A timeline detailing the history of the Israel and Palestinian territories
- 1880s
- 1914
- Nov. 2, 1917
- 1922
- 1922 to 1939
- 1945
- 1947
- 1948
- 1956
- 1964
- June 1967
- November, 1967
- 1968-1970s
- 1969
- 1970
- Oct. 6, 1973
- October, 1974
- 1978-79
- October 1981
- December, 1987
- 1989-1991
- December, 1992
- September, 1993
- February, 1994
- Nov. 4, 1995
- 2000
- September, 2000
- September, 2005
- 2006
- June, 2007
- December, 2008-January, 2009
- Feb. 11, 2011
- May 3, 2011
-
1880s
European Zionists begin arriving in Palestine
Jews begin moving to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Most were fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. They wanted a political and spiritual home in the land of their biblical ancestors – known as Zionists – and begin moving to the land that is now Israel. The immigration gave Palestine a Jewish minority. Theodor Herzl, a correspondent in Paris for a Vienna newspaper, wrote that “there was no room or hope for the Jews of Europe, that the Jews must acquire a territory on which to build a nation.” The book he wrote, which was called The Jewish State, became the Zionist manifesto.
-
1914
First World War begins
Britain and France went to war with Germany and its ally, Turkey. The Turkish (Ottoman) Empire included much of the Middle East, and the Allies saw value in encouraging rebellion among Turkey’s Arab subjects. The promise – at least as the courted Arab leaders saw it – was that Britain and France would support Arab independence after the war. Much of the promise of independence was delivered by British adventurer T.E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia.” Also, acting on behalf of the British government, Sir Henry McMahon promised Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, Arab control over land previously held by the Turks. But under the terms of the secret France-Britain-Russia document known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement of April-May, 1916, Arab independence was to be realized on only a tiny part of Middle East land. The real import of the document was to divide the region between the French and the British.
-
Nov. 2, 1917
Britain supports creation of Jewish national homeland
On this date, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote a short note to Lord Rothschild, a leader of England’s Jewish community. Writing that 68-word note, which came to be known as the “Balfour Declaration,” was tantamount to creating the embryo from which the state of Israel would grow – though its gestation period was to be more than 30 years. Balfour said Britain supported the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. It was a signal event for the Jews of Europe. Arabs, however, believed London had made different promises about the future of Palestine.
-
1922
Britain assumes control of large portions of the Middle East
The British Mandate, authorized by the League of Nations, gave Britain control over portions of the Middle East, including Palestine. Arabs made up 92 per cent of the population and owned 98 per cent of the land, hardly a situation that was going to help Zionism. There began a period of intense Jewish immigration.
-
1922 to 1939
Continued Zionist immigration increases Arab-Jewish tensions
Jews began to build the footings of the modern Israel, reviving the Hebrew language, cultivating land and settling new urban areas. Arabs today scoff at the boast of Israelis that Jews came to a barren and inhospitable land and “made the desert bloom.” They point to ancient vineyards and olive groves that were thriving for centuries before the Jewish immigration of the 20th century. In the years before the Second World War, there had been a series of attempts to resolve the issues of who would live on the contested land of Palestine. By the late 1930s, Britain had toyed with and rejected the idea of dividing the area into two states. It then proposed surrendering the mandate in a way that would leave Palestinians in a majority and limit future Jewish immigration, but also protect the rights of the Jewish minority there. None of its proposals left Britain any closer to resolving its dilemma.
-
1945
Postwar Jewish immigration to Palestine increases
The Jews who survived the Holocaust took their fight for a homeland to a new level. Although official postwar British policy was to continue limiting Jewish immigration, about 200,000 Jews went to Palestine. There were acts of Jewish terrorism against the British, as well as Jewish-Palestinian fighting. In 1946, Jewish militants blew up part of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which was being used as a headquarters for the British military. That event pushed Britain toward abandoning the question of what to do with Palestine.
-
1947
Britain passes Palestine question to the United Nations
The UN proposed dividing Palestine into two states: Jews would control about 53 per cent of the land area, Palestinians about 46 per cent. The city of Jerusalem would be placed under international supervision, a proposal aimed at giving Jews, Muslims and Christians equal access. Jews accepted the plan: Arabs rejected it. By the end of the year, there was intense Jewish-Palestinian fighting.
-
1948
State of Israel declared
When the British pulled out of Palestine on May 14, 1948, Zionists declared the state of Israel. It was immediately recognized by the United States and Russia and just as quickly began to fight its first war. The Palestinians now had help. The armies of Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq invaded. When the war ended, the new Israeli forces controlled more land than they would have been given under the UN partition plan, including one-half of Jerusalem. Many Palestinians, meanwhile, were in flight. Israel says about 600,000 left, many of them ordered to do so by Arab commanders who didn’t want them to get in the way of fighting. Arabs say more than 800,000 fled, worried they would be terrorized, perhaps slaughtered, under Jewish rule. They also contend Jewish commanders ordered many away as part of their effort to rid the land of potential sympathizers for the Arab armies. With their flight, those Palestinians became one of the most problematic facts of modern history. Some 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remained, mostly in the Galilee area, and eventually became Israeli citizens. The creation of the Jewish state meant a massive population transfer. When the fighting stopped, Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. And all the Arab states, though they stopped fighting, maintained their official state of war against the new neighbour, Israel.
