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12 min read

A history of Israel and Palestine – 4,000 years of history in 2,500 words

The land at the heart of the Middle Eastern crisis is at the centre of world attention again. For those whose grasp on the history behind the situation is hazy, Graham Tomlin offers a brief survey.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A blue and gold domed mosque sits surrounded by old stone buildings of a city.
Dome of the Rock, over the skyline of the Old City of Jerusalem.
Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash.

The story begins around 1800 BC, in the middle/late Bronze Age. According to the Bible, a nomadic tribal chief called Abraham received a mysterious call from God – known by the name of YHWH – not another tribal god among many, but the Creator God above all the gods. He was to move from his home in Ur in Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, to travel to Canaan in the west - a fertile strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea, a land inhabited at the time by various tribes known as Canaanites and ruled by the Egyptian Pharaohs. 

Biblical texts report that somewhere around 1400 BC, the small tribe which understood itself to be the descendants of Abraham migrated further to Egypt. There, they experienced severe hardship, and sought to escape back into the land of the Canaanites, through a miraculous event known as the Exodus in around 1250 BC. 

Over the coming centuries they began to settle in the land. The biblical stories depict this as a largely violent conquest, although the archaeological evidence suggests gradual assimilation into the land. It may have been a mixture of the two.  

The growing kingdom 

Around 1000 BC, the people now known as Israel, after one of Abraham's descendants, chose a king for the first time, called Saul, but it was his successor David who expanded the Israelite kingdom, capturing the ancient Jebusite stronghold of Jerusalem, making it the capital of the new nation. His son Solomon later built a Temple in the city, dedicated to YHWH, the God of the Israelites.  

Infighting within the nation resulted in a division into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. In 722 BC, Israel was overrun by the Assyrians to the north, and in 587, Judah fell to the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed Solomon’s Temple. 

Most of the Israelites were taken into exile, some scattered into Syria, many taken away to the dominant empire of Babylon. In 538 BC, by which time the Persians had taken over as the dominant empire in the region, Cyrus, the Persian king, gave permission to the descendants of the exiles to return to their ancestral land. In around 520 BC the Temple was rebuilt, even though it was a mere shadow of the former building. Around 445 BC, Nehemiah, against much opposition, tried to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, to make it a fortified city. 

In 333 BC, the remarkable young Greek warrior, Alexander the Great, conquered the land. When he died in 323, two empires emerged from the territories that he ruled – the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid empires. These empires took it in turns to rule over the land until the Maccabees, a radical Jewish group, revolted against the Seleucids and formed a Jewish kingdom for the first time since the exile. This was the Hasmonean kingdom which lasted from 142 BC until it was overrun by the expanding Roman Emperor, with Pompey conquering Jerusalem in 63 BC. 

The Roman and Byzantine empires 

In 37 BC, Herod the Great, a half Jewish-half Idumean, ambitious yet paranoid man became king of Judaea with the permission of the Romans. He built several remarkable buildings, including a new, grand Temple in Jerusalem, the one present at the time of Jesus. In or around 6 BC, Jesus of Nazareth was born. He lived, taught, and performed miracles around Galilee and eventually journeyed to Jerusalem, where he was crucified by the Romans, after which his followers have always claimed that he rose from the dead, and appeared to many witnesses. The Christian community's presence in the land has shaped it in many ways until recent times as we shall see.

During this time, Judaea remained part of the Roman Empire. In the 60s AD, Jewish rebels revolted against Roman rule, a rebellion which was crushed by the Romans, who proceeded to flatten Herod’s temple. There has never been a Jewish temple on that site since that date. 

70 years later, the Jews revolted against the Romans again, an uprising known as the Second Jewish Revolt, under Bar Kokhba. Yet again, the rebellion was put down – more severely this time. Much of Jerusalem was destroyed by the emperor Hadrian, who rebuilt it as an entirely new Roman city called Aelia Capitolina, trying to erase Jewish presence to put an end to the successive revolts, and renamed the land Palestina, after the Philistines, a seafaring tribe who had arrived in the land before the time of King David.

In 312, after an internal political and military struggle, Constantine became the first Christian emperor. This was the beginning of the Byzantine empire, named after the city of Byzantium, a new capital, chosen to rival Rome. In 326 Constantine authorised the building of Christian churches in the land, including the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, over the site of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. 

