Timeline of Events
1917- Britain seized Palestine from the Ottomans. They gave support to "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration, along with an insistence that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities".
1920 - San Remo Allied Powers conference granted Palestine to Britain as a mandate in order to prepare it for self-rule. European Jewish migration which increased in the 19th century, continued.
The 1940s - Nazi Holocaust of the Jews in Europe prompted efforts at mass migration to Palestine. Jewish armed groups in pursuit of an independent Jewish state fought British authorities.
1947 - United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with international control over Jerusalem and its environs.
Independence
1948 - Israel declared independence as the British mandate ended.
1948-1949 - First Arab-Israeli war. Armistice agreements left Israel with more territory than envisaged under the Partition Plan, including western Jerusalem. Jordan annexed the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem while Egypt occupied Gaza.
Around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs either fleed or were expelled out of their total population of about 1,200,000.
Six-Day War
1967 June - After months of tension including border skirmishes, Egypt's expulsion of the UN buffer force from Sinai, and its closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, led to a pre-emptive attack on Egypt. Jordan and Syria joined the war. The war lasted six days and left Israel in control of east Jerusalem, all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights, and Sinai. Jewish settlements are set up in all of these areas in the coming years, with government approval.
1972 - Palestinian "Black September" gunmen took the Israeli team hostage at the Munich Olympics. Two of the athletes were murdered at the site and nine more killed during a failed rescue attempt by the German authorities.
1976 March - Mass protests by Israeli Arabs at government attempts to expropriate land in the Galilee area of northern Israel. Six Arab citizens were killed in clashes with security forces. The events are commemorated annually as Land Day.
1976 July - Israeli commandos carried out a raid on Entebbe Airport in Uganda to free more than 100 mostly Israeli and Jewish hostages being held hostage by German and Palestinian gunmen.
Camp David Accord
1977 November - Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem and began the process that led to Israel's withdrawal from Sinai and Egypt's recognition of Israel in the Camp David Accords of 1978. The accords also pledged Israel to expand Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza.
Invasion of Lebanon
1982 June - Israel invaded Lebanon to expel Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leadership after an assassination attempt by a small Palestinian militant group on the Israeli ambassador to London.
Uprising
1987 December - First Intifada uprising began in the Occupied Territories. Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza formed the Hamas movement, which rapidly turned to violence against Israel.
1991 October - US-Soviet sponsored Madrid conference brought Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestinian representatives together for the first time since 1949. Yitzhak Shamir's reluctant participation, under US pressure, brought down his minority government.
Oslo Declaration
1993 - Prime Minister Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Declaration to plot Palestinian self-government and formally end First Intifada. Violence by Palestinian groups that rejected the Oslo Declaration continued.
1994 May-July - Israel withdrew from most of Gaza and the West Bank city of Jericho, allowing Yasser Arafat to move PLO administration from Tunis and to set up Palestinian National Authority.
1995 September - Mr. Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the Interim Agreement for transfer of further power and territory to the Palestinian National Authority. The agreement was based on the 1997 Hebron Protocol, 1998 Wye River Memorandum, and internationally-sponsored "Road Map for Peace" of 2003.
1996 May - Likud returns to power under Benjamin Netanyahu, pledged to halt further concessions to Palestinians. The settlement expansion resumed.
1999 May - Labour-led coalition elected under Ehud Barak, pledged to move ahead with talks alongside Palestinians and Syrians.
2001 January - Failure of last-ditched efforts at restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks in Taba, Egypt, Ehud Barak loses elections to Ariel Sharon who declined to continue talks.
2002 March-May - Israeli army launched Operation Defensive Shield on West Bank after a spate of Palestinian suicide bombings. It was the largest military operation on the West Bank since 1967.
2002 June - Israel began building barriers in and around the West Bank. Israel said the barrier aimed at stopping Palestinian attacks; Palestinians saw it as a tool to grab land. The route was controversial as it frequently deviated from the pre-1967 ceasefire line into the West Bank.
2003 June - Quartet of United, States, European Union, Russia, and United Nations proposed a road map to resolve Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel and Palestinian National Authority both accepted the plan, which required a freeze on the West Bank Jewish settlements and an end to attacks on Israelis.
2004 July - International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the West Bank barrier is illegal.
Withdrawal from Gaza
2005 September - Israel withdrew all Jewish settlers and military personnel from Gaza while retaining control over airspace, coastal waters, and border crossings.
Hamas Islamist group won Palestinian parliamentary elections. Rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza escalated. It was met with frequent Israeli raids and incursions over the following years.
2006 June - Hamas gunmen from Gaza took Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit hostage, demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners. Major clashes between Israel and Hamas in Gaza followed.
2006 July-August - Israeli incursion into Lebanon, in response to deadly Hezbollah attack and abduction of two soldiers, escalated into the Second Lebanon War. The government faced criticism over the conduct of the war, which left Hezbollah forces largely intact.
2007 November - Annapolis Conference for the first time established a "two-state solution" as a basis for future talks between Israel and Palestinian Authority.
Gaza invasion
2008 December - Israel launched a month-long and full-scale invasion of Gaza to prevent Hamas and other groups from launching rockets.
