Historic Jewish Polities in Palestine
The last independent Jewish entity prior to the establishment of the modern state of Israel was the Hasmonaean Kingdom, which ceased to be independent in 63 BCE and was displaced completely in 37 BCE by King Herod, who was installed by Rome. Herod's client Kingdom of Judea ceased to exist upon Herod's death around 4 BCE. After Herod's death no independent Jewish political entity existed in Palestine, or anywhere else, until 1948. Despite there being no independent Jewish state post-Herod, Judea and the surrounding area continued to be the cultural and religious home of the Jews. There were Jewish communities in many cities of the Roman and Persian Empires, but Jerusalem and Judea were still regarded as "home". In around 70 CE the Romans defeated a Jewish r
evolt, destroyed the Temple and deported hundreds of thousands. After successive revolts, Jews were banned from Jerusalem, but not Judea, which was renamed Syria Palaestina. The name Palaestina derived from "Philistia", i.e. the land of the Philistines.
Continuous Jewish Presence in Palestine
Nonetheless, Jews were never completely driven from Palestine. The population totals and percentages are unreliable and appear to to have waxed and waned in cycles before the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, but there were always at least some Jewish presence in what had previously been Judea. Not only native-born Jews, but immigrants from Europe fleeing persecution as well. Population figures become more reliable during the reign of the Ottomans, 1516 through the end of World War I. (1516 was when the Ottomans conquered Jerusalem — the empire existed before that date) Jewish population according to Ottoman censuses remained a steady 5,000 from the 1530's through the 1800 census. The total population was around 156,000, increasing to 275,000 in 1800. The Ottoman Palestine region roughly corresponded to modern Israel, plus the occupied Palestinian territories and the Kingdom of Jordan. There are no reliable figures for that area excluding what is now Jordan. (Throughout this time Palestine, including what is now Jordan, was simply a geographical term, like "The Midwest U.S." that is descriptive, but has no legal or political meaning. Palestine at this time was part of the Ottoman province of Syria.)
Palestine As the Ancestral Home of the Jews
During this time, although there was recognition that Palestine was the location of their ancestral home, it doesn't appear that there was any indication that the area was a political Jewish homeland of any sort. On the contrary, Palestinian Jews were a religious minority living amid a Muslim majority in a Muslim-ruled empire, similar to how European Jews at the time were a religious minority living amid a Christian majority in Christian-ruled lands.
The Ottoman Empire
It must be emphasized the Ottomans did not view their various provinces as potential independent nations, or even as "homelands" of various ethnic groups, but as simply administrative divisions, analogous to counties within an American state. Individual subjects were categorized according to their religion with Muslims at the top, with "Greeks" and "Armenians" next and Jews last. In the 1500's the Catholic rulers of Spain and Portugal expelled Jews from their realm. These Jews, known as Sephardim, were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire. Once welcomed into Ottoman lands, many Sephardim settled in the center of the empire, in what is now Turkey, although many spread throughout other Ottoman lands, including Palestine.
During the 19th Century Jews continued to relocate from other parts of the empire and immigration into Palestine from outside the empire continued. Much of the immigration was driven by persecution that occurred not only in Europe, but in the empire itself and other Muslim nations such as Egypt. During the 1800's Jews continued to be a presence in Palestine, although never more than a small minority. This was the situation in the late 1800's as Zionism cohered and established itself. Despite the lack of a Jewish state, there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the area that is now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories. Though a minority, Jews were clearly a people indigenous to the area.
A detail that is often overlooked when considering the political situation in the former Ottoman lands is that the Ottomans, though Muslim, were not Arabs, but Turks. The various peoples whose descendants are today's Arabs were a variety of tribes, nations and nomads mainly from the Arabian peninsula and Syrian desert. Over the centuries various kingdoms and nations rose and fell until the Muslim conquests united the disparate peoples around the Muslim religion and the Arabic language.
Arabs in Palestine
There have been Muslim (and Christian) Arabs in the area known as Palestine for centuries. Following the takeover of the area by Rome in the first century BCE it was a Jewish enclave ruled by Rome. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire continued to rule, although the area was disputed with the various Persian Empires and passed back and forth between them and Rome along with the Syria and the rest of the Levant. Even after the Arab conquests of the seventh century, the borderlands that comprised present-day Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Jordan sometimes reverted to Roman rule. In the eleventh century the Crusaders conquered parts of "The Holy Land", but after several centuries of back-and-forth with various Muslim armies they permanently lost control to a Muslim Caliphate, securing a permanent Muslim majority presence among the population, with Christian and Jewish minorities. Eventually the Arab Caliphs were displaced by the Turkish Ottomans, who ruled the area until the end of World War I.
