their primary identity, 36 percent their religion, 13 percent “Palestinian,” and about 10 percent “Israeli.”

The structure of the State

How the State is governed.

• Parliamentary democracy. Israel is a parliamentary democracy. The Knesset, its parliament, has a single chamber of 120 members, elected by proportional representation. Voters choose a party list, not a single local candidate, and the whole country votes as one district. A party must clear a 3.25 percent threshold to enter the Knesset at all. The Prime Minister is head of government, and the President is head of state with mostly ceremonial duties.
• Government by coalition. No single party has ever won an outright majority of the 120 seats, so every Israeli government has been a coalition of several parties. Those parties span a wide range: secular and religious, left and right, Jewish-majority and Arab-majority. In 2021, for the first time, an independent Arab party (Ra’am) joined a governing coalition. Because coalitions must be assembled and held together, small parties can carry weight beyond their size, and governments can fall when a coalition breaks apart.
• No single constitution. Israel has no one written constitution. Its constitutional rules come from four sources. The first is the Basic Laws, foundational laws passed from 1958 on, after a 1950 decision to build the constitution one chapter at a time. The others are the Declaration of Independence, Supreme Court decisions, and parliamentary tradition.
• The Supreme Court, which sits as both the highest court of appeal and the High Court of Justice.
• The Israel Defense Forces, whose founding is told above, in From Defenselessness to Defense. Druze men have been drafted since 1956. Muslim and Christian Arab citizens are not conscripted, though voluntary service is open to them. In 2024 the Supreme Court ruled that, with no law in force exempting them, the state must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students. The question remains contested.
• The religious establishment: the Chief Rabbinate (with separate Ashkenazi and Sephardic Chief Rabbis) and the rabbinic courts for personal-status matters such as marriage and divorce.
• How a person becomes a citizen. There are several paths. The Law of Return (1950, extended in 1970) gives any Jew, and their children, grandchildren, and spouses, the right to immigrate and receive citizenship. People who are not eligible under the Law of Return can become citizens by naturalization under the Citizenship Law (1952). It sets requirements such as a period of residence, some knowledge of Hebrew, and renunciation of a previous nationality where required. A third path is historical: when the State was founded, Arab residents who remained within its 1949 borders became eligible for citizenship under that same 1952 law. Its registration and residence conditions, however, left many stateless until amendments closed the gap over the following decades. Citizenship also passes from parent to child by birth.
• The citizenry. About 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are Arab (mostly Muslim, with Christian and Druze communities): the country’s largest minority. As citizens they vote and run in national and local elections. Arab-majority parties sit in the Knesset, and Arab citizens have served as government ministers, ambassadors, mayors, and judges, including on the Supreme Court. From the 1948 war until December 1966, most Arab citizens lived under a military government, which required permits to travel outside their home areas. The record also documents inequality between Jewish and Arab citizens, in income, in municipal budgets, and in the allocation of land and building permits. There is also the 2018 Nation-State Basic Law, which remains contested. It named Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people and changed Arabic from an official language to one with “special status.”
• Three events Arab citizens remember. On October 29, 1956, Border Police killed residents of the village of Kafr Qasim as they returned from the fields, unaware of a curfew. The court counted 43 dead, and the village commemorates 49. In 1958 a military court led by Judge Binyamin Halevy convicted eight officers and ruled that a soldier must refuse a “manifestly illegal” order, one over which illegality flies “like a black flag.” On March 30, 1976, protests and a general strike against the state’s taking of Arab-owned land in the Galilee ended with six Arab citizens killed. Arab citizens mark the date as Land Day. In October 2000, as the Second Intifada (a Palestinian uprising, from the Arabic for “shaking off”) began, police killed 12 Arab citizens during protests inside Israel. A state commission of inquiry, the Or Commission, found in 2003 that the violence grew out of the government’s long-term discrimination against and neglect of Arab citizens. It also cited statements by Arab leaders as a provoking factor.
• Turning points in politics. For its first three decades Israel was led by Labor coalitions, beginning with David Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party. In May 1977 the Likud party, led by Menachem Begin, won the election and formed the first government not led by Labor. In 1992 the Knesset passed two Basic Laws, one protecting human dignity and liberty and one protecting freedom of occupation. In 1995, in the United Mizrahi Bank case, the Supreme Court ruled that Basic Laws outrank ordinary laws, so the court may strike down laws that conflict with them. Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister in 1996–99, 2009–21, and from December 2022, is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Israelis voted in five Knesset elections between April 2019 and November 2022. In July 2023 his coalition passed an amendment that barred the courts from reviewing government decisions as “unreasonable,” part of a wider plan to change the judiciary. It set off strikes and protests, joined by thousands of army reservists. On January 1, 2024, the Supreme Court struck the amendment down, eight justices to seven. In the election of October 27, 2026, Arab parties won a record 19 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. On November 8, President Isaac Herzog gave Gadi Eisenkot 28 days to form a government.

