People & Histories

Bethlehem · Neil Ward, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Understanding a Palestinian in 5 minutes

  1. Rooted in the land

    Many Palestinian families can name the village, the house and the olive trees their great-grandparents tended. Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians lived in Palestine for centuries under Ottoman rule, farming its hills and filling towns such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus and Hebron. A distinct Palestinian national identity took shape in the late Ottoman and British Mandate years, partly in response to Zionism; Palestinians see it as the political form of a much older attachment to place.

    • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
    • Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 — Beshara Doumani, University of California Press (1995)
    • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)

  2. The Nakba, which never ended

    In the 1948 war that created Israel, roughly 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians, over half the Arab population of Mandate Palestine, fled or were expelled, and hundreds of villages were emptied and most later razed. Palestinians call it al-Nakba, "the catastrophe", and mark it every 15 May. Old house keys, kept by refugee families, are its symbol. Many Palestinians describe what followed, from 1967 to Gaza today, as a Nakba that is still going on.

    • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
    • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
    • Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory — Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Columbia University Press (2007)
    • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)

  3. A people scattered

    The Palestinian statistics bureau counted about 15.5 million Palestinians at the end of 2025: some 7.4 million in historic Palestine (the West Bank, Gaza and Israel) and about 8.1 million outside it, most in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gulf, with large communities in Chile, the US and Europe. Nearly 6 million are registered refugees with the UN agency UNRWA. Many have no state and no passport of their own, and the right of return is close to sacred.

    • Palestinians at the End of 2025 — Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, PCBS (2025)
    • UNRWA in Figures — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA (2024)
    • Palestinians in Latin America: Between Assimilation and Long-Distance Nationalism — Cecilia Baeza, Journal of Palestine Studies (2014)

  4. Life under occupation

    Since 1967 Israel has controlled the West Bank and Gaza. For about three million West Bank Palestinians that means military law, checkpoints, permits, a separation barrier, and settlements housing roughly 750,000 Israelis including East Jerusalem. Gaza was blockaded from 2007 and has been devastated by war since October 2023. Israel says these measures answer real security threats; Palestinians experience them as a daily denial of freedom and dignity.

    • Area C of the West Bank: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations (2017)
    • 2025 Report on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem — Office of the EU Representative (West Bank and Gaza Strip, UNRWA), European External Action Service (2026)
    • Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem — International Court of Justice, ICJ (2024)
    • The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development — Sara Roy, Institute for Palestine Studies (2016)

  5. Sumud, steadfastness

    Sumud, "steadfastness", is a core Palestinian value: staying on the land, rebuilding the demolished house, harvesting the olives, getting the children to school despite everything. It lives in culture too: tatreez embroidery (UNESCO-listed in 2021), dabke dancing, poetry, the keffiyeh, and a passion for education that has made Palestinians among the most highly educated people in the Arab world.

    • The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank — Raja Shehadeh, Quartet Books (1982)
    • Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape — Raja Shehadeh, Profile Books (2007)
    • Art of embroidery in Palestine, practices, skills, knowledge and rituals — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO (2021)
    • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)

  6. Divided leadership, unresolved future

    The PLO and Yasser Arafat turned refugees into a national movement and won world recognition. The 1993 Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority but no state. Since 2007 the movement has been split between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, and no national election has been held since 2006. Many Palestinians feel let down by their own leaders, by Arab states and by the world, even as more countries recognise a State of Palestine.

    • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
    • Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 — Yezid Sayigh, Oxford University Press (1997)
    • Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance — Tareq Baconi, Stanford University Press (2018)
    • Palestinian Public Opinion Polls — Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, PSR

The story

Deep roots. The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean has been continuously farmed and settled for thousands of years, by Canaanites, Israelites, Philistines, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs. The name Palestine goes back to the Greek historian Herodotus and the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. After the Arab conquest in the 630s the population gradually adopted Arabic and, for most, Islam, while Christian communities remained. Many Palestinians see themselves as heirs to all of these peoples.

Ottoman Palestine

1517 – 1917
c. 1850–1917 identityempirelandreligion

Late Ottoman Palestine and the roots of Palestinian identity

Under the Ottomans, Palestine's towns and villages grow and modernise, and an educated Arab elite begins to speak of "Palestine" as a homeland, just as Zionist immigration begins.