While there was definitely an uninterrupted presence of Muslim Arabs in Palestine for at least 500 years, that is not to say that every modern Palestinian is descended from Islamic Conquest Era Arabs. While this may be true, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was significant immigration into Palestine from other parts of the empire. There were significant waves of immigration from Egypt due to famines and internal conflict. One study suggests that approximately one sixth of the population of Egypt relocated to Palestine by the nineteenth century. Maghrebis, i.e. Algerians, emigrated after a rebellion. Many Palestinians are descended from Albanians, Bosnians or Kosovars from the Ottoman European regions as the Empire resettled various groups. There are even suggestions that many of today's Palestinian Muslims are descendants of Jews or Christians whose ancestors had converted centuries previously.
A claim that is sometimes made is that today's Palestinians (and sometimes today's Jews) are descendants of the Biblical era Canaanites, who were the inhabitants of the land before the Exodus according to the Bible. The Bible, as well as archeology, identifies Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites (Herod was an Edomite) and Midianites. This is possible, however Canaanites (and their subgroups) ceased to be an identifiable ethnic group as the Muslim conquests subsumed conquered peoples into "Arabs".
In the land that makes up modern Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories, both Jews and Muslim Arabs have had an uninterrupted presence and had been ruled by foreign empires for centuries. The Arabs were a large majority, but the Jews never disappeared. Both should be considered indigenous.
Zionism
Zionism is a movement that originated in the late 1800's that supported the creation of a political homeland for the Jews as a solution for the ongoing persecutions, expulsions, and pogroms that bedeviled them throughout their modern history. Not all Zionists saw Palestine as the home they were seeking to establish. Alternatives in Argentina, Cyprus and East Africa were considered and eventually rejected. As the twentieth century began, the focus was on Palestine. The 1880's saw the first wave of wholesale immigration of Jews into Palestine from Eastern Europe with a second wave from Russia and Poland in the first decade of the twentieth century. Jews began to buy land throughout Palestine, and continued to emigrate from Europe and from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, increasing their numbers substantially, but were still a minority of around 30-35%.
League of Nations Mandates
Things changed in November 1918. The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side in the First World War and was dismembered with the allies, particularly The United Kingdom and France, dividing up the empire into various "mandates" under the aegis of the newly formed League of Nations. The end goal was to form independent nations from the various parts of the former empire. The British were responsible for the Mandate of Palestine, which included what is now the State of Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and briefly the Emirate of Transjordan which was immediately broken off as a British Protectorate as a payback to the Hashemite family.
Prior to First World War many constituent ethnicities in the multinational empires began to agitate for independence. In Europe, most of these achieved independence after World War I as ethno-states, including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, carved out from Austria Hungary, and Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia from Germany and Russia. In the Ottoman Empire, their European territories, Greece and Bulgaria, were granted national status. In the eastern regions, it was different.
Pan-Arab Independence Movement
The Arabs had begun to push for independence from the Turkish Ottoman Empire before the war. Arab leaders worked with the allies, who promised them independence if they worked with them to defeat the Ottomans. Many Arab leaders envisioned a Pan-Arab state, which would include all the Arab lands, but Britain and France divided the Arab lands into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Palestine and Transjordan under League of Nations Mandates.
Hashemites
The House of Hashim, also known as the Hashemites, worked with the Europeans during the war. After the defeat of the Ottomans the head of the family was installed as King of Hejaz. Hejaz was a region of what is now Saudi Arabia. The Hejaz was later forcibly incorporated by the rival Saud family into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Other Hashemites were installed as Kings of Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan as reward for their wartime assistance and as partial compensation for their loss of Hejaz.
Nation Building by France and the United Kingdom
The borders of the new nations were drawn up with little or no consultation with the inhabitants. Despite being majority Muslim and majority Arab, these territories were not homogenous. Sunni and Shi'a Muslim populations were thrown together even though they had few commonalities. Large ethnic groups such as the Kurds, among others, were incorporated into majority Arab nations. I doubt that pre-independence anyone in these nations thought of themselves as an Iraqi, a Syrian, a Jordanian, but likely identified simply as an Arab, a Turkmen, an Assyrian, or a Kurd. The borders drawn by the Europeans imposed nationalities upon these people that they had not decided for themselves.
