Time Line: Israel

Early History

About 1200 bce, Hebrew tribes began settling in the area that is today Israel. According to biblical tradition, Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt into Canaan (part of modern Israel), which the Hebrew god Yahweh promised to them as their home for all eternity. At about the same time, the Philistines also moved into the area. After a series of wars with the Canaanites and the Philistines, the victorious Hebrews under Saul established the kingdom of Israel in 1020 bce.

The kingdom of Israel reached its zenith under Solomon in the middle of the tenth century bce. After Solomon’s death it split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. In 721 bce, the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom, but the southern kingdom clung to a precarious existence for two more centuries. In 587 bce, the Chaldeans conquered Judah, thus ending Jewish political independence until 1948.

Throughout the following 600 years, a succession of Persians, Greeks, and Romans conquered and occupied the area that is today Israel. After a series of Jewish revolts against Roman rule, the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and scattered most of the Jews to different parts of the Roman Empire. Israelis call this scattering the Diaspora. Most of the Jews so scattered refused to assimilate into the communities in which they found themselves. They dressed in the traditional manner and practiced their own religion with all its rituals.

Reluctance to assimilate contributed to the growth of anti-Semitism in all parts of Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. Xenophobia and ethnocentrism both contributed to this growth, as did the charge that the Jews had crucified Jesus Christ. Anti-Semitism caused European governments to limit the economic activities in which Jews could participate. European kings adopted laws forbidding Jews to own land, serve in the army and bureaucracy, and participate in the arts.

Some states also prohibited Christians from money lending and so this created a void. It was not illegal in general to lend (or to make money from someone lending out your money) but only illegal for Christians to lend at interest. Many Jews took up moneylending, which further fueled the hatred of Christians, who considered moneylenders little more than thieves. This growing anti-Semitism resulted in frequent pogroms and expulsions from the nations in which the Jews lived. During the Middle Ages, almost all the European kingdoms expelled the Jews from their countries at one time or another.

When most European nations lifted the laws that restricted Jews after the French Revolution of 1789, Jews began to excel in many fields. The success of many Jews added the new dimension of envy to the already existing anti-Semitism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century a number of writers began to politicize anti-Semitism, which resulted in the first anti-Semitic political parties. The appearance of political anti-Semitism provided the catalyst for the formation of the Zionist movement.

Zionist Movement

Zionism grew out of the Dreyfus Affair in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the French army who was accused in 1894 of selling military secrets to the Germans. French officials subsequently convicted Dreyfus and sent him to a French penal colony. Dreyfus’s brother Matieu refused to believe that his sibling was guilty and rallied Jews from around the world to help prove him innocent. French society divided down the middle into anti-Dreyfusards and Dreyfusards. The public debate engendered street battles between the two groups, bitter debates in the French parliament, and a war of words in newspaper editorials around the world. As a result, Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist sent by his newspaper to cover the Dreyfus Affair, founded the modern Zionist movement.

Herzl became convinced by the outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in France during the Dreyfus Affair that Jews would never be treated justly in Christian society. He felt that Jews must have their own nation, both as a refuge for Jews wishing to return to their homeland and as an international representative for Jews living abroad. He further championed the idea that his proposed Jewish nation should be in Palestine.

Consequently, Herzl organized a meeting of Jewish leaders from all over the world in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Many of the Jews who assembled in Basel supported Herzl’s proposals and formed the Zionist movement. Some of the representatives were wealthy and agreed to donate large sums of money to establish Jewish communal farms in Palestine—then dominated by the Ottoman Empire—and subsidize any Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel. Already since 1882, Jews from Russia had begun to return to Palestine in the face of increasing pogroms sponsored by Russian anti-Semites.

Between 1897 and 1914, a few thousand Jews from all parts of the world went to Palestine. The Ottoman government, however, was not willing to absorb large numbers of Jews or allow the Jews an autonomous state within their empire.

Balfour Declaration

During World War I the officials of the Ottoman Empire allied their nation with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Great Britain, France, Russia, and eventually the United States. By 1917, the war had exhausted the resources of its original participants. British government officials desperately attempted to arrange loans in order to buy war materials.

