Palestine

The 1946 Survey of Palestine calculated the region's total land area at 26,320 square kilometers (10,162 square miles), with 704 square kilometers of inland water, for an overall area of 27,024 square kilometers.[6] Seven principal geographic regions were identified: the maritime plain, the coastal plain of Acre, the Esdraelon and Jezreel plains, the central range of Judea and Samaria, the hills of Galilee, the Jordan Valley, and the Beersheba district (the Negev), which alone covered approximately 12,576 square kilometers — nearly half of the country's land area.[6] A Ben-Gurion University research record states that the Negev comprised approximately half of Palestine's land area and that the associated study reviewed 375 historical maps covering portions of the region between 1799 and 1948.[7]

The Gaza Strip is a densely populated coastal strip approximately 25 miles long and 7 miles wide, situated between Israel and Egypt.[8] The West Bank — Judea and Samaria — is a hilly 2,183-square-mile territory bordered by Jordan, the Dead Sea, and Israel, with more fertile terrain in the north and largely barren terrain in the south.[5][2] The 1946 Survey organized the Mandate's territory into six districts — Gaza, Lydda, Jerusalem, Samaria, Haifa, and Galilee — with administrative headquarters in Gaza, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Nablus, Haifa, and Nazareth respectively.[6]

At the end of Ottoman rule, the territory was divided into three administrative units called sanjaqs. The Acre and Nablus sanjaqs belonged to the Vilayet of Beirut, while the Jerusalem Sanjaq — covering roughly the later districts of Jerusalem, Lydda, and Gaza — was administered directly by the Ottoman government in Constantinople. Palestine was therefore not a single Ottoman administrative entity but a territory divided among several jurisdictions.[6]

The name Palestine derives from the Hebrew Peleshet and related ancient Egyptian and Assyrian forms referring to the Philistines, who settled a coastal area near present-day Gaza.[1][2] Herodotus first employed it as a geographic label in the mid-fifth century BCE, using the phrase "the Philistine Syria"; over subsequent centuries the term evolved from a descriptive designation into a proper noun.[1] In Talmudic literature, Palestine denoted a Roman province rather than an indigenous Hebrew concept, and from the fourth century CE the Land of Israel was divided into provinces officially styled First, Second, and Third Palestine.[1]

After the fall of the Crusader kingdom, Palestine ceased to function as an official administrative designation, yet it continued in non-Jewish languages as a name for the Holy Land on both sides of the Jordan River.[1] Under the Ottoman Empire, the region was not governed as a province called Palestine; instead it formed part of broader Ottoman provincial structures, including the sanjaqs described above.[1][6] The territory later designated Mandatory Palestine was commonly called "Palestine" in English in the late nineteenth century, but it remained administratively fragmented, with parts governed through the vilayets of Beirut and Syria and the independent Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem.[9]

When Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the territory later associated with Mandatory Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, governed not as a single unit but through overlapping provincial structures.[9] The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry reported that, before World War I, the area had no separate existence as a single Ottoman administrative unit, and that its population was approximately 689,000: about 85,000 Jews, a great majority of Muslims, and somewhat less than ten percent Christians.[10] The economy was overwhelmingly agricultural and the general standard of living was low.[10]

British forces under General Allenby occupied the territory in 1917–1918 following the Ottoman defeat in World War I.[11] A British military administration headquartered in Jerusalem was established at the end of 1917.[11] On 2 November 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for establishing "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine while stipulating that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities, or the rights and political status of Jews in other countries.[9][6] These simultaneously stated commitments to Jewish national aspirations and to the civil and religious rights of the existing population became central to the Mandate's contested political framework.