The rise of Islam 

In the 7th century, Christian Byzantine rule over Jerusalem came to an end. The new faith preached by Muhammad (570-632) inspired determined armies to spread northwards from the Arabian desert. The second Caliph, Omar, accepted the surrender of Jerusalem bringing it under Arab, Muslim rule for the first time, although people of Arab descent had been in the land for a long time before – they are mentioned in the New Testament in the second chapter of the Book of Acts. 

Since the Roman destruction of the temple in AD70, during the Byzantine period the site of the old Jewish temple had been kept as a dump for rubbish. In around 690, a Muslim ruler, Abd-al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock as a shrine on the site, to mark Muhammad’s reported night journey to heaven, followed soon by the Al Aqsa mosque nearby on the same site. Jerusalem now became a site of Muslim Pilgrimage. 

In the early 11th century, tensions between Muslims and Christians led Caliph Hakim to demolish much of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was rebuilt shortly afterwards, but in a much less impressive format. In 1099 western Christians, hearing of attacks by Muslims on their holy places, and inspired by the idea of re-taking the Holy Land for Christendom, arrived in Jerusalem as part of the First Crusade. The Second Crusade arrived sometime later, but the Crusader armies were finally beaten by the Muslim leader Salah-ud-din (Saladin) in the battle of Hattin in Galilee in 1187. A third crusade tried to win the land back but was unsuccessful and the last Crusaders were banished back to Europe in 1291. 

From the 13th to the 16th century, the land was ruled by the Mamluks, an Egyptian military class of former slaves. Meanwhile, the Byzantine empire came to an end in the mid-C15th when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, or Turks. This was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over the land of Palestine for 400 years, from 1517 to 1917. In the C16th the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent built the famous walls of Jerusalem that are still standing today. 

Throughout this long period, most inhabitants of the land were Arabs, descendants of the early settlers, and remnants of the Arab conquest. They were a mix of Christians and Muslims, while there were a number of Jews who lived in the land. 

The rise of Zionism 

In the 19th century, the long story of European anti-semitism began to gather pace, manifested for example in the famous Dreyfus affair which took place at the end of the century. The idea grew that Jews needed a homeland, with the first Zionist conference to advance the idea taking place in Basle, Switzerland in 1897. The obvious candidate, for historic reasons, was Palestine. The problem was there was already an Arab population long established in the land. 

Towards the end of the first world war, the Ottoman empire began to break up. The Middle East was divided up into zones ruled by different European powers, with the British taking control of Palestine. The British recognised the gathering momentum for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and declared support for the idea in the Balfour declaration of 1917, while claiming at the same time to acknowledge the rights of the Arab peoples of the land. Before long, Jewish immigration to Palestine began to increase in volume, leading to increasing tension with the existing, predominantly Arab population.  

In Europe, the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust gave a radical urgency to the need for a homeland where Jewish people could feel safe. Many European Jews fled to Palestine, hoping to find a home and safety there. The British found themselves increasingly caught in the middle of violent and deadly clashes between Arab and Jewish groups. Underground Jewish militia sometimes targeted the British, such as in the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, the British headquarters in Palestine, by the Irgun, a Jewish militant group, which killed 91 people, most of them British soldiers. 

Recognising their position was untenable, the British decided to withdraw from Palestine. In November 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, a proposal to partition the land into Jewish and Arab states of roughly equal size, although the Jewish territory was larger than the Arab one. The Arabs refused to accept the plan, as they felt they were the rightful owners of the land, and the Jews were newcomers.  

When the British Mandate over Palestine came to an end in 1948, almost immediately, the Jews declared the creation of the State of Israel. Surrounding Arab countries immediately attacked the new state, but Jewish forces resisted successfully, and, under the leadership of David Ben Gurion, Jewish groups started to occupy Arab towns and cities, removing much of the Arab population, who for the most part were forced to leave. When this Arab-Israeli war finished, the new Jewish state held about 75 per cent of the land of Palestine, though with a significant Arab population still present within Israel. Around 700,000 Palestinian former residents became refugees, either in camps within Israel, or in surrounding countries such as Jordan, Syria or Lebanon. This period is known by the Israelis as the War of Independence, but by the Arabs as the Nakba – the catastrophe.