The population over time

The population across the decades.

• May 1948: about 650,000 Jewish residents at the founding, with about 156,000 Arabs remaining within the armistice lines after the war’s displacement (documented above).
• 1960: about 1.9 million Jewish residents.
• 1980: about 3.3 million.
• 2000: about 4.9 million Jewish residents and about 1.2 million Arab residents.
• September 2026: about 10.3 million residents in all. About 7.8 million are counted as Jews and “others” (non-Arab Christians, members of other religions, and people not classified by religion). About 2.2 million are Arabs (Muslims, Arab Christians, and Druze), and about 304,000 are foreigners living in Israel.

The Jewish citizenry includes Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Yemenite, Persian, Ethiopian, and Soviet communities. The Arab Israeli citizenry includes Muslim, Christian, and Druze communities, alongside smaller Circassian, Armenian, and other historical minorities.

About 154,000 Druze live in Israel and the Golan Heights. Druze men of the Galilee and Mount Carmel are drafted into the army, while most Druze in the Golan Heights declined Israeli citizenship and kept their Syrian citizenship. About 184,000 Christians live in Israel, about 1.9 percent of the population, and most of them are Arab. Some 300,000 Bedouin live in the Negev desert in the south. By one estimate of the Israel Democracy Institute, about 120,000 of them live in 35 villages the state does not recognize, though estimates vary widely.

Immigration has reshaped the country more than once. In 1974 the U.S. Congress passed the Jackson–Vanik amendment, which tied trade with the Soviet Union to freedom of emigration. It was passed “in response to restrictions on emigration from the Soviet Union that disproportionately affected Jews.” After the Soviet Union opened emigration, Israel took in about one million immigrants in the 1990s, most of them from the former Soviet Union. The Soviet Jewry Chapter tells that story. Ethiopian Jews came in two airlifts. Operation Moses brought about 8,000 in 1984 and 1985, and Operation Solomon brought more than 14,300 in 36 hours on May 24 and 25, 1991. The Beta Israel Chapter tells theirs.

Cultural and intellectual life

Language, science, and the arts.

• Modern Hebrew. Reviving Hebrew as a spoken and written language was a central project of the modern Jewish national movement. The work ran from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, much of it through the work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922). Writers of modern Hebrew prose include S. Y. Agnon (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1966), Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Aharon Appelfeld. Modern Hebrew poetry runs from Hayim Nahman Bialik and Rachel Bluwstein to Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch.
• Sciences and medicine. Israeli research centers on the Weizmann Institute (1934), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1925), the Technion (1924), and Tel Aviv University. Israeli Nobel laureates in chemistry and economics include Ada Yonath (Chemistry, 2009), Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko (Chemistry, 2004), Dan Shechtman (Chemistry, 2011), Daniel Kahneman (Economics, 2002), and Robert Aumann (Economics, 2005).
• Visual arts and music. The arts run through the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Bezalel Academy (1906). The Israel Philharmonic was founded in 1936 as the Palestine Orchestra by the violinist Bronisław Huberman, to employ Jewish musicians fleeing Nazi Germany.
• Film and media. Israeli film has won growing international recognition over the past two decades (Joseph Cedar, Ari Folman, Samuel Maoz, Nadav Lapid), and Israeli television formats are distributed internationally.
• Arabic literature. Emile Habibi, an Arab citizen of Israel, won the Israel Prize for Arabic literature in 1992, two years after accepting a literary prize from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The economy

From runaway prices to high technology.

In the early 1980s Israel’s economy was in crisis. By December 1984, prices were rising at 445 percent a year, according to the Bank of Israel. In July 1985 the government adopted what the bank called “a comprehensive and balanced stabilization program,” and by 1986 inflation had slowed to about 20 percent. In September 2010 Israel joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of developed economies, as its 33rd member.

