Israel and Palestine: Two Peoples, One Land

Modern political Zionism took shape in the late nineteenth century. It drew on the Jewish historical attachment to the land, and responded in part to antisemitism in Europe. Its supporters sought a national home where Jews would no longer depend on others' protection as a vulnerable minority. Jews themselves disagreed about Zionism, as they did about other responses to persecution.⁶

Palestine was already home to an Arabic-speaking population, mostly Muslim with a Christian minority, whose political hopes included independence. A 1946 historical account by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry described competing wartime promises and the Arab demand for self-government. The conflict grew out of the claims of people already living in the country, alongside Jewish immigration and national organisation.¹

On 2 November 1917, Britain's Balfour Declaration supported establishing "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. It added that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities. It defined no borders and no constitution for any future state.⁷

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The wording was uneven: a national home for one people, civil and religious rights for the others. Read closely, it explains why later arguments were not only about how Britain carried out its policy, but about what it had promised, to whom, and on what authority.⁷

The League of Nations approved the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922, and it came into effect in 1923. Britain governed under a framework that included the national-home policy. Immigration, land and representative government became recurring flashpoints. Inquiry after inquiry, and revision after revision of British policy, failed to produce an arrangement both national movements would accept.¹

In 1939, a British White Paper proposed limits on Jewish immigration and a future independent Palestine on terms it set out. Published before the full scale of the Holocaust was known, it shaped the rules under which people fleeing persecution, and later survivors, tried to enter the country.⁸

The Holocaust changed everything for Europe's Jews. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews. Survivors faced destroyed communities and a refugee crisis; at its peak in 1947, the number of Jewish displaced persons in Europe reached about 250,000. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes how this strengthened support for a Jewish state among survivors and others. It did not remove the Palestinian population, or its own political claims.⁶

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending that Palestine be partitioned into an Arab state and a Jewish state, with a special international regime for Jerusalem. It was a recommendation for the future, not a division already in place.⁹

On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel. The declaration invoked the Jewish people's historical connection to the land, their persecution, and the UN partition resolution. It promised equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants, "irrespective of religion, race or sex".¹⁰

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War came with the end of the Mandate. Fighting between Jewish and Arab forces was followed by the intervention of neighbouring Arab states. When it ended, Israel held more territory than the partition plan had assigned to the Jewish state. The proposed Arab state did not come into being: Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt administered Gaza.⁹

For Palestinians, these years are remembered as the Nakba, the "catastrophe". Hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes. As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugees' return, the restitution of property and compensation. The question of what happens to those refugees, and their descendants, outlived every ceasefire that followed.³

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The birth of a state and the displacement of a people were two experiences of the same rupture. A history that tells 1948 only as a declaration, or only as a movement of armies, leaves out the civilian upheaval that made the conflict last.¹⁰³

In 1949, armistice agreements stopped that phase of the fighting. They were not a peace settlement. The armistice lines later became a key reference in negotiations, while the questions of refugees and statehood stayed open. A ceasefire line, a proposed partition boundary and a recognised international border are three different things.¹¹

In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded to pursue Palestinian national aspirations. It became the main body representing Palestinians internationally. It is distinct from the Palestinian Authority, which the later Oslo agreements would create, and from Hamas, a separate movement.¹²

In June 1967, war came again. In six days, Israel captured the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Jordan, and Gaza from Egyptian control. It also took the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the war brought Israeli military occupation and further displacement.²

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That November, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242. It linked peace to Israel's withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict, to every state's right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries, and to a just settlement of the refugee problem. It became a fixed point of diplomacy for decades, even as the parties disagreed about what it required.¹³

Israeli settlements in the occupied territory became one of the central disputes. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion. It concluded that Israel's settlement policy violated international law, that its continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful, and that the presence should end as rapidly as possible.¹⁴

An advisory opinion is the court's legal assessment in answer to a request; it is not a criminal conviction of anyone. Nor does it mean any particular proposal can ignore the rights and security of the people affected. Its importance here is the line it draws between occupation and sovereignty.¹⁴

And the territory at stake is not only Gaza. The West Bank and East Jerusalem sit at the centre of the questions of borders, settlements and Palestinian statehood. An agreement on humanitarian conditions in Gaza can leave much of the wider conflict untouched.²⁴

In December 1987, a Palestinian uprising against the occupation began: the first intifada. In the same period, Hamas emerged from Palestinian Islamist networks, as a rival to Fatah, the dominant movement within the PLO. The difference between the two would come to matter enormously, to diplomacy, and later to the split between Gaza and the West Bank.¹⁵

