An Honest History of Israel and Palestine
A note before we start
This is not a story with one villain and one hero. It’s a story about land, and about the money and power that have moved across that land for more than a century. Two peoples have real claims to the same small place. Outside empires made promises they couldn’t keep. And in our own time, a great deal of money rides on the conflict continuing.
The goal here is not to make you angry at one side. It’s to give you the unvarnished version, so that no one can sell you a fairy tale in either direction.
A few terms are worth knowing before we start:
- Zionism: a political movement that began in Europe in the late 1800s, aiming to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It grew largely in response to violent antisemitism in Europe.
- Palestinian nationalism: the parallel movement among the Arabs already living in Palestine, seeking self-rule in their own homeland.
- Aliyah: a Hebrew word meaning “ascent,” used for a wave of Jewish immigration to the land.
- Yishuv: the Jewish community living in Palestine before the state of Israel was founded.
- Nakba: Arabic for “catastrophe,” the name Palestinians give to the mass expulsion and flight of 1948, when the state of Israel was founded.
- The occupied territories: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, lands Israel captured by war in 1967 and has controlled since. “Occupation” is a specific status under international law, which is why the term is fought over so bitterly.
1. The Ottoman ground: who was there, and how the friction started
For four centuries, Palestine was a set of provinces inside the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish-led empire that ruled much of the Middle East until World War I. There was no country called “Palestine” with its own government; the land was split among Ottoman administrative districts.
The population was overwhelmingly Arab, most of them Muslim, with sizable Christian and smaller Jewish communities. An Ottoman census around 1878 counted roughly 85 percent Muslim, 11 percent Christian, and about 4 percent Jewish in the relevant districts. The total population in the early 1880s stood somewhere around 450,000 to 470,000 people, of whom the long-settled Jewish community numbered around 20,000 to 25,000. These figures are estimates, and each side of the modern argument tends to shade them: Arab accounts stress how populated the land already was, while some Zionist accounts have understated the Arab presence.
A rooted Arab population lived there, the ancestors of today’s Palestinians. So did a small, long-present Jewish community, alongside a deep Jewish historical connection to the land going back thousands of years. Neither fact cancels the other.
Starting in the 1880s, that balance began to shift. Waves of Jewish immigration, the Aliyah, brought Jews fleeing violent persecution in Europe, especially the pogroms in the Russian Empire (a pogrom is an organized massacre, often of Jews). Between 1882 and 1914, roughly 55,000 to 70,000 Jewish immigrants arrived. By the eve of World War I, the Jewish community had grown to about 80,000 out of a total population near 738,000.
The Ottomans tried to restrict this immigration. Beginning in 1881–1882, the government limited Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine specifically, fearing another nationalist movement that might break away from the empire, as others had. In 1892 it moved to bar land sales to Jews even when the buyers were Ottoman citizens. Immigration often ran against Ottoman policy.
The land purchases themselves, though, were in the main ordinary legal transactions. Land was bought, at market price or above, from Arab absentee landlords, local owners, and Ottoman officials, through funded organizations like the Jewish Colonization Association and later the Jewish National Fund. Enforcement of the Ottoman rules was inconsistent, and officials were often willing to sell despite the restrictions. The immigration was frequently unlawful under Ottoman decree; the land was largely purchased, not seized. Harsher dispossession comes later, and this account will not soften it when it does.
Friction started almost immediately, and it was local before it became national. As new agricultural colonies were established, some displaced the Arab tenant farmers (the fellahin) who had worked that land, which bred early resentment. At the same time, an Arab Palestinian national identity was taking shape, expressed through newspapers, petitions, and local leaders who increasingly saw Zionism as a threat to their future in their own homeland.
Two national movements, each with a genuine claim, had arrived at the same door. That was combustible on its own. Then an empire poured fuel on it.
2. Britain’s three promises: the same land, sold three times
World War I ended Ottoman rule, and the mechanism driving the modern conflict comes into view.
To win the war, Britain made three separate promises about the same region, and they contradicted each other. This is the mainstream historical account, stated plainly by Britannica and academic encyclopedias alike.
