The Israel-Palestine conflict: a brief, simple history

One of the biggest myths about the Israel-Palestine conflict is that it's been going on for centuries, that this is all about ancient religious hatreds. In fact, while religion is involved, the conflict is mostly about two groups of people who claim the same land. And it really only goes back about a century, to the early 1900s.

Around then, the region along the eastern Mediterranean we now call Israel-Palestine had been under Ottoman rule for centuries. It was religiously diverse, including mostly Muslims and Christians but also a small number of Jews, who lived generally in peace. And it was changing in two important ways. First, more people in the region were developing a sense of being not just ethnic Arabs

but Palestinians, a distinct national identity. At the same time, not so far away in Europe, more Jews were joining a movement called Zionism, which said that Judaism was not just a religion but a nationality, one that deserved a nation of its own. And after centuries of persecution, many believed a Jewish state was their only way of

safety. And they saw their historic homeland in the Middle East as their best hope for establishing it. In the first decades of the 20th century, tens of thousands of European Jews moved there. After World War One, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the British and French Empires carved up the Middle East, with the British taking control of a region it called the British

Mandate for Palestine. At first, the British allowed Jewish immigration. But as more Jews arrived, settling into farming communes, tension between Jews and Arabs grew. Both sides committed acts of violence. And by the 1930s, the British began limiting Jewish immigration. In response, Jewish militias formed to fight both the local Arabs and to resist British rule.