The transition from Ottoman sovereignty to British civil administration proceeded through several formal stages. On 25 April 1920, the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers at San Remo allotted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain.[11][6] On 1 July 1920, British civil administration replaced the military government and Sir Herbert Samuel became the first High Commissioner.[6] The Treaty of Sèvres formally renounced Turkish sovereignty over Palestine on 10 August 1920; the League of Nations Council approved the Mandate on 24 July 1922; and the Mandate formally came into operation on 29 September 1923, after the Treaty of Lausanne entered into force.[6]

The Mandate's preamble incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration and expressly recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home.[12] Under Article 2, Britain was made responsible for creating the political, administrative, and economic conditions securing that national home, developing self-governing institutions, and safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all inhabitants irrespective of race or religion.[12][11] The Mandate required Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and to encourage close Jewish settlement on the land, while recognizing the Zionist Organization — subject to British approval — as the appropriate Jewish agency to advise and cooperate with the administration.[12][6] English, Arabic, and Hebrew were designated the three official languages of Palestine.[12][6]

The Mandate also guaranteed freedom of conscience and worship, prohibited discrimination on grounds of race, religion, or language, and protected each community's right to maintain schools in its own language.[12] Article 25 authorized Britain, with League of Nations consent, to postpone or withhold the application of Mandate provisions in the territories between the Jordan River and Palestine's eastern boundary — a provision used in establishing Transjordan as a separate administration.[1][12]

Britain's obligation to carry out the Balfour Declaration's promises was incorporated into the Mandate agreement itself, making implementation an international commitment rather than merely a domestic policy.[9] The British White Paper of 1939 subsequently proposed strict restrictions on Jewish immigration — limiting it to 75,000 people over five years, after which further immigration would require Palestinian Arab consent — and authorized restrictions on transfers of land from Arab to Jewish ownership.[11] The immigration quota was exhausted by the end of 1945.[6] Zionist representatives rejected the White Paper, while Arab representatives criticized its transitional arrangements and the continuing British role.[11]

Britain faced political pressure from both communities throughout the Mandate period. Arab leaders boycotted proposed elections in 1923, rejecting participation in a system they believed required acceptance of the Balfour Declaration; only a fraction of possible Muslim and Christian secondary electors were chosen, and the elections were annulled in May 1923. The High Commissioner subsequently governed with councils composed exclusively of British officials.[11] Britain announced on 18 February 1947 that it would refer the Palestine question to the United Nations, concluding that the Mandate had become unworkable and that its obligations to the two communities had proved irreconcilable. The territory then contained approximately 1.2 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews.[11]

Recurring violence punctuated the Mandate from its earliest years. In the May 1921 disturbances, 47 Jews were killed and 146 wounded.[11] During the disorders of 23–29 August 1929, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed, while 339 Jews and 232 Arabs were wounded.[11] The Shaw Commission attributed the 1929 violence principally to Arab political and national frustration, fear of the economic future, and hostility linked to Jewish immigration and Zionist policy.[11]

The most sustained period of unrest was the Arab Rebellion, which began in April 1936 following attacks near Tulkarm, Nablus, and Petah Tikva.[11] Arab political leaders called a general strike and formed the Supreme Arab Committee under the presidency of the Mufti of Jerusalem, demanding suspension of Jewish immigration.[11] The rebellion involved attacks on Jewish property and settlements, sabotage of railways and telephone lines, and attacks on British forces, continuing in diminished form through 1939.[11] The 1936 disturbances alone produced a six-month total of 314 people killed and 1,337 wounded.[6]

The Royal Commission of 1937 — the Peel Commission — identified Arab demands for national independence and Arab hostility toward the Jewish National Home as the underlying causes of the disturbances.[11] It concluded that the Mandate's obligations had become mutually irreconcilable and recommended terminating the Mandate and partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab area to be largely incorporated into Transjordan, and a British-controlled enclave including Jerusalem and Bethlehem.[11] The Arab community rejected partition, while Zionist opinion was divided over the principle and rejected the proposed frontiers.[11]

By 1936, Palestine's settled population was approximately 1.3 million, including an estimated 384,000 Jews whose share had risen from 13 percent in 1922 to nearly 30 percent.[11] By the eve of the Mandate's end, the settled population stood at approximately 1.887 million, including about 625,000 Jews.[11] Britain's conclusion that neither community's core demands could be satisfied within a single administrative framework led to the February 1947 decision to refer the question to the United Nations.[11]