  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 — Beshara Doumani, University of California Press (1995)
  • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

This period is the answer Palestinians give to anyone who says they did not exist before 1948 or 1964: a living society of farmers, merchants, newspapers and schools, with its own sense of place. It is the world refugees' grandparents remembered.

What happened

The Ottomans ruled Palestine from 1516 to 1917. It was not a single province: from 1872 Jerusalem was a separate district reporting directly to Istanbul, while the north fell under Beirut. But the "Holy Land", centred on Jerusalem, was a familiar idea, and the name Filastin was used in Arabic.

How it's seen
Palestinian view

Palestinians were a settled people with deep roots and a distinct identity centred on Jerusalem and the Holy Land, which was becoming national well before the British arrived.

Common Israeli view

There was no Palestinian state or nation; the land was a neglected Ottoman backwater whose Arab inhabitants saw themselves as Ottoman subjects, Muslims or Arabs of "southern Syria", and Palestinian nationalism arose mainly in reaction to Zionism.

Historians

Historians such as Rashid Khalidi describe overlapping identities, local, religious, Ottoman, Arab and Palestinian, with Palestinian identity sharpening in the decades before 1917, partly but not only in response to Zionism, much as other modern national identities formed.

Debated by historians Full story →
1917–1948 empirelandmigrationidentity

The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate

Britain conquers Palestine in the First World War, promises a "national home for the Jewish people" there, and rules for three decades as Jewish immigration grows and Arab resistance hardens.

  • The Balfour Declaration — Arthur James Balfour, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School (1917)
  • One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

For Palestinians 1917 is where the catastrophe began: an empire promised their country to another people without asking them. Every 2 November Palestinians mark the anniversary in protest, and many see Britain as bearing a historic responsibility it has never accepted.

What happened

On 2 November 1917, as British troops pushed into Ottoman Palestine, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild that the government "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people", provided "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".

How it's seen
Zionist and Israeli view

A historic recognition of Jewish rights in the ancestral homeland, written into international law by the League of Nations.

Palestinian view

A colonial betrayal.

Historians

Britain made overlapping, contradictory wartime pledges to Arabs, Zionists and France.

Well established Full story →

British Mandate & revolt

1918 – 1947
April 1936 – 1939 resistanceempireland

The Great Arab Revolt

Palestinian Arabs rise against British rule and Jewish immigration with a six-month general strike and then armed rebellion; Britain crushes it, leaving Palestinian society weakened before 1948.

  • Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past — Ted Swedenburg, University of Minnesota Press (1995)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

The revolt is remembered as the first great Palestinian uprising, with the keffiyeh as its badge; the peasant rebel became a national hero. Its defeat, and the loss of so many leaders and fighters, is part of why Palestinians were so vulnerable a decade later.

What happened

In April 1936, after years of rising Jewish immigration, land loss and the killing of the preacher-rebel Izz al-Din al-Qassam by British police in 1935, Palestinian Arabs launched a general strike that lasted six months. The newly formed Arab Higher Committee, led by Jerusalem's Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, demanded an end to immigration and land sales and a representative government.

How it's seen
Palestinian view

A national revolt against colonial rule and the Zionist project, crushed by an empire with collective punishment, executions and house demolitions.

Jewish and Israeli view

Known in Hebrew as "the Events", a campaign of Arab terror against Jewish civilians and settlements, in which hundreds of Jews were killed; it pushed the Yishuv to build up the Haganah and its own defences.

Well established Full story →
November 1947 – July 1949 warindependencerefugeeslandidentitymigrationpolitics

1948: The War of Independence and the Nakba

After the UN votes to partition Palestine, war breaks out; Israel is born and survives, and some 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians flee or are expelled, never to return.

  • General Assembly Resolution 181 (II): Future Government of Palestine — United Nations General Assembly, United Nations (1947)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
  • The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 — Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1979)
  • World Jewish Population, 2024 (American Jewish Year Book) — Sergio DellaPergola, Springer / Berman Jewish DataBank
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel — Ilan Pappé, Yale University Press (2011)
  • Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory — Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Columbia University Press (2007)
  • Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel — Provisional State Council of Israel (1948)
  • The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
  • The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — Ilan Pappé, Oneworld (2006)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

Palestinians call it al-Nakba, the catastrophe. Most of their society was uprooted and their villages erased; refugees and their descendants now number millions. Nakba Day, 15 May, the day after Israel's independence, is the central date of Palestinian memory, and the right of return its core demand.