The first went to the Arabs in 1915. In the Hussein–McMahon correspondence, Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt offered Sharif Hussein of Mecca British support for an independent Arab state, in exchange for the Arabs revolting against the Ottomans. The Arabs revolted. Britain later insisted Palestine had not been included, but its own Foreign Office in 1919 acknowledged the promise covered Palestine.
The second went to France in 1916. Weeks after promising the Arabs independence, Britain secretly negotiated the Sykes–Picot Agreement, carving the same Arab lands into British and French zones of control. The land promised to the Arabs was, in secret, already being divided between two empires.
The third went to the Zionists in 1917. The Balfour Declaration was a 67-word letter from Britain’s foreign secretary pledging support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, with a caveat that the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities, then over 90 percent of the population, not be harmed. An impossible balancing act, promised anyway.
The motives explain the contradiction. The Balfour Declaration was in large part a wartime instrument: an effort to rally support, keep allies in the fight, and secure British strategic control of the land route to India through a friendly presence in Palestine. One historian’s summary calls it a war weapon, not a moral vision. Britain mortgaged a land it did not yet control, to more than one buyer, to win a war.
In 1922 the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations) formally handed Britain control of Palestine as a “mandate,” and wrote the Balfour promise of a Jewish national home into the terms. The contradiction was now baked into international law. Two peoples had each been given reason to expect the same land, by an outside power that would spend the next quarter-century unable to satisfy either.
Everything that follows, the violence of the Mandate years, 1948, the wars, the occupation, grows out of this crack in the foundation: an imperial power making promises for its own gain that it could not keep to anyone.
3. The Mandate years: rising immigration, rising revolt
For the next quarter-century Britain governed Palestine, and the pressure kept building. Jewish immigration rose in waves, and its character changed as Europe grew more dangerous. When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, immigration jumped to 30,000 that year, 42,000 in 1934, and 61,000 in 1935. By 1936 the Jewish population had reached nearly 400,000, about a third of the total, up from under 10 percent in 1882.
For Jews, this was refuge from persecution that would soon become genocide. For Arabs, it looked like being displaced in their own homeland by newcomers backed by an imperial power. Both readings were grounded in something real, and the collision produced repeated violence. The 1929 riots, sparked at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, cost hundreds of lives and hardened both communities.
In 1936 the pressure erupted into the Arab Revolt, a three-year uprising against both British rule and Zionist settlement. Its demands were an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on land sales to Jews, and Arab independence. The British crushed it by 1939, arming Jewish police units to help do so. The toll fell overwhelmingly on the Arab side: roughly 5,000 Arabs killed, alongside several hundred Jews and about 200 British. The revolt shattered Palestinian society, killing or exiling much of its leadership, and left the Arab community weakened at the worst possible moment, just before the decisive years ahead.
Britain, trying to hold the lid down, reversed course. Its 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years, then made further immigration dependent on Arab consent. The timing was grim: this slammed the door on Jewish refugees at the exact moment Europe’s Jews most desperately needed somewhere to flee. One imperial policy, set for imperial convenience, helped trap people who would die in the Holocaust.
4. 1947–1949: partition, war, and the Nakba
After World War II and the Holocaust, Britain handed the problem to the new United Nations. In November 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international control. The plan gave the Jewish state about 56 percent of the land, even though Jews were then roughly a third of the population and owned far less of the land. Zionist leaders accepted the plan. Arab leaders rejected it as unjust, and civil war broke out between the two communities almost immediately.
What happened next is the heart of the matter, and it has two names because it has two experiences. Israelis call it the War of Independence. Palestinians call it the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.” Both names describe the same events.
The facts, drawn substantially from Israeli historians working in Israel’s own military archives, are these. Over the course of the fighting, more than 700,000 Palestinians, about half the Arab population, were expelled or fled from their homes. Somewhere between 400 and 600 Arab villages were destroyed or depopulated. Massacres occurred; the most notorious, at Deir Yassin in April 1948, killed more than 100 villagers, and news of it was deliberately spread to frighten other Arabs into flight.