-
1956
Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal: Israel, Britain and France invade
European powers agreed to participate because they feared Nasser’s control of the Suez would destabilize the region and jeopardize their access to Middle East oil. Israel briefly occupied Gaza during the war, which was short but costly for everyone. The attack on Egypt made Israel even more of an outcast in the Middle East and contributed to the Arab animosity toward Israel.
-
1964
Palestine Liberation Organization formed
European powers agreed to participate because they feared Nasser’s control of the Suez would destabilize the region and jeopardize their access to Middle East oil. Israel briefly occupied Gaza during the war, which was short but costly for everyone. The attack on Egypt made Israel even more of an outcast in the Middle East and contributed to the Arab animosity toward Israel.
-
June 1967
Six-day Arab-Israeli war
Israel’s third battle against its Arab neighbours changed the modern Middle East almost as much as the creation of the state of Israel 19 years earlier. Israel scored huge successes and the destruction of Egypt’s air power before it could scramble off the ground. Jordan and Syria also suffered big losses in air power. The war humiliated Arab leaders, including Egypt’s Nasser, and led to some change in tactics for attacking Israel, specifically an increase in cross-border raids. But there would be a huge price to pay for the success. Israel was now in control of vast tracts of land on which Palestinians lived. It also put on the table the issues that would later become the focus for peace talks: the Israeli-occupied lands of the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. And it instigated the first attempt at what was to become a long history of Western-sponsored peace processes. Israel’s often harsh occupation of the West Bank and Gaza would become a source of debate among Israelis themselves.
-
November, 1967
UN Security Council passes Resolution 242
Within months of the end of the Six-Day War, the international community began the task of trying to make a real peace in the Middle East. Discussed and disputed, this UN Resolution 242 led to heated debates. Arabs and Israelis could never agree on what it meant. “Two forty two” became the mantra for a generation of Palestinians. Their interpretation of the resolution was that the UN was telling Israel to get off all the lands it won in the 1967 war. Israel said there was no call in the resolution for the withdrawal from “all” occupied territories and interpreted the document to mean a negotiated withdrawal from some of the occupied territories. It said the resolution implied that the Arab states must recognize Israel and agree to non-belligerency.
-
1968-1970s
Islamists grow in number
In the wake of the 1967 defeat and occupation, the Muslim Brotherhood grows in size in Gaza and the West Bank, where it offers solace, health care, schools and religion. Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a nearly blind quadriplegic preacher, develops a following urging greater religiosity and protests against the leftists then common. As opponents of the PLO, this movement, known as al-Mujamma, is encouraged and supported by Israel. From this group would emerge the founders of Hamas.
-
1969
Yasser Arafat becomes chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization
The small, eccentric man in the checkered head scarf became one of the most recognizable faces of modern history. Until his death in 2004, he kept the Palestinian cause alive and he was able to see that in the early 1990s it was time to compromise to get a Palestinian autonomy deal and gamble that autonomy could be turned to statehood.
-
1970
King Hussein drives PLO out of Jordan
The king sees Arafat and his fighters as a threat to his power. Jordan’s action disperses PLO fighters, with many of them settling in Lebanon, where they would play a central role in the beginnings of that country’s coming civil war. It also gave rise to the Palestinian faction “Black September.” Its members are held responsible for a number of terrorist acts, among them the assassination of the Jordanian prime minister in Cairo in November, 1971, and the abduction and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.
-
Oct. 6, 1973
Yom Kippur war begins
The war, launched by Egypt and Syria to try to win back territories lost to Israel in 1967, had only limited success. The real boost to the Arabs, though, was psychological. They surprised the Israelis with their attacks, caught them off guard and inflicted heavier losses than the Israeli public thought could be exacted by Arab enemies.
-
October, 1974
PLO recognition
Arab summit declares the PLO the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
-
1978-79
Israel and Egypt negotiate and sign Camp David Accords
U.S. president Jimmy Carter invited Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to Camp David in September, 1978, when peace talks in the region were near total collapse. Sadat had grown frustrated as Israel continued its policy of settling Jews in the occupied territories. But after 12 days of meetings, they emerged with two documents. One set out the framework for Egypt-Israel peace, including Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Sinai. The other addressed the Palestinian issue and set a timetable for self-government and then autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. It was signed March 26, 1979, and was a landmark peace treaty – for the first time, an Arab country had made peace with Israel.
-
October 1981
Sadat is assassinated
Sadat was killed on Oct. 6, 1981, when an Egyptian assassination team shot him to death as he reviewed a military parade. The attackers were identified as Muslim fundamentalists. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, cracked down on Islamic extremists in response.