What happened

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, for Resolution 181, which divided Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international zone around Jerusalem.

How it's seen
Israeli national narrative

The Jews accepted the UN compromise; the Arabs rejected it and attacked, first Palestinian militias and then five Arab armies. Israel fought for its life.

Jewish memory

A rebirth after the Holocaust: a sovereign home after nearly 1,900 years, and a refuge that opened its doors to survivors from the DP camps and to Jews driven from Arab lands, which is why many diaspora Jews still feel 1948 as their own story.

Palestinian narrative

The partition plan gave a Jewish minority over half the land against the will of the majority.

Historians since the opening of the archives

Israeli "new historians" such as Benny Morris showed from Israeli archives that there were many expulsions and massacres and that the idea of "transfer" had circulated among Zionist leaders, while finding no single master plan: the exodus was "born of war, not by design".

Debated by historians Full story →

Nakba & dispersal

1948 – 1966
1949 – today refugeesexileidentity

Refugee camps, UNRWA and the right of return

The UN sets up a special agency for Palestinian refugees, whose camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza become permanent towns and the heart of Palestinian identity in exile.

  • UNRWA in Figures — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA (2024)
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica

Read more
★ Why it matters today

Nearly six million Palestinians are registered refugees. Camp life, UNRWA schools and the demand to return to homes lost in 1948 define what it means to be Palestinian for millions, and Israel's 2024 ban on UNRWA is felt as an attack on refugee status itself.

What happened

In December 1949 the UN General Assembly created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which began work in 1950. 9 million refugees, the 1948 refugees and their descendants, are registered with it, a quarter or so of them living in some 58 recognised camps.

How it's seen
Palestinian view

UNRWA is the international community's acknowledgement of responsibility for the refugees, and the right of return, affirmed by UN Resolution 194, is an individual right that cannot be bargained away.

Israeli view

Uniquely, refugee status passes to all descendants, perpetuating the problem; a mass return would end Israel as a Jewish state.

Well established Full story →
1964–1988 resistancenationalismterrorismexile

The PLO, Arafat and the armed struggle

Refugees organise their own national movement; under Yasser Arafat the PLO wages guerrilla war and terrorism, wins world recognition, and in 1988 declares a state alongside Israel.

  • Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 — Yezid Sayigh, Oxford University Press (1997)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • Yasser Arafat — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

The PLO turned a dispersed refugee population back into a people with a voice and a flag. It is still, formally, the representative of all Palestinians, and its symbols and songs remain central even as many Palestinians feel it has grown old and remote.

What happened

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 under Arab League sponsorship. The real energy, though, came from Fatah, founded in the late 1950s by young refugees including Yasser Arafat, which launched guerrilla raids from 1965.

How it's seen
Palestinian view

A national liberation movement, comparable to Algeria's or Vietnam's, that forced the world to recognise the Palestinians and moved, at great cost, from armed struggle to diplomacy.

Israeli view

A terrorist organisation that deliberately targeted civilians, including athletes and schoolchildren, until it recognised Israel in 1993, and whose leader never fully abandoned violence.

Well established Full story →

Occupation & the PLO

1967 – 1986
1967 – today (Gaza pullout August 2005) landoccupationreligionsecurity

Settlements, the West Bank, and the Gaza disengagement

Israeli settlements spread across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to house roughly 750,000 Israelis, while in 2005 Israel removed all its settlers and soldiers from Gaza.

  • The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 — Gershom Gorenberg, Times Books (2006)
  • Lords of the Land: The War over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 — Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Nation Books (2007)
  • 2025 Report on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem — Office of the EU Representative (West Bank and Gaza Strip, UNRWA), European External Action Service (2026)
  • Area C of the West Bank: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations (2017)
  • Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem — International Court of Justice, ICJ (2024)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

For Palestinians, settlements, their roads, outposts and settler violence, are the daily face of the occupation, swallowing land, olive groves and water and making a viable state ever less possible.