For decades two myths competed. The Israeli version held that Palestinians left voluntarily, on orders from Arab leaders. The opposing version held it was a single premeditated master plan of ethnic cleansing. The careful historical record, established largely by Israeli “New Historians” like Benny Morris, sits between and cuts through both: some Palestinians fled the fighting, some fled on Arab instructions, and many were deliberately expelled, sometimes through atrocities committed to hasten their flight. Morris, an Israeli, found no single written master plan but documented that expulsion became widespread policy in practice, and that Israeli leaders up to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion understood the refugees would never be allowed back. That is the unvarnished version, and it does not flatter the founding myth. [1]
The other half of the story is equally real and equally unflattering to the opposite myth. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. The next day, the armies of five Arab states invaded. This was a real invasion, accompanied by rhetoric about destroying the Jewish state, against a people three years removed from the Nazi genocide. Israel, outnumbered on paper and lacking heavy weapons at the outset, won. The Palestinians who fled were barred from returning, their property absorbed by the new state. Those roughly 150,000 Arabs who remained inside Israel became citizens, but lived under military rule until 1966.
Two peoples, two catastrophes braided together: one gaining a state as a refuge from genocide, the other losing its homeland in the process. Describing both is not a refusal to take sides or a way of splitting the difference. It is what actually happened, and any account that drops either half is telling you a story rather than the history.
5. 1967: the occupation that never ended
In June 1967, in six days, everything changed again. Israel, facing mobilizing Arab armies and closed shipping lanes, launched a preemptive strike and won a stunning victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. When the shooting stopped, Israel had captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. For the first time, all of historic Palestine was under Israeli control, and roughly another 400,000 Palestinians were displaced, an event Palestinians call the Naksa, the “setback.”
That November, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, built on a formula that has anchored every peace effort since: land for peace. Israel would withdraw from territories it had occupied; in return, its neighbors would recognize it and make peace. The resolution’s wording was deliberately ambiguous about whether Israel had to give back all the land or only some, and that ambiguity has been argued over ever since.
Here the pattern that defines the present day sets in. Rather than trade the land back, Israel began settling its own citizens on it. The settler movement, driven partly by religious nationalism and partly by government policy, started building homes in occupied territory almost immediately. Sinai was later returned to Egypt in a 1979 peace treaty. East Jerusalem and the Golan were formally annexed. The West Bank and Gaza were placed under military occupation that, for the West Bank, has now lasted more than half a century.
The scale of the settlement project is the clearest single measure of where “land for peace” went. By 2023, roughly 700,000 Israeli settlers were living on occupied Palestinian land, more than 470,000 in the West Bank and over 229,000 in East Jerusalem, across some 350 settlements and outposts. Expansion did not slow; it accelerated. In 2024 the Israeli government advanced nearly 29,000 settlement housing units and appropriated more Palestinian land as “state land” in that single year than in roughly the previous three decades combined. By late 2025, settlement growth had reached its highest level since 2017.
On the legal question there is little genuine dispute internationally, whatever the political argument. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest court, issued an advisory opinion that Israel’s continued occupation is unlawful and that its settlements violate international law. This is reported plainly by Israel’s own press, not only by Palestinian sources. Israel rejects the ruling and disputes that the territories are “occupied” in the legal sense, an argument it has used to keep taking land without absorbing the people living on it.
Strip away the rhetoric and the mechanism is visible. Each year more land is taken, more settlers move in, and the physical possibility of a separate Palestinian state shrinks. Whatever the stated intentions, the facts on the ground move in one direction, decade after decade. [2]
6. Gaza, Hamas, and the blockade
The 1990s brought the closest thing to hope in this story. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO and Israel recognize each other and set up limited Palestinian self-rule under a new Palestinian Authority. The deal promised a path toward Palestinian statehood. It never arrived. Settlements kept expanding, extremists on both sides worked to wreck the process, and the promise curdled into disillusionment.
Into that disillusionment came Hamas. Founded in Gaza in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, it rejected Oslo, refused to recognize Israel, and its founding charter called for Israel’s destruction. It built an armed wing and carried out suicide bombings aimed partly at derailing the peace process. It is designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and others. None of that is in dispute, and an honest account states it plainly.
