Zionism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

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Overview

Zionism is the movement, begun in late nineteenth-century Europe, for a Jewish national home in Palestine. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the long dispute between that movement and the state it created, and the Palestinian Arab population who lived there and who claim national rights in the same land. Israel was founded in 1948, and about 700,000 Palestinians were displaced, an event Palestinians call the Nakba. This guide presents Israeli and Palestinian narratives as their own accounts and does not adopt either as settled fact. It matters because the conflict shapes regional politics and global debate today.

Context

Jews in Europe faced persecution and exclusion, including pogroms in the Russian Empire and the Dreyfus affair in France. Nationalism spread across Europe and the Ottoman world. Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empire with a majority Arab population and a small Jewish community. The First World War and the Holocaust were the turning points that changed the scale and urgency of the conflict.