If you come to the history of Israel and Palestine looking for the villain in the Jewish people or the Palestinian people, you are going to be disappointed. The real story is harder than that. It is the story of two peoples with deep connections to the same small piece of land, both shaped by histories that gave them powerful reasons to fear what would happen if someone else controlled their future.
For Jewish people, those fears grew from centuries of persecution and ultimately the Holocaust. For Palestinian Arabs, they grew as they watched a foreign-supported national movement develop in the place where they already lived. By the middle of the twentieth century, both populations increasingly believed something fundamental was at stake: safety, self-determination, homeland, and survival.
To understand how they reached that point, we have to go back before Israel existed, before the Nakba, before occupation and peace processes, and before the conflict had hardened into the political identities we recognize today.
Before the Conflict
At the end of the nineteenth century, the region then commonly known as Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, although it was divided among several Ottoman administrative districts rather than governed as a single province called Palestine. Around half a million people lived in the area. Most were Arabic-speaking Muslims, alongside significant Christian communities, Druze, and a much smaller Jewish population, including old Jewish communities centered especially in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias.
The land also carried extraordinary religious and historical significance. For Jewish people, it was the ancestral Land of Israel, home of the ancient Israelite kingdoms and the place generations had prayed toward and remembered during centuries of diaspora. For Christians, it was the landscape of the life and death of Jesus. For Muslims, Jerusalem was al-Quds, home to al-Aqsa Mosque and one of Islam’s holiest places.
But for the people actually living there, it was also something much simpler.
It was home.
This was also the age of nationalism. Across Europe and the weakening Ottoman Empire, people were increasingly organizing around the idea that groups sharing a language, culture, history, or national identity should be able to govern themselves. Italians and Germans had recently unified national states. Nationalist movements were spreading among Greeks, Serbs, Armenians, Arabs, Jews, and many others.
Jewish nationalism and Arab nationalism developed within this much larger transformation. They did not develop in exactly the same way or on identical timelines, but eventually two national movements would make increasingly incompatible claims to the same land.
Why Zionism Emerged
Jewish attachment to the land did not begin with modern Zionism. Religious, cultural, and historical connections to the Land of Israel stretched back thousands of years, and small Jewish communities had continued to live there throughout the centuries.
Political Zionism was something newer.
By the late nineteenth century, centuries of persecution had taught many European Jews a frightening lesson: acceptance as a minority could never be guaranteed. Jewish communities had endured expulsions, segregation, forced conversions, discriminatory laws, pogroms, and periodic massacres. Even in Western European societies where Jews had gained legal equality, modern antisemitic movements demonstrated how fragile that acceptance could be.
Some Jewish thinkers increasingly concluded that assimilation and legal equality were not enough. Jewish people would never be truly secure, they argued, until they possessed political self-determination and a homeland of their own. That idea developed into modern political Zionism, particularly in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
For most Zionists, Palestine was the natural focus because of the Jewish people’s ancient connection to the land. Beginning in the 1880s, waves of Jewish immigrants arrived, many fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe. They purchased land, established agricultural settlements, revived Hebrew as a modern spoken language, and gradually built schools, political organizations, labor institutions, defense groups, and other foundations of a future society.
From the Zionist perspective, this was both refuge and return. But the land to which they were returning was not empty.
Another people was already living there.
Palestinians Weren’t Waiting for History to Happen
The Arab population of Palestine had its own towns, villages, farms, businesses, religious communities, families, political networks, and generations of attachment to the land. People did not necessarily think about their identity in the same national categories we use today. A person might understand himself simultaneously as Arab, Muslim or Christian, Ottoman, a resident of Jerusalem or Jaffa, and increasingly as Palestinian.
As Zionism developed, Arab nationalism was also spreading through the weakening Ottoman Empire, and a more distinct Palestinian political identity increasingly took shape. Rising Jewish immigration and land purchases helped accelerate that process because Palestinian Arabs increasingly understood that the newcomers were not simply individual immigrants looking for new homes. They were part of an organized national movement seeking to establish a Jewish homeland in the same place Palestinians considered their own.
The basic collision was becoming visible. Jewish nationalists increasingly argued that Jewish people needed a homeland where they could govern themselves and be safe. Palestinian Arabs increasingly answered that this was already their homeland.
Both claims had histories behind them. But history had placed them on the same small piece of earth.
Then an Empire Started Making Promises
World War I destroyed the Ottoman Empire and transformed the political future of the Middle East. Britain emerged from the war as the dominant outside power in Palestine, and decisions made in London would profoundly shape what happened next.
During the war, British officials encouraged an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire while corresponding with Sharif Hussein of Mecca about postwar Arab independence. Exactly which territories Britain had promised became a matter of fierce dispute later, particularly whether Palestine was included.
At roughly the same time, Britain and France were secretly negotiating their own plans for dividing influence over much of the former Ottoman territory. Then came another commitment.
In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, announcing that it viewed “with favour” the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people.”
The declaration also said that nothing should be done to prejudice the “civil and religious rights” of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. But that language contained an enormous imbalance. The Arab population constituted the large majority of the people living there, yet the declaration did not recognize their political or national rights. They appeared simply as the “existing non-Jewish communities.”
