Israel

The land that comprises modern Israel has been inhabited continuously since prehistoric times and lies at the crossroads of ancient Near Eastern civilisations. Canaanite city-states are documented from the third millennium BCE, and Egyptian sources of the Late Bronze Age refer repeatedly to the region. Israelite kingdoms emerged in the early Iron Age, with biblical and archaeological tradition recording a unified monarchy under David and Solomon around the tenth century BCE that subsequently divided into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Israel fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE, and Judah to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, an event that destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and initiated the Babylonian exile.

Successive empires governed the territory thereafter. The Achaemenid Persians permitted a Jewish return and the building of the Second Temple; Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BCE inaugurated Hellenistic rule under the Ptolemies and Seleucids. A Hasmonean Jewish state arose after the Maccabean revolt of 167 BCE before falling under Roman authority in 63 BCE. Roman repression of Jewish revolts in 70 CE and 135 CE, including the destruction of the Second Temple, scattered much of the Jewish population. The land then passed through Byzantine, early Islamic (Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid), Crusader, Ayyubid, and Mamluk hands before being incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, which administered it for four centuries as part of the province of Greater Syria.

Ottoman rule ended during the First World War when British forces occupied the region in 1917, the same year the Balfour Declaration expressed British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. The League of Nations granted Britain the Mandate for Palestine in 1922. Jewish immigration grew substantially during the Mandate, especially after the rise of Nazism in Europe, and intercommunal tensions between Jewish and Arab populations escalated. Following the Second World War and the Holocaust, the United Nations General Assembly approved a partition plan in November 1947. Britain withdrew on 14 May 1948, and on the same day David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. Neighbouring Arab states intervened militarily, and the ensuing 1948 war ended with armistice lines that left Israel in control of more territory than the partition plan had assigned, while displacing a large Palestinian Arab population.

Subsequent decades were shaped by recurring conflict, including the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967 (which brought the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights under Israeli control), and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Israel signed peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 established the Palestinian Authority and a framework for limited Palestinian self-government, though a final-status settlement was not reached. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 and from the Gaza Strip in 2005, while the West Bank remains under a mix of Israeli and Palestinian administration.

Israel is a parliamentary democracy whose government rests on a series of Basic Laws rather than a single written constitution. Executive authority is held by a cabinet led by the prime minister and accountable to the unicameral Knesset, while a largely ceremonial president serves as head of state. An independent judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, completes the principal organs of the contemporary state.