-
December, 1987
Palestinian intifada begins
Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, is founded during the first months of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising. It shares the Islamist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement established in Egypt in the 1920s. Hamas’s covenant, or charter, published in August, 1988, calls for the “obliteration” of Israel and states that Palestinians must use jihad in their national struggle. The group opposes the PLO strategy, formulated in November, 1988, of trying to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. During the first years of the intifada, Hamas’s tactics evolved from non-violent protests to firebombs, planted bombs, and small-arms attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
-
1989-1991
Collapse of the Soviet Union triggers mass migration of Jews to Israel
In this period, more than 500,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union settled in Israel, increasing the population by 10 per cent. Since the 1967 war, Israel had let small numbers of its people live on occupied land. The so-called “settlements” where they established homes has become a big part of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.
-
December, 1992
Hamas expulsion
Responding to Hamas’s increased attacks on Israeli forces, Israel prime minister Yitzhak Rabin rounds up more than 360 Hamas leaders and about 50 Islamic Jihad members and expels them from Israel’s northern border. Lebanon refuses to allow their entry and the 413 men spend a year in tents in a no-man’s land before Mr. Rabin bows to international pressure and allows the men back. The group contained the nucleus of Hamas’s future militant leadership.
-
September, 1993
Israel, Palestinians sign Oslo self-rule accords
An outgrowth of the Madrid conference of 1991, the talks were conducted secretly in Oslo, Norway. The accords were subsequently signed at a public ceremony in Washington on Sept. 13, 1993, in the presence of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and U.S. president Bill Clinton. Rabin, his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 as architects of the Oslo accords that laid out the parameters of a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
-
February, 1994
Violence increases
On Feb. 25, Baruch Goldstein, a physician and reserve officer from the Kiryat Arba settlement outside Hebron, entered the mosque at Abraham’s Tomb and murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer. The event, and its aftermath, changed the Hamas-Israel conflict dramatically. In April, 1994, 40 days after the Hebron massacre, Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing inside Israel, at a bus stop in the town of Afula. A second suicide bombing, on a bus in Hadera, took place a week later. The era of suicide bombings had been unleashed.
-
Nov. 4, 1995
Rabin is assassinated
While leaving a peace rally, the Israeli prime minister is killed by a religious zealot law student who had strenuously opposed Yitzhak Rabin's peace initiative, particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords, because he felt that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would deny Jews their “biblical heritage which they had reclaimed by establishing settlements.”
-
2000
Camp David II summit
At the Camp David talks with U.S. president Clinton, PLO leader Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, Israel makes it clear that it is willing to accept an independent Palestinian state on most of the West Bank and Gaza, with a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat rejected the proposal without putting forward counterproposals and walked away.
-
September, 2000
Second intifada
A visit by Likud leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem sparks the second intifada, and the dwindling peace talks grind to a halt. Fatah’s al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade joins Hamas in launching waves of suicide bombings against Israelis. Hamas draws support from a regional alliance comprising Iran, Syria and the Shia Islamist group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which all broadly oppose U.S. policy in the Middle East.
-
September, 2005
Israel withdraws from Gaza
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon oversees a troop pullout from Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation but Israel still controls its border crossings. Jewish settlers from many communities in Gaza are evacuated. The Israeli Foreign Ministry says the withdrawal shows that Israel is willing to make significant concessions for peace.
-
2006
Hamas wins Palestinian legislative elections
Hamas defeats the Fatah movement, which dominates the PLO. The Palestinian Authority's backers – the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations (known as the quartet) – demand that Hamas renounce violence and recognize Israel. It refuses.
-
June, 2007
Hamas takes complete control of the Gaza Strip
Hamas conducts a brief civil war with security forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas accuses Abbas of conspiring against it. Abbas describes what happened as a coup, leaving him with only the West Bank to govern. Hamas then deepens its control of the Gaza Strip, building its own bureaucracy and security forces. Israel closes all Gaza crossings and maintains a naval blockage, allowing only relief supplies to enter Gaza.
-
December, 2008-January, 2009
Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza
In response to hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza on southern Israeli communities, Israel wages a 22-day conflict against the Hamas authorities in Gaza. Some 1,300 Gazans (military and civilian) are killed, thousands are wounded and many official buildings as well as some small industries and some residential areas are levelled. Thirteen Israelis are killed in the conflict.
-
Feb. 11, 2011
Mubarak's regime falls in Egypt
After 18 days of revolt in Tahrir Square, citizens of the largest country in the Arab world succeed in pressing for democratic change. The country’s military leaders order Hosni Mubarak to step down as president and schedule elections. The process inspires others in the region for the first time since Nasser. However, the Arab spring turns into bloody stalemate in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain as others try to depose their autocratic rulers.
-
May 3, 2011
Palestinian factions sign unity accord
A surprise unity deal is struck between the mainstream Fatah faction of Palestinian president Abbas and its rival, the Islamist Hamas movement. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal makes it clear he accepts the goal of a state of Palestine based on 1967 borders, but refuses to recognize Israel. Hamas’s charter calls for reclaiming all the land of the former British mandate, including Israel. In the Cairo agreement, Hamas and Fatah agree to the creation of a new, technocratic government that will hold elections within a year. The deal draws a cool response from Washington and denunciations from Israel, which says it cannot talk with Hamas while that group remains officially committed to the country’s destruction.