The large Jewish banking house of Rothschild, which had financed many Jewish settlers in Palestine, agreed to loan the British government money if the British would assist in establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war. The British agreed and issued a declaration of their intent called the Balfour Declaration.

Almost simultaneously, T. E. Lawrence, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, promised the Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire independence in return for their aid in fighting on the side of the British. The British government backed up these commitments with the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. These two commitments could not both be kept as they were not compatible. Their mutual incompatibility set the stage for the Arab-Jewish conflict that developed in the area.

In 1919, the League of Nations awarded Palestine to the British as a mandate. British officials agreed to administer the area for ten years, during which time they would prepare the people of the area for independence. The British mandate officials, in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, began permitting large-scale Jewish emigration to Palestine but placed limits on the number of Jews who could enter the mandate each year.

Almost immediately violence erupted between the Jewish settlers and the Muslim inhabitants of the area. The violence escalated during the period between the two world wars, with both sides forming paramilitary organizations to prosecute what became an undeclared war. The British found themselves caught in the middle and often became the target of both Palestinian and Jewish guerrilla organizations.

In 1937, a British investigatory committee concluded that the only solution to the problems faced by the people of Palestine seemed to be the partition of the area into two countries, one Jewish, the other Arab. The report, however, only intensified the violence in the region. The British government responded by releasing the White Paper of 1939, which declared that there would be no partition.

Formation of the State of Israel

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Jewish emigration to Palestine increased greatly, often illegally exceeding the yearly quotas. When World War II erupted in Europe, Jewish leaders proclaimed their allegiance to Great Britain and in effect declared war on Germany. Many Jews fought on the side of the Allies, both in the national armies of the United States, Russia, and Great Britain, and in guerrilla bands in German-occupied Europe and Russia.

The Zionist leaders in Palestine insisted that the quotas on Jewish emigration to Palestine be lifted so that Jews fleeing the Nazi terror could escape Europe. The British refused because they feared that such a policy would prompt the Arabs to ally themselves with Germany. The Zionists responded by helping Jews enter illegally. After the war ended, the Zionists redoubled their efforts to persuade the British mandate officials to allow unlimited emigration to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been in concentration camps and were incarcerated in refugee camps in Europe.

When the British authorities resisted, the Jews used guerrilla warfare against the British and against Palestinians who opposed further Jewish emigration. The violence reached its zenith in 1947 when Jewish guerrillas blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the British mandate officials. Ninety-one people were killed.

The next year the British gave up their role as the mandate power, declared the Palestinian Jewish problem beyond their capabilities to solve, and withdrew from the area. Simultaneously, Zionist leaders declared the formation of the state of Israel under Jewish rule. President Harry S Truman of the United States and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin immediately recognized the legitimacy of the new state and sponsored its membership in the United Nations.

The West Bank includes approximately 2,278 square miles of disputed lands west of the Jordan River between Israel and Jordan. It contains sites of religious and historic significance to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Gaza Strip is a narrow band of desert like land along the western Mediterranean coast, approximately twenty-six miles long and five miles wide.

Members of the United Nations adopted a resolution recognizing Israel but at the same time providing that a Palestinian state should be formed on part of the former territory of the British mandate. Most of the independent Arab states of the Middle East refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel.

Arab-Israeli War

Officials of the Israeli state had hardly declared their independence when their new nation was invaded by the military forces of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. In this first Arab-Israeli War the fighting was indecisive, but hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had to flee from their homes. Most of them took up permanent residence in refugee camps in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan, where they lived in squalid conditions.

Officials of the United States finally brokered an armistice, but both sides continued to carry out guerrilla raids. Finally a US diplomat, Ralph Bunche, managed to hammer out a peace settlement between the belligerents. None of the officials of the Arab states, however, was willing to recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

Between 1948 and 1955, Palestinian guerrillas continued to attack targets inside Israel, which sparked off Israeli retaliation against Palestinians in Israel and the refugee camps. In 1956, with the collaboration of French and British officials, the Israeli military attacked Egypt and occupied the Suez Canal zone in retaliation for Egypt’s attempt to block the Israeli port of Elat on the Gulf of Aqaba.