Israel now draws much of its household and industrial water from desalination plants on the Mediterranean, which turn seawater into fresh water. The government expects seven plants to supply 85 to 90 percent of that water once the last one opens. Offshore, the Tamar natural gas field began producing in 2013 and the larger Leviathan field in December 2019. Israel now exports gas to Egypt and Jordan.

In 2025 the technology sector produced 18.3 percent of Israel’s economic output and about 58 percent of its exports, worth $85 billion, according to the Israel Innovation Authority, a government agency. About 400,000 people, roughly 11 percent of the workforce, worked in it.

From 1967 to today

The main events since 1967.

• June 5–10, 1967. The Six-Day War. In May 1967, Egypt demanded that the UN Emergency Force, stationed on its border with Israel since the 1956 war, withdraw. After the UN agreed to withdraw the force, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced on May 22 that he would close the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s sea route to the Red Sea. He also sent large numbers of troops into the Sinai. Jordan joined the Arab coalition. Early on June 5, Israel launched what Britannica calls a “preemptive” air assault that destroyed most of Egypt’s air force on the ground. Israel had sent word to King Hussein of Jordan, through the UN, that it would take no action against Jordan unless Jordan started fighting. That morning Jordan’s air force took off against Israel, and Jordan entered the war. In six days Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. More than one million Palestinians came under Israeli rule.
• September 1, 1967. Khartoum. Arab leaders meeting in the Sudanese capital resolved on “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.”
• November 22, 1967. Resolution 242. The UN Security Council called for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It also affirmed the right of every state in the area “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” The English text says “territories,” not “the territories.” Israel has read that as not requiring withdrawal from all the land taken in 1967, and Arab states have read it as requiring withdrawal from all of it. The resolution also called for “a just settlement of the refugee problem.”
• October 6, 1973. The Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israeli forces in the Sinai and on the Golan Heights on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Israel recovered to win militarily, at heavy cost, and the war opened the diplomacy that led to the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. On October 22, Security Council Resolution 338 called for a cease-fire and for carrying out Resolution 242 “in all of its parts.”
• 1974–1977. After the war. In April 1974, after the first report of a commission of inquiry into the war, headed by Supreme Court President Shimon Agranat, Golda Meir’s government resigned. On the evening of November 19, 1977, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat landed in Israel. The next day he spoke to the Knesset in Jerusalem, opening the talks that led to Camp David.

  I have come to you so that together we might build a durable peace based on justice, to avoid the shedding of one single drop of blood from an Arab or an Israeli.

• September 17, 1978. The Camp David Accords. After thirteen days of talks at Camp David, the American presidential retreat in Maryland, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed two framework agreements at the White House, witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. One pointed toward a peace treaty, the other to a Palestinian “self-governing authority” in the West Bank and Gaza.

  

• March 26, 1979. Peace with Egypt. Israel and Egypt signed a treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab state, ending “the state of war between the Parties.” Israel undertook to withdraw from the Sinai within three years. It completed the withdrawal in April 1982 and evacuated the town of Yamit and other settlements despite widespread protest. The treaty has held since.
• June 6, 1982. The Lebanon war. On June 3, Palestinian gunmen shot Israel’s ambassador in London. They had been sent by Abu Nidal, a bitter enemy of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO. Israel held that its July 1981 cease-fire with the PLO, then based in Lebanon, covered any attack carried out on behalf of Palestinians anywhere. Israeli forces invaded Lebanon, and by September 1 the PLO had withdrawn from Beirut. On September 16–18, a Lebanese Christian militia, the Phalangists, killed hundreds of civilians, most of them Palestinians, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of Beirut. Israel’s own commission of inquiry, under Supreme Court President Yitzhak Kahan, found in February 1983 that the Phalangists bore direct responsibility. Israeli leaders who had let the militia into the camps bore “indirect responsibility,” because they should have foreseen the danger of a massacre. The commission also found that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon should “draw the appropriate personal conclusions.” Israeli forces held a strip of southern Lebanon until 2000.
• December 1987. The First Intifada. A Palestinian uprising (the word is Arabic for “shaking off”) began in Gaza: strikes, boycotts, and street attacks with stones and firebombs. It ran until the Oslo agreement of 1993. Hamas, an Islamist Palestinian movement founded during the uprising, issued its founding covenant in August 1988. Both intifadas, with figures from the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem, are documented in The Terror Record, which also quotes the charter.
• September 13, 1993. The Oslo Declaration of Principles. Israel and the PLO signed it at the White House. Before the signing, the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and renounced terrorism, and Israel accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. It aimed at “a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority” for the West Bank and Gaza, “for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.” The Palestinian Authority took over Gaza and Jericho in 1994, and Oslo II of 1995 divided the West Bank into three kinds of areas, described below in The territories after 1967.

