Israel and the Jewish people: roots, memory and choosing life

Roots you can see, a memory you can hear

The Jewish bond with this land is older than modern Israel by thousands of years. You can see it in stone: Assyrian reliefs record the siege of the Judean city of Lachish in 701 BCE.¹ And on parchment: the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve Jewish writing and belief from the Second Temple period.²

The land also lives in Bible stories, in Hebrew and in prayers facing Jerusalem. Faith and history are different kinds of knowledge, and you can understand a bond without sharing a faith. At the Passover table, families still tell the story of slavery and freedom through questions and food.³ And there is no single way to be Jewish: religious or secular, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi or other.

Exile: a home, and a danger

For generations Jewish communities lived across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and beyond, writing, trading and arguing with their neighbours. The Iraqi Jewish Archive keeps the record of that life, and of its end.⁴ According to Israel’s foreign ministry, more than 850,000 Jews were forced out of Arab countries and Iran in the twentieth century;⁵ almost 120,000 left Iraq in 1950–1951 alone, according to the US National Archives.⁴

Antisemitism, hostility to Jews because they are Jews, took many forms: libels, restrictions, violence and expulsions, from England in 1290 to Spain in 1492.⁶ Pogroms struck Jews in the Russian Empire;⁷ in Baghdad’s Farhud, on 1–2 June 1941, Jews were attacked and robbed.⁸ Not every society was hostile, but the slide from belonging to danger could be fast. That is part of why home and self-defence matter so much in Jewish memory.

Remembering the victims does not make the attackers’ descendants, or a whole religion, guilty forever. And criticising Israel’s government is not in itself hatred of Jews; Jews as a whole are not responsible for what that government does.

The Holocaust

Between 1933 and 1945 Nazi Germany, with its allies and collaborators, persecuted the Jews of Europe and murdered about six million of them. Families, communities and whole cultural worlds were wiped out.⁹

That memory helps explain how deep the Israeli need for security runs. It does not reduce Jewish identity to victimhood, and it is no licence to harm others. Zionism came before the Holocaust; Israel is not only an answer to catastrophe, but also a national dream and a life built.

Zionism: an old longing becomes a plan

In the late nineteenth century Zionism became a modern national movement; Theodor Herzl gathered the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.¹⁰ In the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, Britain backed a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, provided nothing prejudiced the rights of the non-Jewish communities there.¹¹ In 1922 the League of Nations made Britain responsible for carrying it out.¹²

But the land was not empty. Arabs lived there too, with homes, fields, towns and deep roots. The clash of two national hopes is not a footnote to this story; it is the story.

1947–1948: dancing in the streets, then war

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly recommended a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international Jerusalem, by 33 votes to 13.¹³¹⁴ The Jewish leadership accepted the plan; the Palestinian Arab leadership and the Arab states rejected it as unjust to a country with an Arab majority.¹⁵ In Israeli memory, that was the night people danced in the streets.

Fighting broke out at once, while Britain still ruled.¹⁵ According to Israel’s foreign ministry, local Arabs and irregulars from neighbouring states attacked Jewish communities.¹⁶ Three years after the Holocaust, Israelis remember those months as a war for survival itself. By 1949 the Jewish side had lost about 4,000 fighters and 2,000 civilians, roughly one in every hundred people.¹⁶

And the part the Israeli story tends to skip: in the same months, before the state was declared, Palestinian Arabs were already losing their homes. According to the Israeli historian Benny Morris, about 75,000 had left by April 1948 and about a quarter of a million more fled by June; in July Israeli forces expelled 40,000 to 50,000 people from Lydda and Ramle. He puts the total at just over 700,000 refugees.¹⁷ How much of it was planned is still argued over; the Palestinian story goes into it.

On 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel.¹⁸ Arab armies crossed into the former Mandate (Israelis call it an invasion; Arab accounts speak of the Arab armies entering Palestine).¹⁵ The war ended in 1949 with armistice agreements, not peace; the Arab state never arose, and Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza.¹⁵

Ben-Gurion: the builder, and the hard decisions

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, led the state through that war. To many Israelis he is the man who turned a dream into a state; in 1953 he moved to Sde Boker in the Negev, to show where he thought the future lay.¹⁹

He also led the hardest decisions of 1948. On 16 June his government decided not to allow a mass return of the refugees. According to Morris, Ben-Gurion supported “transfer”, although not all his colleagues agreed.¹⁷ You can value what he built and still see the price that others paid.

The Declaration of Independence promised equal rights and freedom of religion, conscience, language and education.²⁰ It is a standard to judge the state by, not proof that it was always met. For many Jews 1948 is the year of national revival; for many Palestinians, the Nakba. Both are real, and neither requires blurring a fact.

1949–1967: newcomers, military rule and weeks of fear

The young state took in hundreds of thousands: Holocaust survivors, and Jews who left Arab countries or were driven out of them. According to the foreign ministry, more than 120,000 came from Iraq and more than 47,000 from Yemen. Today, the ministry says, the descendants of Jews from Arab countries and Iran are the majority of Israel’s Jews.⁵ Anyone who sees Israelis as “Europeans” is missing this.