US President Dwight Eisenhower successfully brought heavy pressure on the Israelis to withdraw from Egypt. The United States, however, was involved in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and needed an ally in the Middle East. Over the ensuing years, Israel became that ally.

A special relationship developed between the two nations, with the United States taking Israel’s side in their dispute with their Arab neighbors, often in the face of hostile world opinion. The US government and military also supplied Israel with arms and subsidized Israeli economic development. Many historians attribute the development of this special relationship to the power of the so-called Jewish Lobby, which subsidized the political campaigns of members of the US Congress. There was also no comparable Arab Lobby to advocate for those opposed to Israel’s control of the area and for those in favor of Palestine.

The Six-Day War

In 1964, Yasir Arafat formed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as an umbrella group to coordinate the activities of all Palestinian guerrilla bands. Increasing guerrilla attacks on targets inside Israel spurred increasing Israeli retaliatory attacks on suspected guerrilla outposts in and the refugee camps in neighboring countries. In 1967, military and civilian officials in Israel decided to eliminate at least some of the guerrilla bases by a surprise attack on neighboring Arab countries. Israel also feared an attack and so decided to strike first.

During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli military forces overwhelmingly defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and occupied much strategic territory from which guerrillas had launched attacks against Israel. Israeli forces overran the Golan Heights on their border with Syria and Lebanon and occupied the Negev Desert on their border with Egypt.

The General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution denouncing the Israeli actions as aggression and declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. Despite an unprovoked Israeli attack on a US naval vessel that killed more than 200 American sailors, only a US veto in the Security Council prevented the United Nations from taking military action against Israel.

The Six-Day War shifted the locus of Palestinian guerrilla attacks to Israeli targets outside Israel. The new round of violence reached its zenith with the murder of eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany. The cycle of violence, with the Israelis retaliating for Palestinian guerrilla attacks, continued until 1973.

Yom Kippur War

On the high Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in 1973, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq launched a surprise attack of their own. The attack caught the Israeli military completely unawares, and the attackers destroyed most of the equipment of the Israeli army and air force at the very outset of hostilities. Only a massive effort sponsored by US President Richard Nixon saved Israel from being completely defeated by the Arab states.

Nixon stripped US military forces in Europe and the US of much of their equipment and airlifted planes and tanks to Israel. The Israelis were able, with this aid, to fight off their attackers. The Arab states blamed the US for their defeat and declared an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and its European allies.

The oil embargo created shortages of gasoline and fuel oil in the US and Europe. For the first time, some in the US Congress openly questioned the special relationship between Israel and the United States. The cycle of violence between Palestinians and Jews continued with guerrilla raids and attacks on refugee camps.

In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter arranged what promised to be a breakthrough meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Meeting at Camp David outside Washington, D.C., the two men reached an agreement that established a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt.

The Israelis agreed to give up the territory they had conquered from Egypt during the Six-Day War in return for Egyptian recognition of the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Many people hoped at the time that the Camp David Accords would lead to similar arrangements with the other Arab nations, but this was not to be.

Invasion of Lebanon

In 1982, Israeli officials used the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to Britain as a pretext for invading Lebanon. The Israeli government intended to destroy the power of the PLO in Lebanon, deprive it of its bases there, and drive Arafat out of the country or kill him.

The Israelis allied themselves with Maronite Christian militias in Lebanon, one of which perpetrated the mass murder of several hundred Palestinian refugees. Many people around the world blamed Israel for the massacre, and only another US veto prevented the United Nations from intervening in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

The Israelis succeeded in driving Arafat out of Lebanon. He moved his headquarters to Libya and continued to orchestrate ineffectual guerrilla raids against Israel. The Israeli government seemed to have achieved relative security without a peace settlement with the Arab states of the Middle East, other than Egypt. In 1987, however, the Palestinian people unexpectedly began a revolt that eventually brought Arafat back to the region and promised to end with the creation of a Palestinian state.