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted on Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Mandatory Palestine into one Jewish state and one Arab state, with Jerusalem designated as a corpus separatum — a separate entity administered by the United Nations.[13][14] The resolution passed by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions.[14] The proposed Jewish state covered approximately 5,600 square miles and included about 550,000 Jews and 500,000 Arabs; the proposed Arab state covered about 4,400 square miles and included about 745,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews; Jerusalem's proposed population was roughly equal at 100,000 Arabs and 100,000 Jews.[13]

The plan recommended two roughly equal states that would cooperate on economic matters, including currency, roads, and government services.[14] Zionist leaders accepted the proposal; Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states rejected it.[14] Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha told Jewish Agency representatives that the Arab world would reject compromise and fight the proposal.[15] David Ben-Gurion responded to the vote: "I could not dance. I knew we faced war, and that in it we will lose the best of our youth."[15]

No government was established for the Arab portion of Palestine as the resolution envisaged, and fighting between Arab and Jewish irregular forces began before the Mandate formally ended.[13] The British Mandate ended on 15 May 1948, and forces from five Arab states — Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon — invaded as the new State of Israel came into being.[13][4] Israel's proclamation of independence did not define its boundaries, although its concurrent request for American recognition referenced the boundaries contemplated in the 29 November resolution.[13]

David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's establishment on 14 May 1948, when Britain ended its rule in Palestine.[4] The ensuing War of Independence — which Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe — fundamentally altered the region's demographic and political geography.[16] Approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from territory under Israeli control during the 1948 hostilities, moving to areas of Palestine under Arab military occupation and to neighboring Arab states.[13] Territory under Israeli control or military occupation at the war's conclusion totaled about 7,750 square miles.[13]

After the war, Jordan controlled the West Bank — Judea and Samaria — and East Jerusalem, while Egypt administered the Gaza Strip and Israel controlled the remainder of the former Mandate territory.[4] No Arab state was established in any part of Mandatory Palestine as the partition resolution had envisaged.[13] The Palestinian refugee issue remained unresolved and was among the questions that the Oslo agreements anticipated for later permanent-status negotiations.[5]

Israel captured the West Bank — Judea and Samaria — from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt during the June 1967 Six-Day War, gaining control of all of Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River.[5][5] Since 1967, Israel has maintained military administration over the West Bank while permitting limited Palestinian self-rule under arrangements subsequently created through the Oslo process.[5] Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005 while retaining control of Gaza's airspace and land and maritime access points.[17]

The West Bank is a 2,183-square-mile hilly territory bordered by Jordan, the Dead Sea, and Israel.[5] The Gaza Strip is a densely populated coastal strip approximately 25 miles long and 7 miles wide.[8] Under the Oslo-related redeployments, the West Bank was divided into three administrative zones: the Palestinian Authority exercises full civil and security control in Area A, civil control and shared security control in Area B, while Israel retains full civil and security control in Area C.[5]

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded on 2 June 1964 with the stated aim to "mobilize the Palestinian people to recover their usurped homeland."[4] Yasser Arafat began leading it in 1969.[2] The First Intifada erupted on 9 December 1987, when protests broke out in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.[4]

Oslo I was signed on 13 September 1993 and Oslo II in 1995; together they established an interim Palestinian self-governing authority — the Palestinian Authority — to administer parts of the West Bank and Gaza, and they anticipated further negotiations over borders, refugees, and Jerusalem.[5][4] The 1993 Oslo Agreement established the PA, which came into being in 1994.[18] Yasser Arafat served as its first president; after his death in 2004, Mahmoud Abbas succeeded him.[18]

The PA was conceived as an interim institution intended to be replaced by an independent, democratically elected Palestinian government following a final peace agreement.[18] The 1990s were described as a period in which cornerstones for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence were laid, including mutual acceptance, renunciation of violence as a permanent strategy, and the establishment of Palestinian self-government.[19] The Second Intifada began on 28 September 2000 following Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.[4] The violence of the early twenty-first century crippled Palestinian political institutions and damaged the social cohesion that had developed after 1967.[19]

