Palestine

The land known historically as Palestine, lying between the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River, is among the most continuously inhabited regions in the world. Archaeological evidence at sites such as Jericho documents settled communities reaching back to the Neolithic period, and by the Bronze Age the territory was home to Canaanite city-states linked through trade and tribute to the great powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia. From roughly the late second millennium BCE the region saw the emergence of Israelite and Philistine polities, followed in turn by conquest and incorporation under the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid Persian empires.

Following the campaigns of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, the territory passed through Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule, with a period of Hasmonean self-rule before its absorption into the Roman world in 63 BCE. Roman and then Byzantine administration reshaped the landscape with cities, roads, and a Christianisation that became dominant from the fourth century CE. The Arab Muslim conquests of the 630s brought the region into the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates, with Jerusalem rising as a major religious centre under successive Abbasid, Fatimid, and Seljuk overlords. Crusader states held parts of the coast and interior between 1099 and the late thirteenth century, after which Mamluk and then Ottoman rule prevailed. From 1516 until the First World War, Palestine formed part of several Ottoman administrative districts, with a predominantly Arab population alongside long-established Christian and Jewish communities and a steady increase in Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century associated with the Zionist movement.

After the Ottoman defeat in 1918, the territory was placed under British administration, formalised in 1922 as the Mandate for Palestine under the League of Nations and incorporating the 1917 Balfour Declaration's commitment to a Jewish national home. Mandate-era tensions between Arab and Jewish national movements, intercommunal violence, and waves of immigration culminated in the United Nations partition plan of 1947 and the war of 1948, which produced the State of Israel, large-scale Palestinian displacement known as the Nakba, and the placement of the West Bank under Jordanian administration and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian administration. The 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization gave political form to Palestinian nationalism, and the 1967 Six-Day War brought the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza under Israeli military occupation.

The First Intifada from 1987 and the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 produced the Palestinian Authority, a self-government body with limited jurisdiction over parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO declared independence in Algiers in 1988, and the State of Palestine has since been recognised by a majority of UN member states, gaining non-member observer state status at the United Nations in 2012. The Second Intifada, the 2006 legislative elections, and the 2007 split between Fatah-led governance in the West Bank and Hamas administration in Gaza shaped a fragmented political landscape, further strained by recurring conflicts in and around Gaza.

The present-day State of Palestine is constituted as a semi-presidential republic, with its institutions seated in Ramallah and a continuing claim to East Jerusalem as capital, operating under the Basic Law amid ongoing questions of territorial sovereignty, internal political reconciliation, and international recognition.