A chapter seldom told: from 1948 until 1966 the Arab citizens of Israel lived under military government, until Prime Minister Levi Eshkol announced its end on 8 November 1966,²¹ although the Declaration of Independence had promised equality.²⁰

In 1956, after Egypt’s President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, Israel attacked in Sinai on 29 October in a secret plan with Britain and France; American pressure brought a ceasefire on 6 November.²² Israelis remember “Operation Kadesh” as an answer to cross-border raids and to the blocking of the sea route to Eilat; Egyptians call it the Tripartite Aggression.

In May 1967 Egypt massed troops in Sinai, demanded that the UN force leave and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.²³ In Israeli memory these are “the weeks of waiting”: reservists called up, empty streets, and fear of annihilation 22 years after the Holocaust.

1967: six days, and the start of the occupation

On 5 June 1967 Israel launched an air attack that it calls pre-emptive, and by 10 June it had won.²⁴ It captured Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.²³ In Israel it felt like deliverance: from fear of annihilation to the Western Wall within a week. In the Arab world it is the Naksa, the setback.²⁴

It was also how the occupation began: a large Palestinian population came under Israeli military rule. On 19 June 1967 the government decided to offer peace to Egypt and Syria on the international border, with security arrangements; after the Arab League’s Khartoum summit rejected negotiations and peace, it withdrew the offer in October.²⁵ Resolution 242 followed in November, and the Jarring and Rogers efforts produced no agreement.

Israel also began to build settlements, and Israelis have argued about them ever since. Some see Judea and Samaria as the heart of the Jewish story and as strategic depth. Others see lasting rule over another people as a danger to Israeli democracy and its moral character. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice advised that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible.²⁶

October 1973: sirens on Yom Kippur

On 6 October 1973, on the holiest and quietest day of the Jewish year, the sirens went off.²⁷ Egypt and Syria attacked Israeli forces in Sinai and on the Golan; after setbacks in the first days the war ended in an Israeli military victory.²⁸ About 2,656 Israeli soldiers were killed and more than 7,200 wounded.²⁷ In Egypt and Syria it is remembered as a war to win back the land lost in 1967.

In Israel it is “the failure” (ha-mehdal): a shock that broke the confidence of 1967; protests and the Agranat Commission led to the government’s resignation.²⁷ And out of this war came diplomacy: the Geneva Conference, the Sinai agreements, the Golan disengagement, and at the end of that road, peace with Egypt.²⁸

The 1970s: terror against civilians

In the 1970s Israelis learned a new kind of fear: attacks aimed on purpose at civilians. At the Munich Olympics in September 1972, members of the Palestinian group Black September attacked the Israeli team;²⁹ 11 of its members were murdered.³⁰ In 1974, 26 people were killed in an attack on a school in Ma’alot, by a Time magazine count quoted by Israel’s foreign ministry.³⁰

On 11 March 1978 a Palestinian squad that had come by sea from Lebanon landed near Ma’agan Michael, hijacked a bus on the Coastal Road and fired on the passengers. According to the foreign ministry, 38 civilians were murdered, 13 of them children.³⁰

So for many years, “PLO” meant terror in Hebrew. Israel and the PLO recognised each other only in 1993, in the letters of mutual recognition; what changed on the Palestinian side in between is told in the PLO’s road, 1974–1988. And the site’s rule applies here as everywhere: a deliberate attack on civilians is terror, whoever commits it.

Peace with Egypt, war in Lebanon

In November 1977 Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem and spoke in the Knesset. In March 1978, 348 reserve officers and soldiers wrote to Menachem Begin urging him not to miss the chance, and Peace Now was born from that letter.³¹ After Camp David came the peace treaty of 1979. Israel gave back all of Sinai, and in April 1982 it removed by force the town of Yamit, which it had built there.³² The largest Arab state, which had fought Israel four times, became a neighbour at peace, and still is.

In June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon and besieged Beirut.³³ The government called it “Operation Peace for Galilee” and presented it as pushing the PLO away from the northern border. It was the first war Israelis argued about while it was still being fought.

On 16–18 September 1982 the Phalange, a Lebanese Christian militia allied with Israel, massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut, after Israel’s defence minister had approved their entry.³⁴ According to Peace Now, 400,000 people then demonstrated in Tel Aviv for an inquiry, an organisers’ estimate that is disputed.³¹ The Kahan Commission found that Israel bore indirect responsibility and that Defence Minister Ariel Sharon had ignored the danger of bloodshed, and recommended that he resign.³⁴ The 1983 agreement with Lebanon never came into force.