In September 1993, Israel and the PLO exchanged letters. Yasser Arafat recognised Israel's right to exist in peace and security, and renounced terrorism and other violence. Yitzhak Rabin replied that Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, and would negotiate with it.¹⁶

Two organisations that had treated each other as enemies had agreed on a basis for talking. Israel's letter did not recognise a Palestinian state. And the exchange did not mean every constituency on either side supported the process.¹⁶

On 13 September 1993, the Declaration of Principles was signed. It set out arrangements for interim self-government, and a process meant to lead to a permanent settlement. The hardest questions were left for later: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security and borders. The Palestinian Authority grew out of that interim process.⁴

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The design rested on a transition. A temporary division of powers was supposed to build the conditions for a final agreement. But limited self-government was not independent control of borders, territory and security. The gap between an interim authority and a sovereign state is at the heart of every later argument about what Oslo delivered.⁴

The final agreement never came. Further violence followed, including the second intifada from 2000, and the disputes over occupation and settlements continued. The UN's own account of the period traces repeated initiatives and repeated setbacks, not a steady path from Oslo to two sovereign states.⁵

In 2005, Israel removed its settlements from Gaza and withdrew its permanent military presence from inside the territory. OCHA recorded the military withdrawal as complete on 12 September. It changed how Gaza was controlled. It did not settle the questions of access, security, or Gaza's legal relationship with Israel.¹⁷

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The International Court of Justice addressed that question in its 2024 opinion. The withdrawal, it concluded, had not entirely released Israel from its obligations under the law of occupation, which continued in proportion to the effective control it kept. To describe the withdrawal as ending every such responsibility would misstate the court's view.¹⁸

In January 2006, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian legislative election. The vote was about representation in the Palestinian political system; it was not a permanent mandate for everything the winning movement did afterwards. President Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO remained separate institutions.¹⁹

In June 2007, after fighting with Fatah, Hamas took control of Gaza. Palestinian authority split between Gaza and the West Bank. Israel imposed a blockade, tightening earlier restrictions on movement. Egypt controlled passage through its own border crossing with Gaza, so access depended on more than one gate and more than one authority.²⁰

An OCHA report for August 2023 described the restrictions as they stood before the war that followed: movement of people and goods limited, and dependent on permits and changing arrangements. The date matters. These conditions existed before 7 October; they were not only a response to that day's attacks.²⁰

The split made diplomacy harder still. The body representing Palestinians in international negotiations, the Palestinian Authority administering parts of the West Bank, and the movement governing Gaza were not the same. A proposal could win one's agreement without the others carrying it out. That division still shapes every plan for governing and rebuilding Gaza.¹⁹⁵

On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led armed groups attacked southern Israel. They killed civilians and members of the security forces, and took hostages into Gaza. Israel launched a large-scale military campaign in Gaza. The attacks and the war opened a new rupture in a conflict whose unresolved questions were already vast.²¹

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In June 2024, a UN commission of inquiry reported on both. It found Palestinian armed groups responsible for war crimes, including deliberate attacks on civilians and hostage-taking. It found Israeli authorities responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. These were the commission's findings, not criminal verdicts against named individuals.²¹

The humanitarian toll included repeated displacement, damage to essential services, and severe obstacles to aid. During the war, OCHA separated what its partners recorded from casualty figures supplied by the parties. A history should keep those lines of attribution, rather than present a later total as if it had been known throughout.²²

On 10 October 2025, a ceasefire took effect. OCHA's reporting later that month described people moving north and aid agencies expanding their work. It began a new phase. It did not undo the destruction or the displacement, or answer the political questions that came before.²³

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OCHA's report of 29 October recorded renewed airstrikes, followed that morning by the resumption of the ceasefire. It described the work of restoring aid, water and temporary classrooms. A ceasefire on paper was neither unbroken calm nor completed recovery.²³

The history leaves several questions, connected but distinct: Israeli and Palestinian security, Palestinian self-determination, the status of occupied territory, settlements, Jerusalem, and the refugees. They do not all date from the same year. The refugee question of 1948 and the occupation that began in 1967 overlap, but they are not the same.³¹³⁴

Stopping a war and settling a conflict are different achievements. The armistices of 1949, the interim framework of Oslo and the ceasefire of October 2025 each dealt with particular circumstances. Each should be judged by its own terms and whether they were carried out, not by whether it solved everything.¹¹⁴²³