What happened

Settlement began within months of the 1967 war, first under Labour governments, on strategic grounds and at Kfar Etzion, a bloc lost in 1948. In 1968 religious settlers led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger moved into Hebron.

How it's seen
Settler and right-wing view

Judea and Samaria, with Hebron, Shiloh and Bethel, are the cradle of Jewish history, not foreign land; the territory was never part of a Palestinian state, and its legal status is disputed, not occupied.

Israeli critics

Groups such as Peace Now, founded in 1978, argue the settlements entrench an occupation that corrodes Israel's democracy and its security, and make separation into two states impossible.

Palestinian view

Settlements are colonisation of the land meant for a Palestinian state, enforced by checkpoints, a separate legal system and settler violence that the army often fails to stop.

International law

Most states and the UN Security Council (Resolution 2334, 2016) regard the settlements as illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and in 2024 the ICJ advised that Israel's continued presence in the occupied territory is unlawful.

Well established Full story →
5–10 June 1967 waroccupationrefugeesreligionland

The Six-Day War and the Naksa

In six days Israel defeats Egypt, Jordan and Syria and takes Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, beginning an occupation that still shapes the conflict.

  • Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East — Michael B. Oren, Oxford University Press (2002)
  • 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2007)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)
  • Security Council Resolution 242 — United Nations Security Council, United Nations (1967)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to the Muslim Brotherhood — Tarek Osman, Yale University Press (2013)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

Palestinians call it the Naksa, "the setback". Some 300,000 more people were displaced, and the rest of historic Palestine came under Israeli military rule, which most West Bank and Gaza Palestinians have lived under all their lives. The 1967 lines are the basis of the two-state idea.

What happened

In May 1967 tension on Israel's borders turned into crisis. After false Soviet reports of Israeli troop concentrations against Syria, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser moved forces into Sinai, had the UN peacekeepers there withdrawn and, on 22 May, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which Israel had long said would be a cause for war.

How it's seen
Israeli view

A war of self-defence. Egypt's Nasser expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and massed troops while Arab leaders spoke of destroying Israel.

Palestinian view

A war of expansion that completed what 1948 began, bringing all of Palestine under Israeli control and creating a new wave of refugees.

Historians

Most agree Israel faced a real threat in May 1967, but debate whether Nasser actually intended war or stumbled into brinkmanship, and how far Israel's leaders exploited the crisis.

Egyptian view

Nasser's brinkmanship in May 1967 was a catastrophic miscalculation, many Egyptians now admit, but Israel struck first and seized Egyptian land.

Well established Full story →
30 March 1976 landprotestcitizenship

Land Day

Arab citizens of Israel strike against land expropriations in the Galilee, and six are killed by Israeli security forces.

  • The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel — Ilan Pappé, Yale University Press (2011)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

Land Day was the moment Palestinian citizens of Israel, cut off from the rest of their people since 1948, asserted a shared identity. It is marked every 30 March by Palestinians everywhere.

What happened

The roughly 150,000 Arabs who stayed in Israel in 1948 became citizens but lived under military government until 1966, and much of their land was taken by the state. In 1976 the government announced the expropriation of thousands more dunams in the Galilee as part of a plan to increase the Jewish population there.

How it's seen
Israeli government view at the time

The land was needed to develop the Galilee for all its residents, and the strike was illegal unrest.

Well established Full story →
1982 (occupation of south Lebanon until 2000) warrefugeesexileprotest

The Lebanon War and Sabra and Shatila

Israel invades Lebanon to destroy the PLO, drives it to Tunis, and is tarnished by the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila by its Lebanese allies.

  • Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut (Kahan Commission) — Yitzhak Kahan, Aharon Barak and Yona Efrat, Government of Israel (1983)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

Sabra and Shatila is one of the darkest memories in Palestinian history, and the PLO's expulsion to distant Tunis left refugees in Lebanon exposed and abandoned. Their descendants still live in the camps.

What happened

On 6 June 1982, after an assassination attempt on Israel's ambassador in London, Israel invaded Lebanon. Defence Minister Ariel Sharon's aims went far beyond the stated 40-kilometre zone: to destroy the PLO, which had built a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, and install a friendly Christian-led government.

How it's seen
Israeli views

The government called it "Operation Peace for Galilee", aimed at ending PLO rocket and guerrilla attacks from Lebanon.

