Palestine

An ancient and contested land at the crossroads of three continents and three faiths, whose people declared an independent state in 1988 and whose modern history is defined by dispossession and the struggle for self-determination.

Palestine is a land at the eastern shore of the Mediterranean whose history stretches back to the Bronze Age city-states of Canaan and the Philistines from whom the name ultimately derives. Over millennia the region passed through Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab Islamic, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule, becoming a holy land for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Four centuries of Ottoman governance ended with the First World War, after which Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration and the ensuing Mandate set in motion the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism. The 1947 UN partition plan and the 1948 war produced the Nakba, the expulsion and flight of some 700,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages. Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Intifadas, and the Oslo process followed. On 15 November 1988 the Palestinian National Council in Algiers proclaimed the State of Palestine, and in 2012 the UN General Assembly recognised it as a non-member observer state. The blockade of Gaza from 2007 and the catastrophic war of 2023 to 2025, which leading international institutions have determined amounts to genocide, frame the present.