In January 2006, Hamas won 74 of 132 seats in Palestinian Legislative Council elections, with Fatah winning 45 seats.[18] Israel, the United States, and the European Union confined their relations to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rather than engaging the Hamas-led cabinet.[17] Tensions between Hamas and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority culminated in Hamas's violent seizure of Gaza in June 2007, ending PA governance there.[18] After the takeover, Abbas reorganized the Palestinian Authority cabinet to lead the West Bank, and Israel and Egypt tightened controls on goods and people transiting Gaza.[17]

The Congressional Research Service describes Fatah as a secular Arab nationalist faction and the driving force within the PLO, while describing Hamas as an Iran-backed Sunni Islamist group designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization.[17] Hamas has not accepted the PLO's recognition of Israel.[17] Reconciliation efforts between Hamas and Fatah since 2007 have produced agreements with limited and short-lived effects.[18] Palestinian rule remains divided: the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, controls limited areas of the West Bank, while Hamas controls Gaza.[17]

A Jewish Review of Books essay describes the modern Palestinian national movement as emerging alongside the Zionist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and characterizes the outcome of the War of Independence as leaving Palestinian Arabs stateless, fragmented, and dispersed.[16] The same essay describes the PLO as becoming a major participant in Arab politics after 1967 and Jordan's later relinquishment of its claim to the West Bank — which it had held from 1948 to 1967 — as further consolidating the PLO's position.[16]

Research on Palestinian political development traces the formation of organizations including the Sons of Nakba and Fatah, the reframing of Jordan's relationship to the Palestinian cause, and the creation and evolving expression of Palestinian nationalism through the 1967 war.[20] The Palestinian Authority represents Palestinians internationally alongside the PLO, which continues as the umbrella organization recognized by Arab states and much of the international community.[18][18]

The U.S. Congressional Research Service defines Palestinians as an Arab people whose origins are in present-day Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, or as Arabs living in those areas or having historical and cultural ties to them.[17] It also notes that the borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip remain subject to Israeli-Palestinian negotiation.[17] No final-status agreement has resolved the questions of borders, refugees, Jerusalem, or Palestinian statehood.

The history of Palestine during the British Mandate and the 1948 war has generated sustained debate, particularly over Palestinian displacement. A 1949 U.S. government record estimated that approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the hostilities.[13] A Ben-Gurion University research record describes later scholarship examining Israeli decisions, the reasons for the mass Arab exile, cases such as the transfer of Majdal's Arabs to Gaza in 1950, the absorption of refugees in Arab host countries, and the reasons some Arabs remained in their villages.[21]

Historical cartography has also been used to study the Negev during the Mandate period. A Ben-Gurion University research record describes a GIS study of 375 historical maps covering parts or all of the Negev between 1799 and 1948, addressing settlement, agriculture, imperial mapping, legal geography, and the sedentarization of Bedouin populations. It reports that Palestine Exploration Fund surveys from 1872 to 1890 reduced map errors to several hundred meters, while later British maps achieved errors below 100 meters.[7]

Scholarship describes the 1990s peace process as a period when cornerstones of coexistence were laid, including mutual recognition and Palestinian self-government, while concluding that the Second Intifada's violence damaged Palestinian political institutions and social cohesion.[19] The 1947 British historical memorandum also records the Mandate's constitutional failures, official inquiries into violence during the 1920s and 1930s, and the divided Zionist and Arab reactions to the Peel Commission's partition recommendation.[11]

The first census of the Mandate, conducted on 23 October 1922, recorded approximately 752,048 inhabitants, including nomads: roughly 84,000 Jews and approximately 650,000 Arabs.[11][6] The census covered only the territory west of the Jordan because Transjordan was under separate administration, and a later British census report gave Palestine a land area of 25,483 square kilometers.[22] By the second census in 1931, the population had reached 1,035,821: 759,712 Muslims (73 percent), 174,610 Jews (17 percent), and 91,398 Christians (9 percent).[22] Between the two censuses, the Jewish population increased by 108 percent while the total population grew by 37 percent.[22]