  

  We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough.

• October 26, 1994. Peace with Jordan. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s Prime Minister Abdul Salam Majali signed the second peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.
• November 4, 1995. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. At the close of a Tel Aviv rally in support of the Oslo agreements, Rabin was shot dead by Yigal Amir, an Israeli Jew who opposed them.
• October 23, 1998. The Wye River Memorandum. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, elected in 1996, and Yasser Arafat signed a further interim agreement, setting out steps to carry out Oslo II, with President Bill Clinton as witness.
• May 2000. Withdrawal from Lebanon. Israel withdrew its forces from the strip of southern Lebanon it had held since 1982. On June 18, 2000, the UN Security Council confirmed that Israel had withdrawn “in accordance with resolution 425,” to a line the UN had marked, later called the Blue Line.
• July and September 2000. Camp David and the Second Intifada. A summit at Camp David between Prime Minister Ehud Barak, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, and President Bill Clinton ended without agreement. At the end of September the Second Intifada began. It followed a visit to the Temple Mount on September 28 by Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the opposition. The U.S.-led Mitchell Report later found that the visit did not cause the uprising but was “poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen,” and it faulted both sides for failing to restrain the violence that followed. The Second Intifada was a Palestinian uprising in which armed groups carried out roughly 140 suicide bombings aimed at buses, restaurants, and celebrations. It ran to 2005 and is documented, with B’Tselem’s counts of the dead on both sides, in The Terror Record.
• December 2000 and January 2001. The Clinton Parameters and Taba. In December, Clinton set out his own outline for a final agreement. A Palestinian state would hold “between 94–96 percent of the West Bank,” with land swaps for part of the rest. In Jerusalem, “Arab areas are Palestinian and Jewish ones are Israeli,” in the Old City as well. For refugees, there would be “no specific right of return to Israel itself,” though that “does not negate the aspiration of the Palestinian people to return to the area.” Talks at Taba, in Egypt, followed in January 2001. They ended without an agreement, though the two sides declared that they had “never been closer to reaching an agreement.”
• March 2002. The Arab Peace Initiative. At a summit in Beirut, the Arab League offered to “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict at an end” and “establish normal relations with Israel.” In return, Israel would withdraw “to the line of 4 June 1967,” accept an independent Palestinian state, and reach “a just and agreed solution” to the refugee problem under UN Resolution 194.
• 2003 and 2007. The Roadmap and Annapolis. In April 2003 the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations) issued a “performance-based and goal-driven roadmap” toward two states. At Annapolis, Maryland, in November 2007, Israel and the Palestinians agreed to launch negotiations and to “make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008.”
• August–September 2005. The Gaza disengagement. Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza, evacuating all 21 settlements there, and four more in the northern West Bank. The last soldiers left on September 12. Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary election of January 2006. In June 2007, after fighting with the rival Fatah movement, it seized control of Gaza. Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s party, is the largest faction in the PLO.
• July–August 2006. War in Lebanon. Hezbollah is an Iran-backed Lebanese Shia militia and political party that the United States designated a terrorist organization in 1997. On July 12, 2006, its fighters crossed into Israel, killed soldiers, and captured two, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Israel went to war in Lebanon. On August 11, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 called for “a full cessation of hostilities,” and the fighting stopped three days later, after 34 days. It also called for the area between the border and Lebanon’s Litani River to be free of armed forces other than the Lebanese army and the UN’s peacekeepers. Israel’s own inquiry, the Winograd Commission, later found “serious failings and shortcomings” in how its government and army had run the war.
• 2007–2021. Gaza under Hamas. On September 19, 2007, Israel’s security cabinet declared Gaza “hostile territory” and approved limits on goods, fuel, electricity, and the movement of people. Israel cited security, and Egypt kept its Rafah crossing with Gaza closed for long periods after 2014. Hamas and other armed groups fired rockets and mortars at Israeli towns again and again, and the UN Secretary-General condemned “the targeting of civilian population centres.” Four rounds of war followed. Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27, 2008, after a six-month cease-fire expired, and halted it on January 18, 2009. In November 2012, after rocket fire from Gaza and Israel’s killing of a Hamas military commander, eight days of fighting ended in a cease-fire brokered by Egypt. In June 2014 a Hamas cell kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Israel carried out raids and arrests there, and rockets were fired from Gaza. On July 2, Jewish extremists murdered a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem. After an Israeli air strike on a tunnel from Gaza into Israel on July 6, Hamas took the lead in the rocket attacks, and a seven-week war followed. From March 2018, Palestinians in Gaza held mass weekly protests along the border fence, which they called the “Great March of Return.” In May 2021, after tensions in Jerusalem during Ramadan and clashes at the al-Aqsa Mosque, on the Temple Mount, Hamas fired rockets toward Jerusalem, and eleven days of fighting followed.
• 2008. The Olmert proposal. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas an offer that was never officially published. By Olmert’s own account, Israel would have kept about 6.3 percent of the West Bank and given land equal to about 5.8 percent in exchange. The Old City would have come under international control, and Israel would have admitted a symbolic number of refugees. Abbas did not accept it. Condoleezza Rice, then the U.S. secretary of state, later wrote that he rejected it. Abbas said in a 2015 interview, “He showed me a map. He didn’t give me a map,” and asked how he could sign what he had not received. Olmert left office in 2009 without an agreement.
• September 15, 2020. The Abraham Accords. Israel normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with Morocco following in December, its first agreements with Arab states since the treaty with Jordan.
• October 7, 2023. Thousands of attackers led by Hamas broke through the Gaza border fence into southern Israel. They murdered about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took 251 hostages into Gaza. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum calls it the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust (told in full in The Terror Record). The next day Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel, as part of what it called its support for Hamas, and tens of thousands of people were displaced on both sides of the border. The war in Gaza that followed lasted two years. Gaza’s Health Ministry, which Hamas runs, counted tens of thousands of deaths in the Strip. How many of them were fighters has not been established. Before its ground operations, Israel ordered civilians out of combat areas. On October 13, 2023, its military told the residents of northern Gaza to move south. The warnings came by leaflets dropped from aircraft, text messages, and phone calls. It told the United Nations they should leave within 24 hours. In the months that followed, most of Gaza’s people had to leave their homes, many of them several times. A truce from November 24 to December 1, 2023, and a cease-fire that began on January 19, 2025, brought exchanges of hostages for Palestinian prisoners. In March 2025 Israel resumed its strikes, citing Hamas’s refusal to release hostages. A cease-fire took effect on October 10, 2025, and the last living hostages came home three days later. In November 2025 the UN Security Council, in Resolution 2803, endorsed a “Board of Peace” and a temporary international stabilization force for Gaza.

