Israel and the Palestinians are engaged in an ongoing military and political conflict about land and self-determination within the former territory of Mandatory Palestine. Key aspects of the conflict have included Palestinian refugees, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the status of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, borders, security, water rights, the permit regime in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian freedom of movement, and the Palestinian right of return.
The conflict has its origins in the rise of Zionism in the late 19th century in Europe, a movement which aimed to establish a Jewish state through colonization in the region of Palestine. The Zionist movement garnered the support of an imperial power in the 1917 Balfour Declaration issued by Britain, which promised to support the creation of a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine. Following British occupation of the formerly Ottoman region during World War I, Mandatory Palestine was established as a British mandate. Increasing Jewish immigration led to the rapid growth of the Yishuv, or Jewish population in Palestine, heightening tensions and conflict between Jews and Arabs over land and economic issues. The 1936 Arab general strike led to the Peel Commission investigation, and began the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, which demanded an end to British colonial rule and its support for Zionism. Eventually, the inability of British government to resolve tensions led to the creation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The United Nations later voted to adopt their recommendations as a partition plan in 1947. The plan was rejected by the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League, triggering the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine.
During the ensuing 1948 Palestine war, the State of Israel was founded and more than half of the mandate's predominantly Palestinian Arab population fled or were expelled by Israeli forces, referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba. By the end of the war, Israel was established on most of the former mandate's territory, and the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were controlled by Egypt and Jordan respectively. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has been occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known collectively as the Palestinian territories. Two Palestinian uprisings against Israel and its occupation erupted in 1987 and 2000, the first and second intifadas respectively. Israel's occupation resulted in Israel constructing illegal settlements there, creating a system of institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians under its occupation referred to as Israeli apartheid. This discrimination includes Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees from their right of return and right to their lost properties. Israel has also drawn international condemnation for violating the human rights of the Palestinians.
The international community, with exceptions including the United States and Israel that prefer bilateral negotiations, has largely been in consensus since the 1980s regarding a settlement of the conflict on the basis of a two-state solution along the 1967 borders and a just resolution for Palestinian refugees. In recent years, public support for a two-state solution has decreased, with Israeli policy reflecting an interest in maintaining the occupation, rather than seeking a permanent resolution to the conflict. In 2007, Israel tightened its blockade of the Gaza Strip and made official its policy of isolating it from the West Bank. Since then, Israel has framed its relationship with Gaza in terms of the laws of war, rather than in terms of its status as an occupying power. In a July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) determined that Israel continues to illegally occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Since 2006, Israel has fought several wars with the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, Hamas. Attacks by Hamas-led armed groups in October 2023 in Israel, which resulted in nearly 1,200 deaths, were followed by another war, which has caused widespread destruction, loss of life, mass population displacement, a humanitarian crisis, and a famine in the Gaza Strip. Israel's actions in Gaza during this war have been described by international law experts, genocide scholars and human rights organizations as a genocide.
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the development of political Zionism and the arrival of Zionist settlers to Palestine. During the early 20th century, Arab nationalism and Turkish nationalism also grew within the Ottoman Empire. World War I began in 1914, with Great Britain and France opposing the Ottoman Empire. To gain support from Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali, his Arab Sharifian Army, and Arab nationalists in the war against the Ottomans, Great Britain promised in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence that Hussein would have control of an independent state in the Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire. Palestine was "ambiguously omitted" from the Arab state. The British Empire supplied a large amount of weapons to the Arab revolt in 1916–1918. With support from the Arab revolt the British Empire defeated the Ottoman's forces and took control of Palestine, Jordan and Syria. It later transpired that the British and French governments had secretly made the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 that unambiguously excluded Palestine from Arab control and did not allow the formation of an independent Arab state that included it. Chaim Weizmann's efforts to build British support for the Zionist movement would eventually secure the Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. In July 1920, the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria, with Emir Faisal (one of the leaders of the Arab revolt) as king and tolerated by Britain, was crushed by French armed forces, equipped with modern artillery.
While there was a significant wave of Jewish immigration in the late 19th century, it was not until the arrival of more ideologically Zionist immigrants in the decade preceding the First World War that the landscape of Ottoman Palestine would start to significantly change. Jewish land purchases and the eviction of tenant Arab peasants would contribute to the Palestinian population's growing fear of territorial displacement and dispossession in this period, as would armed confrontations in later years. From early on, some in Zionist movement had the idea of "transferring" the Arab Palestinian population out of the land of a future Jewish state.
According to the political scientist Norman Finkelstein, population transfer was considered as an acceptable solution to the problems of ethnic conflict until around World War II and even for a time afterward. Transfer was considered a drastic but "often necessary" means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic civil war. In modern times, transfer is often seen as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
The idea of transfer gained support of the Zionist leadership after it was proposed by the British Peel Commission. Zionist leaders advocated this for the purpose of establishing a Jewish demographic majority or as a response to violence. Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote in 2004 that the idea of transfer was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism". He clarified in 2008 that it "had not been part of the original Zionist ideology" but was advocated for starting in the mid-1930s in response to the violence of the Arab Revolt. There were Arabs that feared displacement as early as the 1880s with one Zionist writing that he had been accused of coming "to drive them out."
With the creation of the British Mandate in Palestine after the end of the first world war, large-scale Jewish immigration began accompanied by the development of a separate Jewish-controlled sector of the economy supported by foreign capital. The British colonial government in Mandatory Palestine recognized the Zionist organizations as legitimate and representative self-governing institutions of the Jewish population. These organizations created the structure of a quasi state. Chief among them was the Jewish Agency for Palestine (renamed the Jewish Agency for Israel after 1948), which would turn into the government of the local Jewish community. It was originally established in 1908 as the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization (now the World Zionist Organization). Britain and the League of Nations gave it semi-official diplomatic status which increased the international legitimacy of it and by extension the Zionist movement. The Mandate for Palestine recognized the Jewish Agency "as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with the Administration of Palestine." It was also entitled to diplomatic representation in the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva, London and elsewhere.