Palestinian view

An assault aimed at crushing Palestinian nationalism itself. Israel surrounded the camps, lit them with flares and let the Phalangists in; its responsibility was direct, not indirect.

Well established Full story →

Intifadas & Oslo

1987 – 2006
December 1987 – 1993 occupationresistanceprotest

The First Intifada

A popular uprising of stones, strikes and boycotts erupts across the West Bank and Gaza, putting the occupation on the world's screens and pushing both sides towards negotiation.

  • Intifada — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Fatalities statistics, 1987 to the present — B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'Tselem
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

For Palestinians it is a proud memory of mass civil resistance led from inside the territories, by young people, women and local committees. It also gave birth to Hamas.

What happened

On 9 December 1987 an Israeli truck collided with cars carrying Palestinian workers in Gaza, killing four. Protests in the Jabalia refugee camp spread within days across Gaza and the West Bank.

How it's seen
Palestinian view

A largely unarmed popular uprising against twenty years of occupation, met with live fire, beatings, curfews, deportations and mass arrests.

Israeli view

Violent riots that included firebombs and lethal attacks, which soldiers had to contain.

Well established Full story →
13 September 1993 – 4 November 1995 peacestatehoodoccupationviolence

The Oslo Accords and the assassination of Rabin

Israel and the PLO recognise each other and agree on interim Palestinian self-rule; two years later a Jewish extremist murders Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

  • Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo I) — Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, United Nations Peacemaker (1993)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • Remarks at the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, White House, 13 September 1993 — Yitzhak Rabin, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1993)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

Oslo created the Palestinian Authority, brought the PLO leadership home and divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C, the map Palestinians still live in. Many now see it as a trap that let settlements grow while statehood never came.

What happened

The Madrid conference of 1991 brought Israel and its Arab neighbours to the table, but the real breakthrough came in secret. In early 1993 Israeli academics and then officials met PLO representatives in Norway.

How it's seen
Israeli views

Supporters saw a brave gamble that ended Israel's rule over Palestinian cities and won it new friends abroad.

Palestinian views

Many welcomed the return of Arafat and the hope of a state.

Historians and negotiators

Accounts of why Oslo failed differ: US negotiator Dennis Ross largely blamed Arafat's failure to confront violence and make final-status decisions; others, such as Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, point to continued settlement, delays and mistrust on both sides.

Well established Full story →
September 2000 – 2005 violenceoccupationterrorismsecurity

The Second (al-Aqsa) Intifada

After the Camp David talks fail, a far deadlier uprising of shootings, suicide bombings and military reoccupation kills more than 3,000 Palestinians and about 1,000 Israelis.

  • Intifada — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Fatalities statistics, 1987 to the present — B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'Tselem
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)
  • Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors — Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, New York Review of Books (2001)
  • The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace — Dennis Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

For Palestinians it meant tanks in their cities, curfews, assassinations, the barrier cutting through their land and the siege of Arafat. It left the Palestinian Authority shattered and Hamas stronger.

What happened

On 28 September 2000 opposition leader Ariel Sharon, escorted by hundreds of police, visited the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif. The next day Israeli police killed several Palestinian protesters at al-Aqsa mosque, and an uprising spread across the territories. In October, 13 Arab citizens of Israel were killed by Israeli police during protests inside Israel.

How it's seen
Israeli view

Arafat rejected a generous offer at Camp David and turned to terror.

Palestinian view

A revolt against an occupation that Oslo had entrenched, sparked by Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to al-Haram al-Sharif and Israel's lethal response to protests.

International Court of Justice

In a 2004 advisory opinion the ICJ said the barrier, where it runs inside the West Bank, violates international law.

Well established Full story →
January 2006 – June 2007 politicsreligionblockadeviolence

Hamas, the 2006 election and the split with Fatah

Hamas wins Palestinian legislative elections, is boycotted by Israel and the West, and after fighting with Fatah seizes control of Gaza, which Israel and Egypt then blockade.

  • Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance — Tareq Baconi, Stanford University Press (2018)
  • Hamas: A Beginner's Guide — Khaled Hroub, Pluto Press (2010)
  • The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development — Sara Roy, Institute for Palestine Studies (2016)

Read more
★ Why it matters today

The split between a Fatah-run West Bank and a Hamas-run Gaza has paralysed Palestinian politics for nearly twenty years. No national election has been held since, and many Palestinians blame both factions for putting power before the national cause.

