Arab–Israeli conflict

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the most extensively documented disputes of the modern era, yet its origins stretch back to competing promises made during the chaos of the First World War. On the 14th of May 1948, the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum and declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Within hours, the armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq had crossed its borders. That was not, however, where the conflict began. It began with a region under Ottoman rule for nearly four hundred years, with two national movements awakening in Europe in the same decade, and with British officials writing contradictory letters to two different peoples about the same strip of land. How did competing visions of Palestine harden into a cycle of wars? What made the promises of the First World War so combustible? And what does the long, expensive, and unresolved record of diplomacy tell us about the limits of formal agreements?

• 2. Two Movements, One Land

  ›

  The Zionist Congress first convened in Basel in 1897, and the Arab Club emerged in Paris in 1906. Both movements took root in Europe before they converged on Palestine. Zionists viewed the region as the Jewish ancestral homeland. Arab nationalists regarded it as an integral part of the Arab world and the rightful inheritance of Palestinian Arabs.

  In the late 19th century, the Jewish population of Palestine was a minority within a much larger Muslim Arab majority. The total population of the region reached around 600,000, mostly Muslim Arabs, with significant minorities of Jews, Christians, Druze, and some Samaritan and Bahai communities. Jerusalem at that time did not extend beyond its walled area and held only a few tens of thousands of people. Jewish communities had already begun purchasing land from Ottoman landlords, establishing collective farms called kibbutzim, and founding Tel Aviv as the first entirely Jewish city in modern times.

  The Ottoman Empire had governed the area for close to four centuries, but by the late 19th century its administrators were pushing Turkish primacy at the expense of Arab subjects. That shift, combined with the promise of liberation from Allied powers during World War I, fueled Arab nationalist sentiment across the region. When the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, secretly corresponded with Husayn ibn Ali, the patriarch of the Hashemite family and Ottoman governor of Mecca and Medina, he pledged British support for an independent Arab state under Hashemite rule, including Palestine, in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans. The revolt, led by T. E. Lawrence and Husayn's son Faysal, succeeded in defeating the Ottomans, but the British commitment would prove far harder to fulfill than it was to make.

• 3. Contradictory Promises

  ›

  In 1917, British-led troops, including the Jewish Legion, captured Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. That same year the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, stating that it viewed favorably the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, but that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The declaration was partly a product of the belief, held by Prime Minister David Lloyd George among others, that Jewish support was essential to winning the war.

  At the same time, the 1916 Sykes-Picot treaty between Britain and France had already divided Ottoman Syria into spheres of influence, laying the foundation for the British Mandate of Palestine. The mandated area, formalized in 1923, included what would become modern Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Winston Churchill's 1922 White Paper attempted to reassure Arab communities by clarifying that the Balfour Declaration did not mean a full Jewish state was intended, but Palestinian Arabs remained deeply skeptical.

  A rupture came in 1920. The Arab Kingdom of Syria, a self-proclaimed Hashemite state with its capital in Damascus, collapsed following the Franco-Syrian War. The defeat drove Amin al-Husseini from Damascus back to Jerusalem, where he became a focal point of distinctly Palestinian Arab nationalism. The same year, confrontations between Arab and Jewish forces occurred at the Battle of Tel Hai in March 1920. Violence also broke out in Jerusalem later that year. Each promise made to one party had, in practice, contradicted what had been implied to the other.

• 4. Escalation Toward Partition

  ›

  By 1931, Jews made up 17 percent of the population of Mandatory Palestine, up from 11 percent in 1922. Jewish immigration then doubled the Jewish population again after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Palestinians saw this rapid influx as a direct threat to their homeland and identity. Jewish policies that restricted Arab employment on Jewish-owned farms and industries inflamed Palestinian communities further.

  In the mid-1930s, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam arrived from Syria and organized the Black Hand, an anti-Zionist and anti-British militant group. By 1935 he had enlisted between 200 and 800 men. The escalating tensions fed the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. In response, British Mandate authorities sharply reduced the permitted number of Jewish immigrants. Those restrictions remained in place even as the Nazi Holocaust drove Jewish refugees out of Europe, meaning most Jewish entrants to Mandatory Palestine were classified as illegal.

  By 1947, Britain turned the problem over to the United Nations. On the 15th of May 1947, the General Assembly appointed UNSCOP, a committee of representatives from eleven states. After five weeks of in-country study, the committee proposed a majority plan: a Partition with Economic Union. The UN adopted it in resolution 181(II) on the 29th of November 1947 by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions. All six Arab member states voted no. Armed intercommunal fighting immediately began on the ground, with major atrocities committed by both sides. Just before the mandate expired in May 1948, the Haganah launched offensives that captured the towns of Tiberias, Haifa, Safad, Beisan, and, in effect, Jaffa.

• 5. War and Its Aftermath

  ›

  The 1948 Arab-Israeli War began on the day the British Mandate expired. On the morning of the 15th of May 1948, the armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq invaded. The nascent Israeli Defense Force repulsed them and extended the new state's borders beyond the original UNSCOP partition lines. By December 1948, Israel controlled most of Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan River.