  How we know. The death toll in Gaza comes from two counts that measure different totals. Gaza’s Health Ministry, which Hamas runs, counts the people killed in the Strip since the war began and does not separate fighters from civilians. Israel’s military has announced its own, separate totals of fighters it says it killed. In February 2024 Israel’s embassy in the United Kingdom told the BBC that fighters were hard to tell from civilians. Many did not wear military uniforms, it said, and Hamas also had fighters aged 16 and 17. The sources for both counts are listed at the end of this Chapter.

• 2024. Lebanon and Iran. On April 1, 2024, a strike reported to be Israeli hit a building in Iran’s embassy compound in Damascus. On the night of April 13–14, Iran launched its first direct military attack on Israel from Iranian territory. Israel, with the United States, Jordan, France, and Britain, intercepted most of the drones and missiles. In Lebanon, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members exploded on September 17 and 18. In November, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he had approved the operation. Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on September 27, and its ground forces entered southern Lebanon on October 1. That same day Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel, and on October 26 Israel struck air-defense sites in Iran. A cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon, announced by the United States and France, took effect on November 27, 2024.
• June 2025. War with Iran. On June 13, 2025, Israel began a major military operation against Iran, striking nuclear and military sites, and Iran answered with waves of ballistic missiles. On June 22, local time, the United States struck three Iranian nuclear sites, at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The fighting stopped on June 24.
• February 2026. War with Iran again. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. The United States called its campaign Operation Epic Fury. On March 1, Iranian state media confirmed that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been killed. The White House announced in April that a cease-fire had taken hold. As of November 2026, the record of this conflict is still unfolding.

The issues the Oslo agreement left for the permanent-status talks, among them Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, and borders, remain unresolved.

The territories after 1967

Settlements, the Oslo map, and Jerusalem.