Britain had now committed itself to facilitating a Jewish national home in a territory overwhelmingly inhabited by people who had not consented to that project.
After the war, Britain received a League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, and the commitment to a Jewish national home was incorporated into the Mandate. Jewish immigration continued, Zionist institutions grew stronger, and Palestinian opposition intensified.
Britain spent the following decades trying to manage a conflict that its own policies had helped create.
It repeatedly failed.
As Europe Became More Dangerous
The conflict became dramatically more urgent in the 1930s as Adolf Hitler came to power and Nazi persecution intensified. Jewish immigration to Palestine increased sharply. For Jews trying to escape Europe, the question was increasingly not simply where they wanted to live. It was where they could survive.
For Palestinian Arabs, however, rapidly increasing Jewish immigration looked like confirmation of what they had feared. A national movement supported by an imperial government was growing rapidly in their homeland, purchasing land, building institutions, and openly seeking a Jewish national home.
Palestinian resistance culminated in the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939. Britain crushed the revolt, weakening Palestinian political and military leadership in ways that would matter enormously less than a decade later.
Then British policy shifted again.
In 1939, with Europe on the edge of war, Britain issued a White Paper sharply restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine. It limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 people over the following five years, after which further immigration would require Arab consent.
The timing could hardly have been worse for Europe’s Jews.
Then Came the Holocaust
Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews, roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.
After the Holocaust, the argument for a Jewish refuge was no longer theoretical. A people without a state had been marked for annihilation, while governments around the world had restricted immigration, turned away refugees, or failed to provide escape routes on anything approaching the scale required.
For many Jewish survivors and Zionists, the lesson was devastatingly clear: Jewish survival could never again depend entirely on whether someone else’s government was willing to protect them or let them in.
But the Holocaust created a terrible political question for Palestinians as well.
Palestinian Arabs had not created Nazi Germany. They had not built Auschwitz or carried out Europe’s centuries of antisemitic persecution. Yet to many Palestinians, the proposed solution to a catastrophe created largely in Europe increasingly appeared to require them to surrender part of their own homeland.
From the Palestinian perspective, the question was painfully straightforward: Why should we lose our homeland because of a crime Europe committed?
The Jewish need for safety was real, and so was the Palestinian fear of dispossession. Recognizing one does not require diminishing the other. By the end of World War II, however, those fears were colliding within a political system neither population fully controlled, and the possibility of compromise was rapidly disappearing.
The World Decides to Divide the Land
By 1947, Britain wanted out. Exhausted by war, violence in Palestine, and the seemingly impossible task of reconciling the two national movements, Britain turned the problem over to the newly created United Nations.
The UN proposed partition.
Palestine would be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state, while Jerusalem and its surrounding area would receive a special international status. The proposed Jewish state would receive roughly 56 percent of the territory and the Arab state about 43 percent.
Those numbers require context. Jewish people made up roughly one-third of Palestine’s population and privately owned a relatively small percentage of its land. At the same time, a substantial portion of the territory assigned to the Jewish state was the sparsely populated Negev desert. The proposed Jewish state would also contain a very large Arab population, making its demographic future uncertain from the beginning.
The mainstream Zionist leadership, represented by the Jewish Agency, accepted partition, even though not every Zionist faction was satisfied with the proposed borders. For Jewish people emerging from the Holocaust and decades of uncertainty, international recognition of a sovereign Jewish state represented something generations had dreamed of and millions had desperately needed.
Palestinian Arab leaders rejected the plan, as did the surrounding Arab states. From their perspective, an international organization dominated by foreign governments had decided to divide a country whose population was still majority Arab and award more than half of its territory to a Jewish state.
They had not consented to partition.
And they did not accept the UN’s authority to impose it.
There Was No Peaceful Ending Waiting
The United Nations could draw borders on a map. It could not make the people living inside those borders agree to them.
Within days of the partition vote in November 1947, fighting erupted between Jewish and Arab communities. Britain prepared to leave, and the authority that had governed Palestine for decades began disappearing before anything capable of replacing it had been agreed upon.
The year that followed would enter Israeli and Palestinian national memory in profoundly different ways. For Jewish Israelis, 1948 would become Ha’atzmaut, Independence, the creation of a sovereign Jewish state after centuries of persecution and three years after the Holocaust.
For Palestinians, 1948 would become the Nakba, the Catastrophe, a broader experience of war, displacement, dispossession, and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian communities.
Understanding how the conflict reached that point does not require deciding that only one people’s suffering matters. It does require resisting the temptation to flatten very different histories into identical experiences.
European antisemitism was not created by Palestinians. Palestinian dispossession was not simply another name for Jewish persecution. Zionism emerged in response to genuine Jewish vulnerability and an ancient connection to the land. Palestinian resistance emerged from a population that already lived there and increasingly feared losing political control of its home. Britain and other outside powers made decisions that profoundly affected both populations, often according to their own strategic interests.
These truths do not cancel one another.
They collide.
And in 1948, that collision would transform the land completely. Israel would be born. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would lose their homes. Borders would change, communities would disappear, refugees would scatter across the region, and the unresolved questions created during these decades would become the foundation of a conflict that continues today.
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