The 1931 census reported that 73,195 members of the Jewish population — about 42 percent — had been born in Palestine, while 101,415, or 58 percent, had been born elsewhere.[22] Of those born abroad, 79 percent had come from European countries; nearly 45 percent of the European-born group had emigrated from Poland and 34 percent from Russia.[22] The census described the Jewish community as possessing political organs, schools, religious institutions, Hebrew-language activity, and a distinct economic and social organization.[22]

Official estimates reproduced by the Anglo-American Committee placed Palestine's population at 750,000 in 1922 and 1,765,000 at the end of 1944.[23] The Jewish population rose from 84,000 (13 percent) to 554,000 (31 percent), with three-fourths of that expansion attributed to immigration.[23] The Muslim population rose from 589,000 to 1,061,000 — an increase of 472,000, of which only 19,000 was attributed to immigration.[23] Christians numbered 136,000 at the end of 1944.[23]

The Anglo-American Committee recorded average annual natural-increase rates per 1,000 for 1941–1944 of 30.71 for Muslims, 17.83 for Jews, and 18.89 for Christians.[23] It attributed the high Arab natural-increase rate partly to declining mortality, especially infant mortality, as well as the disappearance of Ottoman-era conscription and a reduced incidence of malaria.[23] The 1946 Survey calculated that between 1922 and the end of 1944 the total population increase of 987,576 was composed of 622,247 from natural increase and 365,329 from migration; for the Jewish population specifically, 74 percent of the increase was migratory.[6]

Population figures for the Palestinian territories vary substantially depending on geographic definitions, methodological choices, treatment of East Jerusalem, and whether estimates measure legal residents or people physically present. A November 2017 Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics census counted 4,705,600 people: 2,830,300 in the West Bank, including 281,200 in East Jerusalem, and 1,875,300 in Gaza.[24] That total was approximately 250,000 below a PCBS projection of 4,952,168; the Jerusalem figure was characterized as an undercount because Palestinian census-takers had limited access to the city.[24]

A 2024 demographic report gave an adjusted estimate for the West Bank and Gaza at the beginning of 2024 of 4,928,100 people: 2,818,100 in the West Bank and 2,110,000 in Gaza, excluding East Jerusalem and people who had lived abroad for one year or more.[24] A PCBS projection using its own territorial definition estimated 5,483,450 people: 3,256,906 in the West Bank including East Jerusalem and 2,226,544 in Gaza.[24] The Congressional Research Service estimates that about 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and 2.1 million in Gaza, that approximately 98 percent are Sunni Muslim with a small Christian minority, and that another 2 million Palestinians live in Israel as citizens.[17] It also reports that around 5.9 million Palestinians in the Middle East are registered refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.[17]

Before World War I, the regional economy was overwhelmingly agricultural and the general standard of living was low.[10] During the Mandate, the coastal plain contained ports, towns, industries, and intensive citrus cultivation, while the Arab economy remained predominantly rural and the Jewish economy underwent substantial industrial development.[23] The two sectors nevertheless had points of contact, including shared participation in citriculture and some trade in agricultural products.[23]

The Mandate recognized English, Arabic, and Hebrew as official languages and protected each community's right to maintain schools in its own language.[12] The 1931 census described the Jewish community as maintaining political, educational, religious, linguistic, economic, and social institutions, while later Palestinian national organizations developed their own institutions and political identity.[22][20]

Jerusalem's religious and political importance was reflected in both the Palestine Mandate, which assigned special responsibilities concerning the Holy Places, and the 1947 UN partition plan, which proposed that the city become a corpus separatum administered by the United Nations.[12][13] The Temple Mount was also the site of Ariel Sharon's September 2000 visit immediately preceding the riots and protests associated with the beginning of the Second Intifada.[4]

Judea and Samaria contains sites central to Jewish historical continuity, including the Tombs of Joseph and Rachel and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.[5] The territory has maintained a near-continuous Jewish presence for thousands of years and also includes major contemporary Palestinian cities such as Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, and Hebron.[5]