After the Six-Day War, Israel governed the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, and East Jerusalem. Within weeks it extended Jerusalem’s city limits and applied Israeli law to East Jerusalem. In December 1981 the Knesset applied Israeli law to the Golan Heights as well, and the UN Security Council unanimously declared the step “null and void and without international legal effect.” Israel did not annex the West Bank or Gaza. It returned the Sinai to Egypt under the 1979 peace treaty.

In those territories Israel began building civilian communities, known as settlements. The governments of the first decade, led by the Labor party, were guided by the Allon Plan, named for the minister Yigal Allon. Israel never formally adopted the plan, but for several years it shaped policy: Israel would keep the Jordan Valley and a corridor to Jerusalem and settle strategic areas. From 1974 a religious movement, Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”), built small communities near large Arab towns. When Menachem Begin’s Likud party won the 1977 election, there were fewer than 4,000 settlers. Begin’s government launched a large settlement program, overseen by Ariel Sharon. By 1992 the Jewish population in the territories was approaching 100,000. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted about 511,000 Israelis living in the West Bank at the end of 2024. That count leaves out East Jerusalem, where about 234,000 lived at the end of 2022. The Israeli group Peace Now compiles these figures from the bureau’s data.

Whether the settlements are legal is disputed. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 is the international treaty that protects civilians in war and under occupation. It says that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” In December 2016 the UN Security Council voted 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining, for Resolution 2334. It said the settlements have “no legal validity.” Israel’s government calls the West Bank “disputed” rather than occupied. It argues that because the West Bank and Gaza were “not under the legitimate and recognized sovereignty of any state” before 1967, the settlements do not violate the Convention. Israel’s own Supreme Court has taken a different starting point. In its 2004 ruling on the security barrier, it wrote that “since 1967, Israel has been holding the areas of Judea and Samaria,” the West Bank, “in belligerent occupation” (the legal term for holding land taken in war). It judged the barrier’s route under the law of occupation. The International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest court, advised in 2004 that the settlements were “established in breach of international law.” In 2024 it advised, by 11 votes to 4, that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied territories is “unlawful.” Its advisory opinions are not binding.

The Oslo agreements of the 1990s drew a new map inside the West Bank. Oslo II, signed in 1995, divided it into three kinds of areas. In Area A, the main Palestinian cities, the Palestinian Authority runs both civil affairs and security. In Area B, made up mostly of Palestinian towns and villages, the Palestinian Authority runs civil affairs and Israel controls security. Area C is the rest. It covers more than 60 percent of the West Bank, according to the UN, and there Israel keeps near-complete control, including over planning and building. The agreement said Area C would be “gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction,” apart from issues left for the final talks. Those talks never produced an agreement.

From 1948 to 1967, Jerusalem was a divided city. Israel, which held the western city, proclaimed Jerusalem its capital in December 1949, while Jordan held the east, including the Old City. In 1980 the Knesset passed a Basic Law declaring that “the complete and united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.” The UN Security Council, in Resolution 478, called the law “null and void” and asked countries with embassies in Jerusalem to withdraw them. Most Palestinians in East Jerusalem are permanent residents of Israel rather than citizens. They can apply for citizenship, and their residency can be revoked. On the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif, Israel left the Islamic religious trust, the Waqf, in charge of the compound after 1967. Israel’s long-standing policy has been that Muslims pray there and non-Muslims visit. Its 1994 treaty with Jordan recognized Jordan’s “special role” in the city’s Muslim holy shrines. In 1995 the U.S. Congress passed a law calling for the American embassy to move to Jerusalem, and the embassy opened there on May 14, 2018.

In their own words

Threats Israel heard, and how its leaders answered.

Israelis have heard leaders and movements at war with their country call for its end.

• October 1947. Before the UN vote on partition, the Arab League’s secretary-general, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, gave an interview to a Cairo newspaper. He said: “I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre …” The historian Benny Morris questions reading the remark as a statement of the Arab states’ war aims, while David Barnett and Efraim Karsh read it as a genocidal threat.
• May 26, 1967. Egypt’s President Nasser told Arab trade unionists, in the Israeli government’s translation, “The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.”
• 1968. The Palestinian National Charter declared that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine” and that the establishment of Israel was “entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time.” In 1993 the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, and the Palestine National Council later voted to amend the charter.
• 1988. The founding covenant of Hamas quoted the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” It also declared, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” In 2017 Hamas issued a new statement of principles but did not repeal the covenant.
• June 3, 2018. The official account of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, posted a statement of his that it dated to 1991. It read: “Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”