In 2006 Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections, running against the corruption of the Fatah-led Authority. The vote led to a violent split: by 2007, after fighting with Fatah, Hamas controlled Gaza while Fatah held the West Bank. The Palestinian national movement was now divided against itself, which suited hardliners on every side.
Israel and Egypt responded to the Hamas takeover with a blockade of Gaza, sealing off most movement of people and goods. It has held, in varying degrees of severity, ever since. For the roughly two million people in Gaza, most of them descendants of the 1948 refugees, this meant living in one of the most densely populated and tightly confined places on earth, with the economy throttled and exit nearly impossible. The blockade became the backdrop to repeated rounds of war: Hamas rockets fired into Israel, Israeli bombardment of Gaza, a ceasefire, then the cycle again. [3]
This dynamic sits at the center of the modern conflict. Hamas needs an enemy to justify its rule and its weapons. Israeli hardliners committed to permanent control need a threat to justify the occupation and the blockade. Each side’s worst actors are, in a grim sense, fed by the other. Ordinary Palestinians and ordinary Israelis are the ones who die in the exchanges. [4]
7. October 7 and the war that followed
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a coordinated assault out of Gaza into southern Israel. Fighters broke through the border, and by the end of the day about 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, including families in their homes and young people at a music festival. Roughly 250 people were taken hostage into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the deadliest single day in Israel’s history. The atrocities included murder of children and the elderly and documented sexual violence. Nothing that follows in this section erases or excuses that. It was a war crime, and it was inexcusable.
What Israel did in response is where the scale becomes almost impossible to hold in the mind. Israel launched a military campaign and tightened the blockade into a near-total siege. As of early 2026, credible counts put the number of Palestinians killed at more than 73,000, a figure that keeps climbing, in a population of roughly two million. Independent analysis published in a medical journal suggests the true toll may be substantially higher once indirect deaths are counted. A UN human rights analysis found that about 70 percent of those killed in residential buildings were women and children. By late 2025, more than two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings were damaged or destroyed. A notable marker of how far the numbers ran: in January 2026, an Israeli military official for the first time accepted the Gaza health ministry’s count of more than 71,000 killed by direct Israeli fire, a ministry Israel had long dismissed as unreliable. [5]
Then there is the starvation, which turns the death toll from a byproduct of war into something a court can name. Israel restricted food, water, fuel, and medicine entering Gaza. By September 2025 the UN-backed IPC, the world’s standard authority on famine, formally confirmed famine in Gaza, with children among those who had starved to death. Deliberately starving civilians is itself a war crime under international law, independent of the bombing.
Here is a precise legal breakdown. In January 2024 the International Court of Justice, the UN’s top court for disputes between states, found South Africa’s genocide case against Israel “plausible” enough to proceed and ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts and allow in aid. That case is still open; a final ruling is years away. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes individuals, issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity including using starvation as a method of warfare. Those warrants are for war crimes, not genocide. Then in September 2025 a UN Commission of Inquiry, chaired by former ICC judge Navi Pillay, went further and concluded that Israel had committed genocide, finding that its forces had carried out four of the five genocidal acts defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, and citing statements by Israel’s own leaders as evidence of intent. Separately, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the leading professional body in the field, passed a resolution reaching the same conclusion.
Israel rejects all of it. It maintains that it acts in self-defense after October 7 and in accordance with international law, and it has called the genocide findings “distorted,” “false,” and “scandalous.” Its supporters argue that Hamas embeds itself among civilians, that Hamas bears responsibility for provoking the war, and that Hamas committed the genocidal act on October 7. Those arguments deserve to be stated, and a reader should weigh them.
But weigh them against the record. Whether or not a court ultimately affixes the word “genocide,” the documented facts are not seriously contested: tens of thousands of civilians dead, most of the dead women and children, a territory reduced to rubble, and a famine confirmed by the world’s own hunger authority. A person does not need the heaviest possible label to see that something monstrous happened here, on a scale that dwarfs the attack that triggered it. Naming that is not antisemitism, and it is not support for Hamas. It is reading the evidence.