United Nations Partition Plan
By the onset of World War II all the former Ottoman territories had become independent, except for Palestine (other than the portion split off to form Transjordan). The government of the United Kingdom had promised the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. This was violently opposed by much of the Arab population. Eventually Britain abandoned its oversight of Palestine and the United Nations took over the task of deciding the fate of the territory. By this time Jews were still a minority, less than a third of the total population, but they had bought up large amounts of the land and were the majority all along the Mediterranean coast and in the highlands adjacent to Syria.
The United Nations presented a partition plan that allocated the coastal areas and a few other areas where Jews were a majority to a Jewish state, as well as the Negev desert, which was sparsely populated. The Arab state would include what we now call the West Bank, Gaza and other lands bordering Egypt, as well as the Golan Heights next to Lebanon. Including the Negev, the Jewish portion was around 55% of the total land and included most major cities; the 45% Arab portion included more arable land. You can see on the accompanying map that other than the Negev Desert (that large triangular area in the south) that the Jewish part of the partition was mostly a thin sliver along the coast.
Arab Rejection of the Partition and Civil War
The Arab leadership rejected the partition plan, arguing against several details that they thought were unfair, as well as the very idea of a Jewish state. In the aftermath of the United Nations Resolution endorsing the partition, violence broke out. Gangs and what can be described as terrorist groups from both the Arab and Jewish population began attacks upon each other and upon the British. The Jewish groups received financial support from Jewish groups in the United States and other nations — Arab militias from Arab nations, and even from Bosnia. Former SS officers from Germany joined the Palestinian cause; several hundred British deserters did as well. The ubiquitous violence caused civilians, mostly Palestinians, to flee to neighboring countries. Initially around 100,000 Arab civilians left, mostly people of means or with connections abroad. As the civil war continued throughout 1947 and early 1948 there was discussion among Jewish leaders, the United Kingdom and King Abdullah of Transjordan for Transjordan to annex Palestine and offer Jews autonomy within the Hashemite Kingdom. This plan was adjusted to annexing only the Arab part of Palestine. No action was taken at that time.
By early 1948 there was an exodus of another 350,000 Palestinians. By the end of the Arab nations' invasion after the declaration of independence of Israel a total of around 700,000 Palestinians had fled from their homes, about 80-90% of the Arab population of the Jewish region of Palestine. People left for a variety of reasons: simple fear of being caught in the crossfire of the two armed militias; Arab leaders evacuating their people in order to use their villages as military bases; and expulsion by the Jewish militias. In contrast to the later Israeli Law of Return, Palestinian refugees were not accorded the right to return to their homes and cities after the war. Palestinian homes and other property were appropriated by Jews or by the state.
Israel Declares Independence After decisively defeating the various Arab forces in the civil war Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948 and was immediately attacked by the armies of its Arab neighbors. Israel won that brief war, which lasted until March 1949, repelling the attackers. When the dust settled, Israel was independent, but the Palestinian State was not; it's assigned territory had been occupied, not by Israel, but by Jordan and Egypt. This is a detail that many supporters of a free Palestine miss or ignore. The opportunity for a Palestinian State was rejected by the Arabs in 1948 in favor of an attempt to take over 100% of Palestine. When the brief war ended, the Arabs still could have formed a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, but those lands were occupied by Jordan and Egypt for 19 years. In the aftermath, Israel captured additional territory. The map on the right shows a comparison between the partition plan and the status after the war. The pink areas represent territory Israel acquired after defeating the Arab armies. The green indicates Palestinian territory occupied by Transjordan and Egypt.
Expulsion of Palestinians
There is no question that there was an exodus of Palestinians from Jewish territory, representing by some estimates, 75-80% of the pre-independence Arab population. Palestinian supporters paint it as unambiguously the result of forced expulsions by the Israeli military or by Jewish militias. Those sympathetic to Israel tend to ignore the question. As outlined in the civil war section above, there were many reasons. Many well-to-do Arab families left for neighboring Arab countries in order to avoid the violence that they saw coming after the Partition Plan was announced. As the civil war raged not only did many Palestinians flee ahead of the violence, but Arab militias cleared villages to use as military staging points. Forced expulsions by the Israeli military was often the consequence of a local Palestinian militia being defeated and the area cleared. In the map above, the pink areas indicate territory that was allocated to a Palestinian State by the U.N. Partition Plan, but was taken by Israel in the War of Independence. It was from these areas primarily that depopulation of Palestinians took place. Once the dust settled, Palestinian refugees were not afforded a right of return to their former homes. It should be noted that even after the war there was still a sizable Arab population within Israel's borders, approximately 20% of the total population.