Golda Meir spoke to the question of survival more than once. In January 1948, with the fighting already under way, she asked American Jewish leaders in Chicago for money to buy arms:

Twenty-five years later, as prime minister, she faced a choice about striking first. On October 6, 1973, hours before Egypt and Syria attacked, the army’s chief of staff asked to launch a preemptive air strike. In her memoir, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported it, she and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan vetoed the strike “on the grounds that Israel would be accused once more as being the aggressor.” She wrote that she would always regret not heeding “the warning of my own heart” to mobilize the army in time.

After her death in 1978, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency collected some of her best-known sayings. Two of them speak of Israel:

Diplomatic relations

The UN, the United States, and the peace treaties.

• UN membership. Israel was admitted to the United Nations by General Assembly Resolution 273 on May 11, 1949 (37 to 12, with 9 abstentions).
• The United States–Israel relationship. President Harry S. Truman recognized Israel on May 14, 1948, eleven minutes after the British Mandate ended. The United States kept an arms embargo during the 1948 war, and the first major U.S. weapon system Israel received, the HAWK anti-aircraft missile, was approved in 1962. The 1985 U.S.–Israel Free Trade Agreement was the first free trade agreement the United States signed. U.S. military aid runs under written agreements. The current one covers 2019 to 2028, and Congress funds it each year. Steven L. Spiegel and William B. Quandt trace the relationship through the presidencies. See also Common Misconceptions.
• The peace treaties. Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and the Abraham Accords (2020) with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco are dated above, in From 1967 to today. Sudan agreed in principle, but full relations were never completed.
• The Vatican–Israel relationship, covered in the Nostra Aetate Chapter. The Fundamental Agreement of December 30, 1993 opened the way to formal diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel, completed in June 1994.
• Today. As of 2026, Israel maintains diplomatic relations with about 160 states, several relationships having been suspended or severed since 2023.

Most of Israel’s Jewish citizens descend from the communities traced in the earlier Chapters of this Unit. They include the Jews of Iraq, Iran, and North Africa, the Sephardic communities of Turkey and the Balkans, and the Jews of Poland and Lithuania, the former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. Many also descend from the European survivors whose history is told in Unit 4. Most of its Arab citizens descend from the Arabs who remained within the armistice lines in 1949.

Object Spotlight

A scroll signed before it was written.

When David Ben-Gurion finished reading the Declaration aloud at the Tel Aviv Museum, twenty-five of the thirty-seven signers stepped forward to a scroll that was not ready for them. The rest, in besieged Jerusalem or abroad, added their names later.

The scribe had not had time to inscribe the text onto the parchment, so the signers put their names to a blank sheet of parchment, trusting the words that had just been read aloud to be inscribed afterward. Otte Wallish completed the scroll by June, and the sheet bearing the signatures was stitched in as its final section.

The finished scroll is held by the Israel State Archives.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History, Decolonization & the Modern Middle East: Zionism, the post–World War I mandates, Arab nationalism, and the establishment of the State.
• World History, National-Movement Formation: modern Zionism as a case of late-nineteenth-century nationalism, beside the European nationalisms studied earlier.
• World History, WWII & the Holocaust: the Fifth Aliyah (1929–1939) and the physicians, scientists, and cultural figures fleeing Nazi Germany.
• United States History: postwar foreign relations: the U.S.–Israel relationship.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: the Israeli “New Historians” debate and the parallel Palestinian and Arab scholarship as material for source evaluation.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 10.7 (decolonization and the modern Middle East, the creation of the State and modern Zionism) and 10.5 (WWII and the Holocaust, the Fifth Aliyah).
• NYS US History: 11.9 (the United States after 1945, the U.S.–Israel relationship).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.6 and RH.11–12.9 (source perspective and conflicting interpretations): the Israeli–Palestinian historiography.

Further Teaching Resources

• Encyclopædia Britannica, Israel, a broad reference overview of the country’s history, government, and society.
• The Economic Cooperation Foundation’s document collections, primary texts and agreements, for the conflict’s own large literature.
• Where the conflict is studied: the Institute for Palestine Studies, the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, the Truman Institute at the Hebrew University, the Crown Center at Brandeis, and the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. The journals Israel Studies, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and the Middle East Journal carry the academic conversation.