8. Follow the money
This is the part that gets lost when the conflict is sold as only a clash between peoples or faiths. A great deal of money rides on this, and the money helps explain why it never stops.
Start with the largest single flow. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid since World War II, receiving about $3.8 billion a year under a long-term agreement that runs through 2028. Since October 7, 2023, that baseline has been dwarfed by emergency spending. By September 2025, U.S. military assistance tied to the war had reached at least $21.7 billion, and counting operations across the wider region, some estimates run above $30 billion. The weapons themselves are staggering in volume: by May 2025 Israel’s defense ministry reported receiving about 90,000 tons of American arms and equipment across hundreds of planes and ships.
Most U.S. aid to Israel is structured so that it must be spent buying weapons from American manufacturers. A Washington Post analysis found that nearly 60 percent of the April 2024 aid package went directly to U.S. weapons makers, to replenish stockpiles and expand production. In plain terms, a large share of “aid to Israel” is really a transfer from U.S. taxpayers to U.S. defense corporations, with the weapons routed through a war. The head of one major contractor told investors that wartime budgets would provide a strong underpinning for his company’s growth for years. He was not being cynical. He was describing the business.
The same machine runs on the other side of the region. In May 2025, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed what the White House called the largest defense cooperation agreement in U.S. history, an arms package worth roughly $142 billion, part of a broader $600 billion in Saudi commitments. The contractors named are the same handful of companies: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman. The weapons flow to Israel, and they flow to Israel’s neighbors, and the checks are written to the same firms either way.
This is not a hidden conspiracy, and it should not be described as one. It is a system operating in the open, documented in White House fact sheets and quarterly earnings calls. The defense industry does not need the conflict to be evil; it only needs it to continue. Every escalation replenishes an order book. Every ceasefire that collapses reopens one. The financial incentive does not point toward resolution.
The pattern is old. In 1934, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Gerald Nye spent nearly two years investigating the arms industry after World War I, questioning more than 200 witnesses, including members of the DuPont family and J.P. Morgan. The panel, remembered for popularizing the phrase “merchants of death,” found ample evidence that arms makers had profited enormously and had sold weapons to both sides of the same disputes. It pointed to conflicts like the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, where a firm could press one country to buy quickly by warning that its enemy would otherwise get the weapons first. Notably, the committee found little evidence that the industry had conspired to start wars. The point was never that arms makers light the fires. It is that they profit from the burning, and so have little reason to help put it out. Ninety years later, the names on the contracts have changed and the arrangement has not.
Set this beside the fear. A frightened public is a compliant one. Israeli hardliners can point to October 7 to justify permanent control. Hamas can point to the rubble of Gaza to justify permanent resistance. Political leaders on multiple sides find that a population kept afraid is a population that asks fewer questions about corruption, about failed governance, about who is getting rich. Fear and money reinforce each other. The fear sustains the policies; the policies sustain the fear; and the arms keep moving the whole time.
None of this means the peoples’ grievances are fake. The Palestinian who lost a home in 1948 and the Israeli who lost a child on October 7 are not pawns in a financial scheme; their pain is real and specific. But their pain is also useful to people who profit from keeping the wound open. Both things are true, and the second one is the part almost no one is paid to say out loud.
9. The story sold to believers
There is one more force to account for, and it speaks directly to how someone comes to see modern Israel as beyond criticism. A large part of that view, in the United States, does not come from studying the history at all. It comes from a specific religious story.
The story is called Christian Zionism, and it is worth understanding on its own terms before judging it. Its theological engine is a system called dispensationalism, developed in the 1800s by a British preacher named John Nelson Darby and spread across America through the widely distributed Scofield Reference Bible of 1909. Its central claim is that the return of Jews to the Holy Land and the existence of a Jewish state are prophesied steps that must occur before the Second Coming of Christ. A frequently cited anchor is Genesis 12:3, in which God tells Abraham, “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” Read as a foreign-policy instruction, it becomes a religious duty for America to support Israel unconditionally.