What happened

Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in Gaza in December 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. It combined social welfare, Islamist politics and armed struggle, including the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s.

How it's seen
Palestinian views

Hamas supporters say they won a free election and were denied the right to govern by a Western-backed coup attempt; Fatah supporters call the 2007 takeover a bloody coup.

Israeli view

Hamas is a terrorist organisation whose founding charter calls for Israel's destruction and contains antisemitic passages; Israel could not deal with it, and the blockade was needed to stop weapons reaching Gaza.

UN and humanitarian view

The blockade amounted to collective punishment of Gaza's civilians, crippling its economy and leaving most residents dependent on aid long before 2023.

Well established Full story →

Division, blockade & war

2007 – today
7 October 2023 – ceasefire of 10 October 2025 (aftermath ongoing) warterrorismhostageshumanitarianidentitypersecutionmemory

7 October 2023 and the Gaza war

Hamas-led militants kill about 1,200 people in Israel and take 251 hostages; Israel's war in Gaza that follows kills tens of thousands of Palestinians and leaves the territory in ruins.

Read more
★ Why it matters today

For Palestinians the war in Gaza is the gravest catastrophe since 1948, a second Nakba: tens of thousands dead, most of the population displaced, famine, and whole neighbourhoods erased. It has touched every Palestinian family in the world and shapes how a generation sees Israel and the West.

What happened

Early on Saturday 7 October 2023, a Jewish holiday, Hamas fired thousands of rockets and sent some 3,000 fighters, joined by other armed groups and civilians from Gaza, through the border fence into southern Israel.

How it's seen
Israeli view

An unprovoked massacre of civilians by a genocidal terrorist organisation, which forced Israel to fight to destroy Hamas and bring the hostages home.

Palestinian views

Palestinians differ about 7 October itself: some saw it as resistance after years of siege, many opposed the killing of civilians, and many say they were never asked.

Many Jews in Israel and the diaspora

7 October revived the oldest fear, of being hunted for being Jewish.

Jewish critics of the war

A significant minority of Jews, especially younger and left-leaning ones, mourn the 7 October victims but condemn the scale of death and destruction in Gaza, and reject treating all criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

International bodies and scholars

The ICJ ordered Israel in January 2024 to prevent genocidal acts while the case brought by South Africa proceeds; the ICC issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Netanyahu, former defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif; a UN commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide.

Debated by historians Full story →

Core values & worldview

If you want to understand a Palestinian, start with the land, and with what happened to it. Most Palestinian families can tell you where they come from, even if they have never been allowed to see it: a village near Jaffa, a house in Haifa, an orchard near Lydda. The story most Palestinians grow up with is of a settled Arab society, Muslim and Christian, whose home was promised to another people by Britain in 1917, settled by Zionist immigrants, and then largely taken in 1948, when most of its people were made refugees.

  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
Most Israelis tell that history very differently, and this site sets their account beside it.
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)

That history helps explain a few things you will often notice.

Justice and recognition. Palestinians often feel that the world refuses to see them, or sees them only as victims or as terrorists. Being recognised as a people with a history and rights, including the right of refugees to return, matters enormously.

  • The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books (1979)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)

Family and hospitality. The extended family, the hamula or clan, is the safety net in a place where the state cannot be. Guests are fed until they cannot move; refusing coffee or food can offend. Weddings are huge and communal.

  • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)

Sumud. “Steadfastness” means staying, enduring and carrying on with normal life as an act of resistance. The lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh described it in 1982 as a “third way” between submission and violence.

  • The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank — Raja Shehadeh, Quartet Books (1982)

Education. With land and security uncertain, education became the portable asset. Palestinians have long had high literacy and university enrolment, and Palestinian teachers, engineers and doctors helped build the Gulf states.

  • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)
  • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica

Daily life & customs

For West Bank Palestinians, daily life is shaped by geography. The 1995 Oslo II agreement divided the territory into Area A (Palestinian civil and security control), Area B (Palestinian civil, Israeli security control) and Area C, about 60 percent of the land, under full Israeli control. Travelling between towns can mean checkpoints and closures; building in Area C almost always needs an Israeli permit that is rarely granted.