Oslo: hope, and then the buses

In December 1987 the first intifada broke out in the West Bank and Gaza, a popular uprising against the occupation.³⁵ Many Israelis, among them soldiers sent to police civilians, came to feel that the situation of 1967 could not go on without a price. In 1988, after the PLO accepted Resolution 242, 100,000 Israelis demonstrated for talks with it, according to Peace Now.³¹

After the Madrid Conference came the mutual recognition and the Oslo Accord of 1993. The Knesset approved it by 61 votes to 50:³⁶ half the country hoped, and half feared. In 1994 came peace with Jordan. For a moment the whole conflict seemed close to an end.

Then came blood and fear. On 25 February 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli, carried out a terrorist massacre of Muslim worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque (the Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron.³⁷ In February and March 1996, 59 people were killed in four Hamas suicide bombings, most of them on buses and at a shopping centre.³⁸ Israelis who had backed the accord were now afraid to board a bus.

On 4 November 1995, at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by Yigal Amir, a Jewish Israeli who opposed Oslo.³⁹ Shimon Peres took over and lost the election of May 1996.³⁹ The killer came from inside, and Israelis have to tell themselves that too. But the murder alone did not decide the fate of the process.

The second intifada: buses, cafés and a barrier

In July 2000 the Camp David summit ended without an agreement; violence broke out after Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif) on 28 September.⁴⁰ For Israelis, the second intifada means suicide bombings on buses and in cafés, restaurants and shopping centres. According to B’Tselem, between September 2000 and September 2010 Palestinians killed 1,083 Israelis, 741 of them civilians.⁴¹

In the same decade, again by B’Tselem’s count, Israeli security forces killed 6,371 Palestinians, at least 2,996 of whom were not taking part in hostilities; the count includes later fighting in Gaza.⁴¹ Most Israelis lived those years as a war for their homes; most Palestinians lived them differently, as their story tells.

The bombings broke something, above all among Oslo’s supporters. Many concluded that there was “no partner”: we made an offer, and got explosions. That is a conclusion, not a fact, and it is disputed in Israel too, but you cannot understand Israeli politics without it. In a joint poll in 2020, 79% of Israeli Jews and 90% of Palestinians said the other side could not be trusted.⁴²

In June 2002 the government decided to build the separation barrier, which many Israelis credit, together with army operations, for the fall in attacks. But about 85% of its route runs inside the West Bank rather than on the Green Line, and according to B’Tselem it has cut some 150 Palestinian communities off from their land.⁴³

2005: we left Gaza

In the summer of 2005 Israel left Gaza in a unilateral step, the disengagement: all 21 settlements in the Strip, home to about 8,500 people, and four in the northern West Bank were evacuated. About 55,000 soldiers and police were sent to remove Israeli citizens from their homes, and Israeli society was torn.⁴⁴

The rockets did not stop. By a figure Human Rights Watch cites, about 2,700 were fired from Gaza between September 2005 and May 2007, most often at Sderot; the organisation found that deliberate or indiscriminate fire at civilians is a war crime.⁴⁵ In June 2007 Hamas seized the Strip.⁴⁶

Hence the sentence almost every Israeli knows: “We left Gaza, we got rockets, and in the end we got 7 October.” Anyone who wants Israel to withdraw again has to face it. Its critics, Israeli and Palestinian, answer that the exit was unilateral, with no agreement; that Israel kept control of the land perimeter, the airspace and the sea;⁴⁴ and that after 2007 it blockaded the Strip.⁴⁶ Both arguments rest on facts; the disagreement is over the lesson.

7 October 2023 and since

On 7 October 2023 the terrorist organisation Hamas led a terrorist attack in Israel in which innocent civilians were murdered and hostages were taken.⁴⁷ According to Israeli government figures, about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were abducted to Gaza.⁴⁸ For many Israelis it was the darkest day since 1948: the state created so that Jews would never again be defenceless did not protect its citizens in their own homes.

Since that day Israel has lived with the hostages. The last 20 living hostages came home in October 2025, under the ceasefire, after about two years in captivity;⁴⁸ the bodies of those who did not survive had been returned by the end of January 2026.⁴⁹ More than 300,000 reservists were called up, and tens of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in the south and the north.⁵⁰ According to the army, 468 soldiers were killed between the start of the ground offensive, on 27 October 2023, and the ceasefire.⁴⁸

Israelis were divided over the war itself. In an Israel Democracy Institute poll at the end of August 2025, about two-thirds backed a deal to free the hostages in return for ending the fighting and a full withdrawal: 62% of Jews and 81% of Arabs.⁵¹ The argument goes on. Some hold that only the defeat of Hamas will bring security; others, that the war went far beyond what security required.

And there is a price the Israeli story finds hard to look at. Israeli military operations in Gaza killed at least 67,869 Palestinians by the ceasefire of October 2025, among them 20,179 children, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza;⁴⁸ that count does not distinguish civilians from combatants.⁵² Hamas is not the Palestinian people, and guilt for terror does not pass to a whole public. What the people of Gaza went through is told in the Palestinian story and on the ceasefire page.