This is not a fringe belief. Depending on how the question is asked, between 63 and 80 percent of American evangelicals say the founding of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. A 2013 Pew survey found that 82 percent of white evangelicals believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, a figure nearly identical to the share of ultra-Orthodox Jews who say the same. Evangelicals make up something like a fifth to a third of the American electorate, and unlike most religious groups, they tend to vote as a bloc on Israel. No American politician can ignore a constituency that size voting on a single issue.
In the fullest version of the end-times script, the return of Christ is preceded by a final catastrophic war, and by a moment at which Jews must either convert to Christianity or perish. Scholars who study the movement, including sympathetic ones, note the uncomfortable implication: in this framework, Jews and the state of Israel function as instruments in a Christian prophecy rather than as ends in themselves. Support for Israel, in this telling, is not quite support for Jewish people. It is support for the role Jewish people are assigned in someone else’s story about the end of the world. And within that story, what happens to actual Palestinians, and to actual Jews, can be treated as secondary to the unfolding of the prophecy.
Notice what this does. It takes a bloody, complicated, this-worldly conflict over land and power and recasts it as a sacred drama with a divinely required outcome. If Israel’s every action is a step toward the return of Christ, then criticizing those actions can feel like arguing against God. The suffering becomes not a tragedy to be stopped but a sign to be welcomed. This is how a person can look at tens of thousands of dead civilians and a confirmed famine and still place Israel entirely in the right: not through any assessment of the facts, but because the facts were never the point. The story was supplied in advance, and the story cannot lose.
That is the rabbit hole. Not a conspiracy, not stupidity, but a coherent and emotionally powerful narrative that arrives fully formed and explains away every uncomfortable fact before it can land. Not all evangelicals hold this view; support among younger evangelicals is measurably declining, and many Christians support Israel, or Palestinians, for reasons that have nothing to do with end-times prophecy. But for a significant bloc, the prophecy is the reason, and it is impervious to evidence by design.
What to make of all this
Trace the whole arc and a shape emerges. An empire made promises it could not keep, for its own advantage. Two peoples with real claims were set against each other and have paid in blood ever since. Land has been taken, decade after decade, faster now than ever. A horrific attack was answered with a vastly more horrific campaign that the world’s own courts and inquiries are still struggling to name. And underneath all of it, money moves to the people who sell weapons, while fear and sacred stories keep populations divided and compliant.
October 7 was a war crime. That is not in question, and it should never be minimized. But the answer to it, measured in tens of thousands of civilian dead, in children, in a starved population and a leveled territory, is not made righteous by the crime that triggered it. A wrong of that scale does not become clean because it followed another wrong. Both can be atrocities, and seeing the second one clearly asks something of us: to read widely, to check who is telling us a thing and what they gain from our believing it, and to weigh the evidence before settling on a view.
That habit, reading across many verifiable sources and judging their reliability, is the core work of citizenship in any country. It is harder than accepting a ready-made story, and it is the only real defense against being handed one.
The facts do not need inflating to indict. Tens of thousands of civilians are dead, most of them women and children. A territory is in ruins. A famine has been confirmed by the world’s own hunger authority. Three separate international bodies are weighing charges from war crimes to genocide. That record stands on its own, and it points to a catastrophe kept alive by people and systems that profit from it, in money, in power, or in the certainty of their own story.
On the surface this looks like a story about belief: the faith of two peoples fighting over one land, and the hubris of American dispensationalists who would hasten Armageddon to secure their own passage to heaven while consigning everyone else to hell. Underneath, it is something plainer. Large communities suffer because a small number of very rich people use fear, division, and money to keep selling arms to both sides.