Israel as a nation grew and prospered. After a period of increasing tension between Israel and the surrounding Arab states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in 1967, to establish a buffer between themselves and their Arab neighbours, Israel issued a series of successful pre-emptive strikes, and after just six days, had occupied the Sinai Peninsula, formerly Egyptian territory, the Golan Heights belonging to Syria, and the West Bank of the river Jordan, including East Jerusalem, which had been under Jordanian rule.  

UN Resolution 242 urged Israel to surrender the land that had been occupied. Instead, Israel began to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, enclaves where Jewish people lived within the territories, although these were regarded as illegal under international law. Settlement building has increased in recent years under more recent Israeli governments and remains one of the points of tension - Jewish settlements built on land that could in future become part of a Palestinian state, if one ever came into being.

In 1973, the boot was on the other foot as Egypt launched a strike on Israel on the festival of Yom Kippur, which, although ultimately beaten back by the Israelis, dented Israel’s sense of invulnerability to attack from their neighbours.  

International pressure to resolve the long-running tension began to mount, and in 1978, under the mediation of US President Jimmy Carter, the Camp David accords were signed by Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt and Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, establishing peace between the two nations. This was seen by militant Muslims as treachery and Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1981.  

Nonetheless, Israel withdrew from Sinai as promised, in 1982. Even though peace was established with Egypt, this did not bring an equivalent sense of harmony within the other occupied territories, particularly the West Bank. In the 1960s and 70s, Palestinian groups had carried out a campaign of attacks on Israel and Israeli targets abroad including the notorious attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, yet these had largely ceased by the late 70s. From 1987 to 1993, a Palestinian uprising against what they saw as Israeli occupation of their land, known as the first intifada increased tension across the region. As a result, secret talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials led to the Oslo Accords of 1993, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, in which Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation recognised the state of Israel and Israel gave up land in Gaza and the West Bank to the limited control of a Palestinian Authority, although with still some element of Israeli influence and control. Just as Sadat had been assassinated for what was seen as surrender on the Arab side in 1981, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995 for what was seen as a betrayal of the Israeli cause. 

The 21st century 

What was meant to be a peace process rolled on. The Camp David meeting in 2000, which was expected to bring about further progress for the Palestinian cause failed to do so and triggered the second intifada which lasted until 2005, much more violent and deadly than the first, with Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel and Israeli retaliation in the West Bank and Gaza. To stop incursions from Arabs into Israeli territory, the Israelis proposed building what they called a Security Wall, but as the Wall of Separation by the Palestinians, who felt that the wall was effectively a land grab, as at points, it stretched into land which hitherto had been traditionally part of the West Bank. 

In 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw troops and settlements from Gaza, yet in 2007, the Islamic militant organisation Hamas took over control of Gaza in a brief war with Fatah, the Palestinian party who had held control until this point. Hamas, unlike the PLO or Fatah, remained dedicated to the elimination of Israel and thus became a dangerous neighbour to Israel. In 2014, in a period of rising tension, Hamas rocket attacks into Israel provoked Israeli air strikes and a ground invasion. In this war, around 67 Israelis and around 2000 Palestinians died. 

In 2017, President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, something which had not happened before as Jerusalem had always been a divided city and claimed by both sides as their capital city. 

In recent years Israel has sought to normalise relationships with Arab states, signing the Abrahamic Accords in 2020 with Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco, with a possible deal with Saudi Arabia tentatively on the way. 

The Hamas attacks on southern Israel in 2023 and the Israeli response in Gaza will have set back any progress in resolving this long-running tragedy for many years, in what is a familiar pattern of attack and retaliation. 

The history is tangled, much more complex than outlined in a brief survey like this. Any attempt to understand the present needs to engage with the history of this fertile, fought-over and precious land, home to two great peoples with contested, but deep roots in the land, who we pray will one day be able to live together in peace – the peace brought and taught by the Prince of Peace.  

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Virtues
War & peace
9 min read

Who’d be a peacemaker these days?

I’m no longer sure we properly grasp what peace is all about.

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London. 

Graffiti of a tank with a peace laurel coming out of its barrel.
Graffiti, Kaunas, Lithuania.
Aliaksei Lepik on Unsplash.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers!’ 

You can’t really argue with that, can you? It is a truth universally acknowledged, that is deeply embedded in our cultural identity. Like the inherent value of family, fairness and a decent cup of tea, being in favour of peace is of the essence of virtue. After all, who’s going to want to sign up and aspire to an ethic of ‘blessed are the conflict creators’? 

