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 Israelites were a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes of the ancient Near East, who inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods.
For 3500 years the land of Israel has belonged to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their seed forever by an everlasting and eternal blood covenant recorded in the Bible. Israel is the only nation on earth created by a sovereign act of God (Genesis 12:1-3; 13:16, 15:5, 17:7-8, 22:17-18).
Scholars believe the first human settlements in Jerusalem took place during the Early Bronze Age—somewhere around 3500 B.C. In 1000 B.C., King David conquered Jerusalem and made it the capital of the Jewish kingdom. His son, Solomon, built the first holy Temple about 40 years later.
In 1920, after the Allies conquered the Levant during World War I, the territory was divided between Britain and France under the mandate system, and the British-administered area which included modern day Israel was named Mandatory Palestine.
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.
From 1517 to 1917, what is today Israel, along with much of the Middle East, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
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.
Palestine's Early Roots
From about 1517 to 1917, the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the region. When World War I ended in 1918, the British took control of Palestine.
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.”
Archaeological work in the area suggests that the city was inhabited as far back as 4000BC. Its earliest known name may be Jebusite, the translation of a Canaanite town. Together with the later arriving Philistines, they are believed to be the earliest known ancestors to present day Palestinians.
"Jews" (Yehudim) is used to denote the descendants of the Israelites who coalesced when the Tribe of Judah absorbed the remnants of the northern Israelite tribes.
Of the land that the Jews bought, 52.6% were bought from non-Palestinian landowners, 24.6% from Palestinian landowners, 13.4% from government, churches, and foreign companies, and only 9.4% from fellaheen (farmers).
Palestine in the ancient world was part of the region known as Canaan where the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were located. The term `Palestine' was originally a designation of an area of land in southern Canaan which the people known as the Philistines occupied a very small part of.
Jacob's 12 sons became the leaders of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. A shortage of food later forced the Israelites to leave Canaan. Many of them moved to Egypt. Eventually, Egypt's leader, the pharaoh, enslaved them.
The history of ancient Israel and Judah begins in the Southern Levant region of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. "Israel" as a people or tribal confederation (see Israelites) appears for the first time in the Merneptah Stele, an inscription from ancient Egypt that dates to about 1208 BCE.
Palestine was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and remained under the rule of the Turks until World War One. Towards the end of this war, the Turks were defeated by the British forces led by General Allenby.
In 722 BCE, the Assyrians, under Sargon II, successor to Shalmaneser V, conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and many Israelites were deported to Mesopotamia. The Jewish proper diaspora began with the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE.
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the birth of major nationalist movements among the Jews and among the Arabs, both geared towards attaining sovereignty for their people in the Middle East.
Different communities of Jews around the world share more than just religious or cultural practices — they also have strong genetic commonalities, according to the largest genetic analysis of Jewish people to date.
Hebrew is the country's official language, and almost the entire population speaks it either as native speakers or proficiently as a second language. Its standard form, known as Modern Hebrew, is the main medium of life in Israel.
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.
By the 11th century, Jewish settlers from southern Europe, Jewish immigrants from Babylon and Persia, and Maghrebi Jewish traders from North Africa were settling in western and central Europe, particularly in France and along the Rhine River.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel.
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.