Footnote(s):
- New Historians: The scholarship on exactly what happened in 1948 is genuinely contested, and honesty requires saying so. The “New Historians,” a group of Israeli scholars who opened the state’s archives in the 1980s, broadly agree that Palestinians were expelled and that the events amounted to what many now call ethnic cleansing. They disagree, sharply, on intent. Benny Morris argues the exodus was largely the product of war and of expulsion decisions taken piecemeal as military expediency, with no single written blueprint. Ilan Pappé, building on earlier work reading “Plan Dalet” as a deliberate design, argues it was a premeditated master plan. A further camp, associated with historians like Efraim Karsh, disputes the New Historians’ conclusions more broadly and defends versions closer to the traditional Israeli account. The main text follows the area of overlap that even these opponents largely share: that mass expulsion happened, that atrocities occurred, and that return was permanently barred. Where they differ is on the question of a coordinating plan, which remains unsettled. [^]
- Settler Colonialism: This pattern of incoming settlers taking and holding the land of an existing population has led a number of scholars to place Israel in the same analytical category as the United States, Canada, and Australia, under the heading of “settler colonialism.” The framework was developed most influentially by the historian Patrick Wolfe, whose 2006 essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” explicitly compared the U.S., Australia, and Israel, arguing that in each case “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Universities now teach the American and Palestinian cases side by side on exactly this basis, drawing parallels in the taking of land, the confinement of the displaced to shrinking territories, and ideologies of entitlement (American Manifest Destiny alongside religious claims to the land). The comparison is genuinely contested. Critics argue that the Jewish historical and religious connection to the land, the fact that many Israelis descend from Jews expelled from Middle Eastern countries rather than from a European “mother country,” and the founding role of refugees fleeing genocide make the settler-colonial label distort as much as it clarifies. Defenders reply that a person’s motive for displacing another does not change the fact of the displacement. Readers can weigh the framing for themselves; it is offered here as an established scholarly lens, not a settled verdict. [^]
- To picture the scale: the Gaza Strip is about 25 miles long and 7 miles wide, roughly 140 square miles, according to the CIA World Factbook. That is about the same land area as the city of Detroit or Las Vegas, and roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Into that space are packed some 2.1 to 2.3 million people, which is why it is routinely described as one of the most densely populated places on earth. Holding the size in mind changes how the casualty figures read: the tens of thousands killed since October 2023 died inside an area smaller than many single American cities. [^]
- It would be wrong to claim that Gaza’s children are simply “raised to hate,” which flattens two million individuals into a single mind and edges toward the dehumanization used to justify treating a whole population as a threat. What the peer-reviewed research does document is narrower and grimmer: children growing up under blockade and repeated bombardment show very high rates of PTSD, depression, and toxic stress, and studies find they come to expect violence as normal and remain hypervigilant even during ceasefires. A generation shaped by those conditions is, predictably, a generation from which grievance and militancy can grow, which is one reason the cycle renews itself and why those who profit from its continuation face little pressure to end it. The point is not that the victims become villains; it is that the conditions manufacture the next round of the conflict, on all sides. [^]
- Part of what drives that ratio is who lives in Gaza. Its population is one of the youngest in the world: by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, roughly 47 percent are under 18 and about 68 percent are under 30, while only about 3 percent are elderly (65 or older). The median age is about 19.5 years, and NPR describes it as one of the youngest populations on earth. In a place where nearly half the people are children, a high share of children and women among the dead is close to a demographic inevitability, which is worth keeping in mind when weighing claims about who among the casualties was a combatant. [^]
- Featured image credit: “The War Traders,” a British anti-armaments cartoon from the era of the First World War (colorized). The image “The War Traders” dates to the campaign against private arms manufacturers that ran through Britain and Europe around the time of the First World War; the financiers in it carry British pound symbols, and the title echoes G. H. Perris’s 1914 book of the same name. It is reproduced here as a historical artifact, not as a depiction of any present-day event. Its point, that a war can be a profit center regardless of who wins or who is buying, was made about European arms dealers a century ago. The same logic recurs in the modern arrangement described in section 8, where American and European manufacturers profit from arming multiple sides of the same region’s conflicts, and where the “merchants of death” label first entered American politics through the 1934 Nye Committee (see the phrase’s history). The recurrence across a century and across countries is the reason the image opens this piece.
- Note: Every factual claim above is linked to a source. Where sources or interpretations conflict, the text notes the disagreement rather than resolving it by force. Sources were chosen for the reliability of the specific facts they document; in some cases, stronger or more neutral sources for the same facts may exist.