2010 May - Nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists were killed in clashes during Israeli boarding of ships attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. Relations with Turkey approached a breaking point. Israel apologized for deaths in 2013.
2010 September - Direct talks resumed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, only to falter over the question of settlements.
2013 July - Talks resumed with Palestinian Authority under US auspices but reached no conclusions. 2013 December - Israel, Jordan, and Palestinian Authority signed an agreement to save the Dead Sea from drying up by pumping water from the Red Sea.
2014 July-August - Israel responded to attacks by armed groups in Gaza with a military campaign by air and land to knock out missile launching sites and attack tunnels. Clashes ended in an uneasy Egyptian-brokered ceasefire in August.
Netanyahu's fourth government
2015 October - Israeli couple were shot dead in their car in occupied West Bank. It was one of the first incidents in what would become a wave of shootings, stabbings, and car-rammings by Palestinians or Israeli Arabs.
2015 November - Israel suspended contact with European Union officials in talks with Palestinians over the EU decision to label goods from Jewish settlements in the West Bank coming from settlements.
Trump thaw
2017 February - Parliament passed a law that retroactively legalized dozens of Jewish settlements built on private Palestinian land in the West Bank.
2017 June - Work began on the first new Jewish settlement in the West Bank for 25 years.
UNESCO voted to declare the Old City of Hebron a Palestinian World Heritage site, a move that Israel complained ignored the city's Jewish heritage.
2017 December - US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which upsetted the Arab world and some Western allies.
The following March, he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war and later annexed. The international community did not recognize Israeli sovereignty.
2019 November - the US said it no longer considered Israeli settlements on the West Bank to be illegal.
Causes of the Conflict
Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims of the land back to a couple of thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century.
Jews fleeing persecution in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab and Muslim majority territory in the Ottoman and later British Empire.
The Arabs resisted, seeing the land as rightfully theirs.
An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory.
The 1967 war is particularly important for today’s conflict, as it left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories home to large Palestinian populations:
Today, the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is under Israeli occupation.
This comes in the form of Israeli troops, who enforce Israeli security restrictions on Palestinian movement and activities, and Israeli “settlers,” Jews who build ever-expanding communities in the West Bank that effectively deny the land to Palestinians.
Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist party, and is under Israeli blockade but not ground troop occupation.
Disastrous Effects
In the summer of 2014, clashes in the Palestinian territories precipitated a military confrontation between the Israeli military and Hamas in which Hamas fired nearly three thousand rockets at Israel, and Israel retaliated with a major offensive in Gaza.
The skirmish ended in late August 2014 with a cease-fire deal brokered by Egypt, but only after 73 Israelis and 2,251 Palestinians were killed.
After a wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in 2015, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced that Palestinians would no longer be bound by the territorial divisions created by the Oslo Accords.
In March and May of 2018, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip conducted weekly demonstrations at the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.
The final protest coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus that accompanied Israeli independence.
While most of the protesters were peaceful, some stormed the perimeter fence and threw rocks and other objects.
According to the United Nations, 183 demonstrators were killed and more than 6,000 were wounded by live ammunition.
In May of 2018, fighting broke out between Hamas and the Israeli military in what became the worst period of violence since 2014.
Before reaching a cease-fire, militants in Gaza fired over one hundred rockets into Israel; Israel responded with strikes on more than fifty targets in Gaza during the twenty-four-hour flare-up.
Response from the International Community
United States
In 2013, the United States attempted to revive the peace process between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
However, peace talks were disrupted when Fatah—the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party—formed a unity government with its rival faction Hamas in 2014.
Hamas, a spin-off of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1987 following the first intifada, is one of two major Palestinian political parties and was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States in 1997.
Since taking office, the Donald J. Trump administration has made achieving an Israeli-Palestinian deal a foreign policy priority.
In 2018, the Trump administration canceled funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. They also relocated the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a reversal of a longstanding U.S. policy.
The decision to move the U.S. embassy was met with applause from the Israeli leadership but was condemned by Palestinian leaders and others in the Middle East and Europe.
Israel considers the “complete and united Jerusalem” its capital, while Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
In January 2020, the Trump administration released its long-awaited “Peace to Prosperity” plan, which has been rejected by Palestinians due to its support for future Israeli annexation of settlements in the West Bank and control over an “undivided” Jerusalem.
Solution For the Conflict
The “two-state solution” would create an independent Israel and Palestine, and is the mainstream approach to resolving the conflict.
The idea is that Israelis and Palestinians want to run their countries differently; Israelis want a Jewish state, and Palestinians want a Palestinian one.
Because neither side can get what it wants in a joined state, the only possible solution that satisfies everyone involves separating Palestinians and Israelis.
The “one-state solution” would merge Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip into one big country.
It comes in two versions.
One, favored by some leftists and Palestinians, would create a single democratic country.
Arab Muslims would outnumber Jews, thus ending Israel as a Jewish state.
The other version, favored by some rightists and Israelis, would involve Israel annexing the West Bank and either forcing out Palestinians or denying them the right to vote.
Virtually the entire world, including most Zionists, rejects this option as an unacceptable human rights violation.
Sources:
Written by Althea Ocomen from Manila City, Phillippines
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