If you come to the history of Israel and Palestine looking to label Jewish people or Palestinian people as the villain, you’re going to be disappointed.

The real story is harder than that.

It is the story of two peoples who had genuine reasons to be afraid. Two peoples with deep connections to the same small piece of land. Two peoples who wanted something remarkably ordinary: a place where they could live safely as themselves.

And it became a catastrophe.

To understand how, we have to go back before Israel existed, before the Nakba, before the wars and occupations and peace processes, to a time when there was neither a country called Israel nor an independent country called Palestine.

Before the conflict

At the end of the nineteenth century, the land we now call Israel and Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire.

Around half a million people lived there. Most were Arabic-speaking Muslims, alongside substantial Christian communities, Druze, and a much smaller Jewish population with ancient communities centered especially in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias.

The land was also sacred in a way few places on Earth are.

For Jewish people, it was the ancestral Land of Israel, home of the ancient Israelite kingdoms and the place generations had prayed to return to during centuries of diaspora.

For Christians, it was the land where Jesus lived and died.

For Muslims, Jerusalem was al-Quds, home to al-Aqsa Mosque and one of Islam’s holiest places.

For the people actually living there, however, 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 a powerful political idea: that peoples who shared a language, culture, history, or identity should be able to govern themselves. Jewish nationalism and Arab nationalism emerged within that much larger transformation.

And in Palestine, those two movements would eventually make claims to the same land.

Why Zionism emerged

By the late 1800s, centuries of persecution had taught Jewish communities an increasingly frightening lesson: being accepted as a minority could never be counted on.

Jewish people had been expelled, segregated, forcibly converted, attacked, and killed across Europe for centuries. In the Russian Empire, pogroms devastated Jewish communities. Even in Western European countries where Jewish people had gained legal equality, modern antisemitism was growing.

Some Jewish thinkers reached a radical conclusion.

Perhaps Jewish people would never truly be safe until they had a country of their own.

That idea became political Zionism: the movement for Jewish national self-determination.

And for many Zionists, there was an obvious place for that homeland: the land from which the Jewish people traced their ancient origins.

Beginning in the 1880s, waves of Jewish immigrants began arriving there, many fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe. They bought land, established settlements, revived Hebrew as a spoken language, and began building the institutions of a future society.

From their perspective, this was refuge and return.

But there was a problem that would eventually consume both peoples.

Someone was already living there.

Palestine wasn’t empty land

The Arab population of Palestine had towns, farms, villages, families, religious communities, and histories of its own.

And as Jewish immigration increased, Palestinian Arabs increasingly understood that this was not ordinary immigration.

It was connected to a national movement, backed by an empire, that intended to create a Jewish homeland on the same land that was theirs.

At the same time, Arab nationalism was spreading across the weakening Ottoman Empire. Arabic-speaking peoples were developing their own demands for self-government, and a distinct Palestinian identity was growing as well.

So two national movements emerged at roughly the same historical moment.

Jewish people increasingly said: We need a homeland where we can govern ourselves and finally be safe.

Palestinian Arabs said: This is already our homeland.

Both statements contained truth.

That was the problem.

Then an empire started making promises

World War I destroyed the Ottoman Empire, and Britain emerged as the outside power with the greatest influence over Palestine.

What Britain did next helped turn a difficult situation into an explosive one.

During the war, Britain encouraged Arab leaders to revolt against the Ottoman Empire with the implication that Arab independence would follow.

At roughly the same time, Britain and France secretly planned how they would divide much of the former Ottoman territory between themselves.

Then, in 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, announcing its support for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

There was an enormous problem.

Britain was making decisions about a land overwhelmingly inhabited by Arabs without giving those people control over what happened to it.

After the war, Britain took control of Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate and incorporated its commitment to a Jewish national home into the new political arrangement.

Jewish immigration continued.

Palestinian resistance grew.

And Britain spent the next several decades trying, and repeatedly failing, to manage the collision.

Then Hitler came to power

Everything became infinitely more urgent in the 1930s.

As Nazi persecution spread across Europe, Jewish immigration to Palestine surged.

To Jewish refugees, Palestine could mean survival.

To Palestinian Arabs, the rapidly growing Jewish population was the gradual transfer of their homeland to another people under the protection of a foreign empire.

Those two experiences existed simultaneously.

Then came the Holocaust.

Nazi Germany murdered six million Jewish people, roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.

After that, the argument for a Jewish refuge gained more support.

A people without a state had been marked for annihilation, and much of the world had either participated, looked away, or refused to give Jewish refugees somewhere to escape.

For millions of Jewish people, the conclusion seemed undeniable:

Never again could Jewish survival depend entirely on the goodwill of someone else’s government.

But Palestinians confronted the same event with a terrible question of their own.

Why should we lose our homeland because of a crime Europe committed?

Palestinian Arabs had not created Nazi Germany.

They had not built Auschwitz.

They had not carried out Europe’s pogroms.

They had not spent centuries persecuting European Jewish communities.

Yet increasingly, they understood that they were expected to surrender their homeland to solve a catastrophe created somewhere else.

And that brings us to the central tragedy.

The Jewish need for safety was real.

The Palestinian dispossession was real.

One did not make the other disappear.

The world decides to divide the land

By 1947, Britain wanted out.

It 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 would receive special international status.

Jewish leaders accepted the proposal.

Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it.

Again, their reactions make considerably more sense when viewed through their own experiences.

For Jewish people emerging from the Holocaust, international recognition of a Jewish state represented something generations had dreamed about and millions had desperately needed: sovereignty and refuge.

For Palestinian Arabs, the proposal looked very different.

Jewish people were still a minority of the population and owned a relatively small portion of the land, yet the proposed Jewish state would receive more than half the territory.

From the Palestinian perspective, foreign governments were dividing their homeland and giving much of it to another population.

They had never agreed to this.

And now the decision had been made.

There was no peaceful ending waiting at the bottom of this

Within days of the UN partition vote, fighting erupted between Jewish and Arab communities.

Britain prepared to leave.

And two peoples entered 1948 carrying radically different hopes and fears.

Jewish people were on the verge of achieving something that had seemed impossible for centuries: a sovereign Jewish state in their ancestral homeland.

Palestinian Arabs were on the verge of losing the society in which they had lived for generations.

The same event would therefore acquire two names and two memories.

Ha’atzmaut: Independence.

Nakba: Catastrophe.

Understanding this history does not require choosing which people’s suffering counts.

It requires understanding how both arrived at the same moment with something existential was at stake.

The Jewish search for refuge from centuries of persecution was morally understandable.

So was the Palestinian determination not to be dispossessed from their home.

Neither people’s suffering cancels the other’s.

Neither people’s suffering justifies everything done in its name.

And neither people created the larger imperial system that repeatedly treated this land, and the human beings living on it, as pieces on somebody else’s game board.

In 1948, all of those forces finally collided.

Israel would be born.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would lose their homes.

And the unresolved conflict between independence and catastrophe would shape everything that followed.

Next article in this series- Independence and Catastrophe Part 1: 1948