But I have begun to wonder whether it’s as clear as all that, and if our intuitive assumptions stand scrutiny.  

Of course, we all want ‘peace on earth’, to live peaceful lives in peaceful communities and, at least sometimes, to have some ‘peace and quiet’. Peace is a good thing. We desire it, we embrace it, and we honour those who make it. 

But I’m no longer sure we properly grasp what it’s all about. I’ve been on a bit of a journey of late. I’ve come to conclude that it is all a bit murky when you dig beneath the surface. 

For a start I have realised that I’m not tuning into the news as much as I used to. OK, to be completely honest I have always been something of a news junkie, and from the Today programme on Radio 4 to various news platforms online I still consume quite a lot. But not as much as I used to.  

The relentless stream of violent conflict from Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere to our increasingly polarized political debates, the othering of those we don’t agree with in identity politics and the vitriol of wider culture wars: it gets too much. It seems I’m not alone. A recent report from the Reuters Institute maps a ten-year trend towards disengagement with the news. 

I yearn for some breakthroughs on the peacemaking front. In their absence it seems that there is only so much I can take. 

Then, my attention was drawn to a piece on the Axios news platform. The headline read, ‘Trump's deep obsession: Winning a Nobel Peace Prize’. That sent me down a rabbit hole. 

Now I did already have a half-memory that in his first term President Trump had been a little resentful of the fact that Barak Obama had received the prize while he hadn’t. But it seems it’s more of a thing than that. 

Axios reported that he has been ‘obsessed’ with winning the prize for years and that his present administration ‘is aggressively pushing him for a Nobel’. They even suggested that it was the subtext to the Oval Office blowup with Ukrainian President Zelensky. 

In fact, President Trump has been nominated for the prize on numerous occasions since 2016, with lawmakers from the US, Scandinavia and Australia putting his name forward.  

Awarded 105 times since 1901, while Dr Martin Luther King jr, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa might seem to epitomise such an award, there have also been controversies.  

The awards given to Mikhail Gorbachev, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat were particularly controversial. But it was the 1973 award to Henry Kissinger that caused the biggest stir leading two of the five members of the selection committee to resign in protest and howls of derision from the press. 

Finally, home alone one evening, I stumbled across Monty Python’s Life of Brian as I surfed the streaming platforms for something to watch. It’s years since I watched it, but it contains one of my favourite scenes of all time. 

Jesus is pictured delivering his ‘sermon on the mount’ from atop a small hillock. The camera pans out to the back of the crowd where they’re finding it hard to hear what he’s saying. The conversation goes something like this: 

What was that?  

I think it was 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'  

Ahh, what's so special about the cheesemakers?  

Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products. 

It was chuckling to myself to this familiar pun that provoked a deeper dive. What was Jesus actually wanting to say? What did the crowd hear him say?  

A quick look back to the Sermon on the Mount confirmed that ‘the blessings’ that start it off are mainly to those in a seeming position of disadvantage: ‘the poor in spirit … those who mourn … the meek … the merciful … the persecuted’. Why does Jesus include peacemakers who ought to be acclaimed by everyone?  They’re the ones doing good stuff with positive benefits. They should be universally acclaimed, why do they need a special blessing? 

From the angelic ‘peace on earth’ that heralded Jesus’ birth, to his final gift to his friends, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you,’ peace is at the heart of what Jesus is about. Receiving peace, giving peace, making peace, ‘peace be with you,’ ‘go in peace,’ peace is littered throughout the gospel stories.  

Of course, for Jesus this is shalom or, back in the Aramaic of his mother-tongue shlama. While an everyday greeting the idea infused in the word is far deeper and richer: it is about wholeness and well-being and harmony. Rather than just the absence of noise and conflict, this kind of peace has substance and depth.  

Maybe that’s why it has to be ‘made’.  

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Jesus doesn’t say ‘blessed are the peace-lovers’ who merely experience and consume the life of peace. Neither does he major on ‘blessed are the peacekeepers’ who police its boundaries. No, it’s ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, those who’ve got their sleeves rolled up and are actively forging an environment of wholeness, well-being and harmony. 