In the beginning, the Intifada, as the Palestinians called their rebellion, took the form of Palestinian youths throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and policemen. The rebellion was a grassroots, anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian statehood movement with no leadership. As the years passed, a leadership for the movement did develop and coordinated other activities such as strikes and boycotts of Israeli products. The Israelis reacted to the rebellion with force, equipping their police and soldiers with plastic bullets, which were often fatal when used against Palestinian adolescents and even children. The death toll among Palestinians averaged about one per day for the next two years. Israeli prestige abroad declined precipitously as television audiences around the world watched the escalating violence.

Profile of Israel

Persian Gulf War

In 1991 Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi military forces invaded and occupied the tiny Persian Gulf protectorate of Kuwait. US President George Bush persuaded the United Nations to issue military sanctions against Hussein and organized an international military coalition against him. US-led military forces quickly defeated the Iraqis, but not before Hussein had launched a number of missiles against Israel. The Israelis did not retaliate because they feared the reactions of the other Arab states and the Palestinians, who were solidly behind Hussein.

In 1993, faced with the continuing intifada, hostile public opinion around the world, and increasing US pressure, the Israelis at last recognized the PLO and Arafat as the spokesman for the Palestinian people and opened negotiations. The Israeli government also allowed the creation of an entity called the Palestinian Authority (PA). They recognized Arafat as the head of the PA and began negotiations designed to eventually lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

In 1995, the representatives of Israel and the PA met in Oslo, Norway, to negotiate a timetable for the establishment of the Palestinian state. After the signing of the Oslo Accords, however, further progress toward a settlement of the Palestinian problem slowed to a crawl. In late 1998, Palestinians and Israelis did agree on a partial Israeli evacuation of the West Bank. At the end of the twentieth century, however, a final peace settlement between Israel and its neighbors seemed as elusive as ever.

Twenty-First Century Developments

In 2000, Israel withdrew from Lebanon enough to satisfy the U.N. but this did not end the ongoing war with Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist movement. In the same year, another rebellion was touched off by the Likud politician Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, a site held sacred by Muslims. Elections in Israel did not resolve the issues either, as in 2001, Ehud Barak called for elections to help out his position in the negotiations, but instead Sharon was elected. Violence continued on both sides and Israel began to create a wall around the West Bank, ostensibly for security purposes. Hamas won the elections in the Palestinian Authority in 2006 and pronounced all previous agreements signed with Israel to be null and void. This appeared to put the peace process back to before 1993. Israel blockaded Gaza but claimed that it was not occupying it. In 2006, the staunch Israel-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in Iran, thus increasing tensions in the region.

A new leader of Israel, Ehud Olmert (Likud Party), won election as prime minister in the same year. Olmert pledged to hold direct talks with the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Fatah faction. A number of different meetings were held between the two leaders between 2006 and 2008. However, no agreement was reached, in part due to difficulties over land swaps, the issue of what to do with existing settlements in the West Bank, and the question of how to police Jewish and Palestinian settlements. Meanwhile, the Israeli prime ministership went to the Likud hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009.

In 2010, a new rebellion broke out, led by Hamas and aimed at both disrupting the peace talks and destroying Abbas’s power. An attempt to establish direct talks failed, due in part to Israel’s unwillingness to declare that peace could exist between the two sides, which in turn was fueled by Israel’s concerns over Hamas and Hezbollah. Direct talks were tried again in 2014, but failed. Complicating the entire situation is instability in Lebanon and the ongoing Syrian civil war, along with Iran’s attempts to derail the peace process and destabilize Israel. With the election in the United States of Donald Trump in 2016, the US government announced a shift in policy to the benefit of Israel and its backers. Trump declared in December 2017 that Jerusalem was now recognized by his administration as the Israeli capital, a controversial position given the cultural and historical value of the city to Muslims as well as Jews. (Indeed, the Palestinian Authority had also hoped to make Jerusalem its capital.) At the end of the decade, peace in Israel seemed as far away as ever.

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