Identity: Palestinian vs. Arab
The reason that Palestine was even considered as a potential separate Arab nation had nothing to do with any supposed uniqueness or separate identity of the Palestinian people, and everything to do with the caprices of the European powers that carved up the Arab world with no regard to affinities or differences among the populations. There was no unique "Palestinian People" as an identity distinct from "Arab People" until borders were drawn that eventually left them on the outside. (Same for the absence of any pre-existing Iraqi, Syrian, Kuwaiti etc. identity) The promise of Britain to create a national home for Jews, as well as their awarding their Hashemite ally his own kingdom, left what we now consider Palestine out in the cold. But that U.N. Partition Plan nonetheless provided for a Palestinian State and it was rejected by the Arab leadership.
Israel's "Right To Exist"
Completely separate from Israel's subsequent treatment of Palestinians and government policy regarding the administration of the occupied Palestinian territories, a recurring theme of many pro-Palestinians is that Israel has no right to exist. This was the reason that Arabs in Palestine violently opposed the creation of a Jewish state, why Arab nations' militaries attacked Israel in 1948, and the mission of the Palestine Liberation Organization and other Palestinian groups for many years was to cause Israel to cease to exist. The issue is often framed as the Jews stole Palestinian land", or that the Jews who emigrated from Europe were colonizers. This view ignores the context of Israel's creation. All of the nations in what we call the Middle East (with the exception of Iran and Saudi Arabia) had their boundaries drawn and their leaders installed by the European powers. Sunnis ruled over majority Shi'a populations, Alawites reigned over Sunnis, Kurds were subsumed into Arab nations, a family from Saudi Arabia was rewarded with three separate kingdoms, yet a narrow strip of Mediterranean coastland and a wedge of desert assigned to one ethno-religious group was a problem that couldn't be tolerated. I suspect that even if a tiny square the size of Washington D.C., set in the south of the Negev had been set aside as a Jewish state, there would have been objections.
1967 Six Day War
In 1967 outright war broke out again after 19 years of tensions, including border conflicts and attacks by Palestinian groups. Israel struck first, a pre-emptive attack on Egypt in response to financial pressure and a partial blockade. After six days the militaries of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were in shambles and Israel had occupied Sinai, Gaza, The West Bank and the Golan Heights. Eventually Golan was returned to Syria and Sinai to Egypt, but it was the beginning of what has been almost 60 years of occupation of the Palestinian Territories by Israel.
Post 1967
Supporters of a Palestinian State usually gloss over the fact that Israeli occupation of The West Bank and Gaza only began in 1967 and that prior to that year Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied The West Bank. But the reality starting in 1967 was that these territories became occupied by Israel, and have been for almost 60 years.
"Apartheid" is not an inaccurate description of how Israel treated its non-Jewish population. Until 1966 the Arab residents of Israel were under martial law, which the Jewish population was not. Although legally, Arab citizens have the same rights as Jewish citizens, discrimination against Arabs is a fact of life in Israel. Now, after the Six-Day War Israel had taken control of The West Bank and Gaza — the territory for a hypothetical independent Palestinian State. Millions of Palestinians who have no rights as citizens of Israel. Israel occupies these territories, but they are not part of Israel. Palestinians are effectively in limbo and have been since 1967.
It's inarguable that by occupying these territories Israel caused as many problems as they solved. Taking these regions from neighboring Arab states gave them more control over their borders, but now they had a hostile population under their authority. A significant faction within Israel referred to The West Bank as "Judea and Samaria", indicating that they saw this territory, not as Palestinian at all, but part of a Greater Israel.
Attitude Forged By Conflict
From the moment that Israel became an independent nation, and even before, they were under constant attack from Palestinian groups and from neighboring Arab nations. This naturally caused Israelis to adopt a constant defensive mentality as they were surrounded by, and in some cases infiltrated by, people who didn't believe they had the right to be there and used violence to achieve their ends. It shouldn't come as a surprise that constant defensiveness would turn into aggressive offensiveness. The Palestinians, of course, viewed Israel as the entity that had stolen their land and driven their people out of their homes and were not going to acquiesce easily. Realistically there was no middle ground.
