On 15 November 1988 in Algiers, then-Chairman of the PLO Yasser Arafat proclaimed the establishment of the State of Palestine. A year after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the PNA was formed to govern (in varying degrees) areas A and B in the West Bank, comprising 165 enclaves, and the Gaza Strip.
Early History
The region of Palestine is among the earliest sites of human habitation in the world. Archaeological evidence suggests a hunter-gatherer community living a nomadic existence in the region pre-10,000 BCE. In the Early Bronze Age, permanent settlements were founded and agricultural communities developed.
In 1988 the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers proclaimed the establishment of the State of Palestine.
Palestine's Early Roots
Throughout history, Palestine has been ruled by numerous groups, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians and Mamelukes. From about 1517 to 1917, the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the region.
In the Hellenistic period, these names were carried over into Greek, appearing in the Histories of Herodotus in the more recognizable form of "Palaistine". The Roman Empire initially used other terms for the region, such as Judaea, but renamed the region Syria Palaestina after the Bar Kokhba revolt.
The oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans found outside Africa are the Skhul and Qafzeh hominids, who lived in northern Israel 120,000 years ago. Around 10th millennium BCE, the Natufian culture existed in the area.
The declaration of a State of Palestine (Arabic: دولة فلسطين) took place in Algiers on November 15, 1988, by the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Officially governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it claims the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as its territory, though the entirety of that territory has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War.
Jews originated as an ethnic and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, in a part of the Levant known as the Land of Israel.
RAMALLAH, Palestine
According to the bureau, Jews controlled only 6.2% of land in Palestine under British mandate (1920-1948). “Israel now controls around 27,000 cubic meters of land, accounting for 85% of historical Palestine,” the PCBS said.
From 1517 to 1917, what is today Israel, along with much of the Middle East, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
The term "Palestine" first appeared in the 5th century BCE when the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories.
However, the situation in Palestine had deteriorated into a civil war between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the termination of the British mandate.
Jews have lived on the land of Israel continuously for almost 4,000 years. The land of Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish people. Approximately 4,000 years ago, Abraham moved to the land of Israel where he lived with his family, raised his children and purchased land to bury his wife and himself.
1920. Mandatory Palestine is how the territory that today is made up of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was referred to when it was under the control of British authorities in the 1920s.
The name Syria-Palaestina was given to the Roman province of Judaea in the early 2nd century AD.
Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times.
And historian Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University in Israel argues in his book The Invention of the Jewish People, translated into English last year, that most modern Jews do not descend from the ancient Land of Israel but from groups that took on Jewish identities long afterward.
Exile under Babylon (586–538 BCE)
According to the Hebrew Bible, he destroyed Solomon's Temple and exiled the Jews to Babylon.
In 1967, Israel absorbed the whole of historical Palestine, as well as additional territory from Egypt and Syria. By the end of the war, Israel had expelled another 300,000 Palestinians from their homes, including 130,000 who were displaced in 1948, and gained territory that was three and a half times its size.
The Palestinian territories are the two regions of the former British Mandate for Palestine that have been militarily occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967, namely: the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.
The history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict began with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This conflict came from the intercommunal violence in Mandatory Palestine between Arabs and Jews from 1920, and erupted into full-scale hostilities in the 1947–48 civil war.
Before David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, announced Israel's Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, 600,000 Jews lived in the land. According to estimates, approximately one-fifth – or up to 120,000 Jews were living in Jerusalem – the newly-declared capital of the nascent state.
Indigenous Peoples in Israel
Israel's Arab Bedouin citizens are Indigenous to the Negev (Naqab, in Arabic) desert, where they have lived for centuries as a semi-nomadic people, long before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
As for the modern State of Israel, its beginnings lie in the 19th century, when the Jewish nationalist movement Zionism took shape. Members of the movement usually referred to the hoped-for nation to be formed in Palestine as “the Jewish State,” as it was called by Theodor Herzl (in German) - “Der Judenstaat.”