A Brief History On Israel & Palestine

By Demitri DeLuca-Lyons
December 20, 2023

It’s important now more than ever that you understand the history of these existing tensions between Israel and Palestine, that it is not so utterly shocking and out of nowhere for this to occur. Israel and Palestine haven’t been on good terms for a very, very long time, and it’s this history I wish to briefly summarize for you.

The Israeli people were always promised a homeland, and they never really got that until 1948. Just a few years after World War 2, Resolution 181 went into effect; a partition plan from the UN to separate Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Palestinians who already lived there opposed the plan, but the UN still applied it through the United Kingdom, which owned the land/territory they lived in after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It was given to the Jewish people and named, appropriately, Israel.

 Immediately after Israel became an independent state, they were forced into war with Palestine in The Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Immediately as in; it was May 14th when Israel was founded, and the attacks were May 15th. Then in 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser took charge of Egypt and nationalized the Suez Canal, which essentially made trade between Asia and Europe nigh impossible. France and Britain responded by striking a deal with Israel wherein they would invade Egypt, and intervene to negotiate control of the canal. In five days, they took thousands of prisoners until the UN Emergency Force was stationed and kicked them out.

Syria bombarded Israeli villages in 1967. Israel shot down six fighter jets in retaliation and drove Syria back, taking sole control over the capital, Jerusalem. Six years later would mark the Yom Kippur War, which took place on the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. Egyptian and Syrian forces closed in suddenly and the IDF suffered heavy casualties, where control was sporadic and eventually ended with a cease-fire. In 1982 they had the Lebanon War when Israel bombed Beirut and southern Lebanon. They invaded the following day to pursue destroying the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and negotiations began shortly after, leading Israel to withdraw. There was a second Lebanon War that left a million Palestinians displaced and a thousand dead in 2006, but not much is known about the details of the war.

All of this leads us to now. Which is to say… It’s been a very strong back-and-forth between these two. Technically, the Palestinians were on the land first, yes. However, the Israelis never had a definitive homeland until Israel was founded in 1948, and they needed one because they were consistently hunted throughout history. Someone, somewhere, would have to give up land. The UNSCOP decided it would be the West. Palestine struck first in October, but the land was taken from them indirectly by the UN, Israeli people did not storm in and take the land for themselves. There are many more decades and centuries worth of history, and all of it is also violent. It is very complex. This is without getting into other issues that plague the two states, such as the messy, messy borders.

There are so many things to consider and all of it is complicated. So complicated, that I couldn’t fit a shortened, cohesive breakdown of it into this article like I planned. So I tried to stick to the recent-ish events of the last 100 years, but there is more. The point of this article is to not take just one side based on what you hear now. Take into consideration all of the history between these states and make your own opinion.