No problem here then. Who’s not in favour of wholeness, well-being and harmony? Well, no-one, until we stumble across what Jesus goes on to say later in this iconic sermon: 

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  

According to Jesus, peacemaking is about wholeness, well-being and harmony and its scope extends to, and embraces, even our enemies. And why, because that’s how God does it: 

“He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  

This is the benchmark that informs the kind of peacemaking that Jesus is talking about. 

Peacemaking always has to start with the existing situation. It is not about restoring how things used to be.

Now you could make an argument that peacemaking is a generational process. That it is about curating how we live together – as individuals, in neighbourhoods or even internationally – where we embody and model these kinds of principles. This is not achieved overnight.  

We make peace and build communities in which we flourish over time. Afterall, as African Ubuntu philosophy articulates ‘I am because we are’. The well-being of each of us is dependent upon the well-being of all of us. This is a way of life, not an off-the-shelf remedy. But what about peacemaking in the middle of conflict? 

This is where the peacemaking process gets to be a murky one, especially when you dig beneath the surface. Altruism on the part of people, communities and nations in conflict is rarely front and centre to what they bring to the table. 

To even contemplate an authentic peacemaking process, both sides in a conflict have to want it. If this isn’t the case the peacemaker will either fail or be in danger of being manipulated as a puppet in the hands of bad actors. 

To genuinely have reached the point of entering a peacemaking process, the parties concerned have to have reached the realisation that the cost of the continuing their conflict exceeds any realistic benefits they can achieve.  

Peacemaking always has to start with the existing situation. It is not about restoring how things used to be. Neither is it about accomplishing the future that has been dreamed of. It is about a cold, hard grappling with how actually things are. 

This is why it’s unpopular, especially with those who have being pursuing the justice of their cause, accomplishing their objectives and seeking victory rather than peace. The peacemaker is a real time and unwanted reminder that they have failed. 

Then, as the peacemaking shifts into gear the one in the middle, the peacemaker, cannot take sides. Yet, inevitably, both sides will see them as partial insofar as their aspirations are traded off in the process of negotiation. The peacemakers are easily dismissed as appeasers or even as traitors to justice. 

Peacemaking is always about compromise. It is about accepting how things are and trading off concerns to reach the best achievable balance. Commenting on the peace negotiations over Ukraine, Wolfgang Münchau recently wrote, 

“The purpose of the peace talks is to fill in the blanks. The two sides may trade off one piece of land against another. Money will buy stuff. But peace deals are never about who is right, and who is wrong. They are not about historic claims.” 

Pragmatic rather than principled, compromise is easily portrayed as a dirty word. Appearing spineless, weak and morally flawed, peacemakers are subject to both being misunderstood and misrepresented by all sides. 

According to the American political scientist R.J. Rummel, who specialised in the study of war and collective violence with a view to their resolution, it is a mistake to think that ‘making’ peace is like a design, construct and build project. While he sees such a view as seductively attractive, it is misplaced to believe that peace can be centrally planned and constructed.  

Rather, peace ‘emerges’ as an equilibrium establishes itself between what the parties involved honestly believe, actually want and really capable of achieving. This mutual self-knowledge cannot be mapped by an external third party and may only be partially comprehended by themselves.  

The art of the peacemaker is to enable an evolving process of reciprocal adjustments. Along the way they must ensure that rebalanced relationships are supported by an ‘interlocking of mutual interests, capabilities and wills’. Peacemakers are far from being centre-stage messiah figures, it is never about them and their ideas or grand plan. Rather, they’re facilitators who must know when to self-effacingly get out of the way. 

He concludes: 

“Peace is a structure of expectations, a social contract. It will be kept only as the parties, for whatever reason, find it in all their intersecting interests, capabilities, and wills to do so.” 

Hard-won peace can remain exceedingly fragile.  

Who’d be a peacemaker? 

Who would willingly open themselves up to being manipulated by bad actors. Who would subject themselves to the rejection of being unwanted, unpopular, misunderstood, misrepresented and portrayed as appeasers and traitors of justice.  

To boot, they have to be self-effacing and understand that their best efforts may only ever result in precarious outcomes, if there is any fruit at all. 

‘Blessed are the peacemakers!’ 

I guess that’s why. 

In the meantime, 338 candidates have been nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. Among them is the late Pope Francis, 

"… for his unstoppable contribution to promoting binding and comprehensive peace and fraternization between people, ethnic groups and states." 

The winner will be announced in October. 

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