  The human cost was immense. Before and during the fighting, 713,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled, becoming refugees. Historian Benny Morris argued that the decisive cause of Palestinian departure was predominantly the actions of Jewish forces, including physical expulsions, military assaults on residential areas, and fear of fighting, while Arab leadership orders were decisive in only 6 of 392 villages. Israel also conducted a biological warfare campaign codenamed Cast Thy Bread, aimed at covertly poisoning Palestinian wells to prevent villagers from returning. Over the course of roughly two decades that followed, some 850,000 Jews from Arab countries emigrated, many driven out by deteriorating conditions; Libya stripped Jews of citizenship, Iraq seized Jewish property, and Egypt expelled most of its foreign community including Jews after the Suez crisis in 1956.

  The war ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which established what became known as the Green Line. But the agreements resolved none of the underlying questions. In 1956, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, nationalized the Suez Canal Company, and triggered a new war. Israel, with British and French backing, invaded the Sinai Peninsula on the 29th of October 1956, captured the Gaza Strip and Sinai, then withdrew under pressure from the United States and United Nations. The United Nations Emergency Force deployed to oversee Sinai demilitarization, but Israel refused to allow its deployment on Israeli territory, a detail that would matter eleven years later.

• 6. The Six-Day War and Its Long Shadow

  ›

  On the 19th of May 1967, Egypt expelled UN observers and deployed 100,000 troops in the Sinai. Jordan signed a defense pact with Egypt on the 30th of May. Israel attacked Egypt on the 5th of June, and the Israeli Air Force destroyed most Egyptian airpower in a surprise strike before eliminating Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi forces in six days. Israel gained the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Shebaa farms, and the Golan Heights.

  Arab leaders met in Khartoum in August 1967 and agreed on three principles: no recognition, no peace, and no negotiations with Israel. Abd al-Azim Ramadan argued this left war as the only option remaining. Egypt launched the War of Attrition in 1967 to erode Israeli positions and force Sinai concessions. It ended after Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970.

  On the 6th of October 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a coordinated surprise attack on Yom Kippur. Israel took three days to fully mobilize. Other Arab states reinforced them and imposed an oil embargo on the United States, Japan, and Western Europe that quadrupled prices. As Israel reversed momentum, the Soviet Union threatened to intervene. The United States, fearing nuclear escalation, brokered a ceasefire on the 25th of October. The Yom Kippur War had served, among other things, as an indirect arena for U.S.-Soviet confrontation, and its aftermath pushed Egypt's new leader Anwar Sadat to expel 15,000 Soviet advisors and seek American help to pressure Israel on territorial return. That pivot eventually led to the Camp David Accords in September 1978, and on the 26th of March 1979, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, the first between Israel and any Arab state.

• 7. Peace Treaties and Unresolved Conflicts

  ›

  The Israel-Egypt peace treaty returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian hands, allowed free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal, and required Egypt to sharply limit troops and equipment it could deploy in Sinai. In October 1994, Israel and Jordan signed their own peace agreement at the southern border crossing of Arabah on the 26th of October, formally ending a conflict whose total cost had been estimated at roughly 18.3 billion dollars.

  The Oslo Accords, signed in September 1993, emerged from secret peace talks in Oslo, Norway that began in mid-1993. Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people; the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist and renounced terrorism. Oslo II followed in 1995. Yet the agreements did not stop the violence. In December 1987, the First Intifada had already begun in the Jabalia refugee camp and spread across the Palestinian territories, combining civil disobedience, boycotts, and stone-throwing with more lethal attacks. In 2000 the Al-Aqsa Intifada triggered a wave of suicide bombings. Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002, described as its largest military operation since the Six-Day War.

  In June 2006, Hamas militants captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, holding him for over five years before exchanging him on the 18th of October 2011 for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. In July 2006, Hezbollah fighters crossed into Israel, killed eight soldiers, and abducted two, igniting the 2006 Lebanon War. Over 1,000 Lebanese and over 150 Israelis died; roughly one million Lebanese and between 300,000 and 500,000 Israelis were displaced, most of whom later returned. In 2002, the Arab League proposed the Arab Peace Initiative. By 2020, the Abraham Accords further calmed relations between Israel and several Arab states. Then in October 2023, Hamas-led attacks triggered a war with massive destruction, displacement, and a humanitarian crisis that was still unfolding.

• 8. The Price of Conflict

  ›

  A report by the Strategic Foresight Group estimated the opportunity cost of conflict across the Middle East from 1991 to 2010 at 12 trillion dollars. Opportunity cost here refers to the gap between the GDP countries actually achieved and what they could have achieved under sustained peace. Israel's share was calculated at almost one trillion dollars. Iraq's opportunity cost was approximately 2.2 trillion dollars, and Saudi Arabia's approximately 4.5 trillion dollars.

  The same report estimated that had Israel and Arab League nations sustained peace and cooperation from 1991 onward, the average Israeli citizen would have been earning over 44,000 dollars annually in 2010 instead of the 23,000 dollars they were earning. Separately, one estimate put total conflict deaths from 1945 to 1995 at 92,000, split between 74,000 military and 18,000 civilian.

  Those figures do not count what came after 1995. The table of notable wars in the source records costs running from the 1948-1949 war through the ongoing Gaza war that began in 2023, with the latter alone associated with roughly 70,000-84,000 Arab deaths and around 2,000 Israeli deaths at the time of reporting. The 12 trillion dollar opportunity-cost figure covers only the period from 1991 to 2010, meaning the true accumulated cost over the full history of the conflict is substantially larger than any single estimate has yet tried to measure.