A timeline of Israel and Palestine’s complicated history

by NICLOE NARIA

To understand the Israel-Hamas war, you have to understand how we got here.

Hamas’s attack on Israel, and Israel’s offensive in Gaza in response, is yet another escalation in a long conflict that has already left thousands dead on both sides.

The latest round of violence between Israel and Palestine began after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Israel ever on October 7, killing more than 1,400 people, and capturing nearly 200, by the latest estimates. Israel responded with an intense counteroffensive that included an order to carry out a “complete siege” of Gaza, and it appears to be readying for a ground assault.

Israeli airstrikes have already devastated many civilian areas, and the death toll in Gaza is growing amid a spiraling humanitarian crisis. Foreign passport holders in Gaza and aid convoys carrying life-saving supplies from Egypt have lined up at the Egyptian border crossing waiting for an agreement that would allow the border to open, but that has so far failed to materialize.

The death and destruction are the bloody culmination of decades of fighting rooted in a complicated history. To understand the current violence, you have to understand how we got here. If you’re just catching up, here are the key dates that have led up to this critical inflection point.

1917: The Balfour Declaration

The 1800s were a time of great colonial expansion as European empires jockeyed to take over other parts of the world, including the Middle East. As early as the 1840s, the British saw Palestine as an opportunity to carve out a sphere of influence in the Middle East, where they were competing with the French and Russians. But it wasn’t until World War I, in which they were fighting the Ottomans who controlled Palestine, that the British formalized their support for the idea of a Jewish state in the region.

In its 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British government unilaterally called for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, despite the fact that Jewish people made up less than 15 percent of the population there at the time. Though the declaration vowed that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” it did not outline what those communities were, what specific rights they had, or how they would be protected, and it didn’t take their thoughts about how their land should be used into account.

The Allied powers in the war backed the declaration, and after the war, the newly created League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to temporarily rule Palestine until the Jewish state could be created.

The British thereafter adopted immigration policies that encouraged more than 100,000 Jews to immigrate over the next two decades.

1930s: Jews seek to flee Nazi rule, but have nowhere to go

Jews had been persecuted in Europe for centuries, but in the early 1900s, antisemitism reached a fever pitch across the continent, particularly in Germany. By the 1930s, it had became a tool of populism and the official policy of the Nazis. As the Nazi Party completed its takeover of the German government, it enacted hundreds of decrees and laws that targeted Jews as “enemies of the state” in Germany, and gradually ramped up an assault on Jewish rights.

At first, Nazis barred Jews from a swath of industries ranging from civil service to acting. Then, they prohibited Jews from marrying people of “German or German-related blood,” prevented them from obtaining citizenship in the German Reich or earning a living, and expropriated Jewish property and sold it to Nazi party officials at low prices. The Nazis’ objective was to make life so terrible for Jews that they would leave — and about a quarter of German Jews had by 1938.

That year, before World War II officially began, Germany annexed Austria and brought another 185,000 Jews under Nazi rule. Though many of them wanted to flee, few countries would have them. Representatives from 32 countries convened in Evian, France, to discuss resettlement. But while many of them expressed sympathy for Jewish refugees, most of them declined to take them in, including the US and Britain.

As Jewish refugees looked for a place to go, Zionists —activists in a movement seeking a permanent home for Jewish people — advertised and agitated for immigration to Palestine. For years, prominent Zionists had called for a Jewish state in Palestine (rather than Uganda or any other nation sometimes suggested) because of the region’s religious and historical significance to Jewish people. And the area proved popular, with the Jewish population of British-ruled Palestine increasing by more than 160,000 between 1932 and 1935 alone.

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