Palestinian political violence, or terrorism, against Israel and Israelis versus Israeli suppression of and violence is a kind of chicken or the egg question. Was the violence perpetrated against Israel by Palestinians a reasonable response to Israel's treatment of Palestinians? Was Israel's treatment of and violence against Palestinians justified in light of the recurring threat from neighboring Arab nations as well as internal threats from Palestinian groups whose founding documents claimed that Israel had to basis for its very existence? Once again, there is no middle ground.
Both sides have arguably solid points in favor of their position. But the difference between the two in 2026 is that only one side has, as Trump might say, all the cards. The government of Israel has the means to keep the Palestinians in limbo, in a stateless condition. Theoretically forever. The neighboring Arab nations are not likely to ever attack them in order to erase them from the map as they tried to do in 1948, or even to force the creation of a Palestinian State. There is international pressure, which Israel ignores. Attacks by Palestinians or by sympathetic groups in other countries is met by disproportionate force. The war against Gaza illustrates this perfectly as horrific as the October 7th attacks were, thousands of innocent civilians were killed as Israel's bombing made Gaza virtually uninhabitable. The West Bank, ostensibly the heart of a hypothetical Palestinian state is being systematically "Judaized" as Jewish settlers move in, appropriating Palestinian land and attacking Palestinians. Although this is technically illegal, the government does nothing to prevent this.
The Never-Ending "Peace Process"
Beginning in the early 1970's the United States encouraged Israel and The Palestine Liberation Organization to agree to peace talks. It seems like every United States president believes he has the answers to a peaceful resolution. Various "solutions" over the years have been suggested. Borders are naturally the major obstacle. This issue has been muddied by the existence of Jewish "settlements" in The West Bank. Until 1982 the official Palestinian position was that Israel did not have a right to exist. This naturally was a position that Israel would never accept. Once that stumbling block was eliminated various peace proposals became bogged down as what appeared to be small details ballooned into major issues. Complicating it all was the unavoidable truth that representatives of both sides benefitted from the status quo.
Conclusion
Israel has a right to exist just as every other nation in that region has a right to exist. Israel, Syria, Iraq — all of them are on the map today because of European nations' drawing of borders with little consideration for the people who lived there. Israel ended up occupying in 1967, not independent Palestinian territories, but territories that had been occupied by other Arab nations since 1948. There could have been, should have been, a Palestinian state starting in 1948, but the Palestinians and other Arabs did not allow it, holding out for the territory allotted to a Jewish state as well. By the time the Palestinian leadership ended their opposition to Israel's existence Israel itself had evolved into a paranoid entity, convinced that they had to ensure security at all costs, with no regard for the Palestinian people. Humanitarian considerations took a back seat to ensuring their own safety.
There is no question that Israel has become in many respects what many Jews fled from in Europe. It's a haven for Jews, but a Hell for the Palestinians. In my view we should be treating them like we treat any other state that abuses the people within their borders as Israel does. Sadly, the United States has scant aversion to cozying up to dictatorships, or allying with them militarily or economically (this hasn't been only under Trump either). Rationales for unquestioning support for Israel have been several: Israel is one of the few nations with democratic institutions, during the Cold War many of the Arab nations had alliances with the Soviet Union, financial support from Jewish organizations, right wing Christians who are convinced that the establishment of a Jewish state will usher in the End Times have become very influential, as well as mutual military and political goals (such as we have seen with Iran). But we should re-assess whether it is in the best interest of the United States to continue to write Israel a blank check.
Epilogue: Antisemitism
Despite there being legitimate reasons to oppose our alliance with Israel, and to deplore their actions in Gaza and the West Bank, for many people the opposition to Israel is based on antisemitism. (Yes, I know Arabs, including Palestinians are also Semites, but the term "antisemite" has come to mean anti-Jewish bigotry). Many of these bigots depend on debunked anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and frankly, some crazy shit to justify it. Jews are not secretly running the world; Jews don't believe that non-Jews are subhuman and exist simply to be the slaves of Jews; Epstein wasn't an agent of Mossad; Netanyahu isn't blackmailing Trump with evidence of pedophilia; and Jews don't eat Christian children.