  • Area C of the West Bank: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations (2017)
Jerusalem is out of reach for most West Bank Palestinians without a permit.

In Gaza, until 2023, more than two million people lived in a strip about 40 km long under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade, with frequent power cuts and few ways out. Since October 2023 most of its people have been displaced, many repeatedly, and much of Gaza has been destroyed.

  • The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development — Sara Roy, Institute for Palestine Studies (2016)
  • Reported Impact Snapshot: Gaza Strip — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations (2026)

Religion structures the week: Friday prayers for Muslims, Sunday mass for Christians, Ramadan iftars shared with neighbours, Christmas in Bethlehem. Food is central: maqluba, musakhan, mansaf, olive oil with za’atar and fresh bread, Arabic coffee with cardamom.

  • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica

The calendar includes national days of memory: Land Day on 30 March, Nakba Day on 15 May, Naksa Day on 5 June, and the anniversary of the 1988 declaration of independence on 15 November.

  • The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel — Ilan Pappé, Yale University Press (2011)
  • Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory — Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Columbia University Press (2007)

Wounds & sensitivities

The Nakba. For Palestinians 1948 is not ancient history; it is grandparents, keys and lost houses. Hearing that refugees “left voluntarily”, or that there was “a land without a people”, is deeply painful. Historians agree most refugees fled or were expelled in war, though they debate how far it was planned.

  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
  • The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — Ilan Pappé, Oneworld (2006)

Being erased. Golda Meir’s 1969 remark that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, and claims that Palestinian identity is invented, still sting. So does being spoken about, but not to.

  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books (1979)

Gaza since 2023. By September 2026 Gaza’s Health Ministry reported more than 73,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023, a figure the UN treats as broadly reliable and many researchers consider an undercount; Israel disputes it and says many were combatants. Famine was confirmed in Gaza City in August 2025.

  • Reported Impact Snapshot: Gaza Strip — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations (2026)
  • Gaza Strip: Famine Confirmed in Gaza Governorate (IPC Analysis) — Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, IPC (2025)
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Almost every Palestinian anywhere has lost someone or knows someone who has.

Prisoners and detention. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have passed through Israeli prisons since 1967, many held without charge under administrative detention. Almost every family knows someone who has been detained, and prisoners are seen as heroes, which many Israelis find hard to understand.

  • Fatalities statistics, 1987 to the present — B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'Tselem
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)

Being reduced to terrorism. Palestinians are tired of being asked to condemn Hamas before they are allowed to grieve. Many oppose Hamas; many support armed resistance against soldiers but not attacks on civilians; views vary widely.

  • Palestinian Public Opinion Polls — Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, PSR
  • Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance — Tareq Baconi, Stanford University Press (2018)

Modern attitudes

Little faith in politics. Polls by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research have for years found majorities wanting President Abbas to resign and support for a two-state solution well below half, though few see a realistic alternative.

International recognition. By late 2025 roughly four in five UN member states recognise a State of Palestine, including the UK, France, Canada and Australia, which did so in September 2025. Palestine has been a UN non-member observer state since 2012.

  • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica

Law and boycott. Many Palestinians place hope in international law: the 2024 International Court of Justice opinion that Israel’s occupation is unlawful, South Africa’s genocide case, and boycott campaigns. Israel rejects all three as biased.

  • Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem — International Court of Justice, ICJ (2024)
  • Application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024 — International Court of Justice, ICJ (2024)

A young society. Most Palestinians are under thirty. Social media, music and humour flourish alongside despair; emigration tempts many young people.

Not all Palestinians are the same

Where you live. A Palestinian citizen of Israel in Haifa, a Jerusalemite with a residency card, a villager in Area C, a Gazan, a refugee in Lebanon and a Chilean of Palestinian descent live very different lives under different legal systems. Each group has its own grievances and its own sense of the others.

  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel — Ilan Pappé, Yale University Press (2011)

Refugees and non-refugees. About 70 percent of Gazans and a quarter of West Bank Palestinians were registered refugees before the war, and camp identity, organised by village of origin, remains strong.

  • UNRWA in Figures — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA (2024)

Muslims and Christians. Most Palestinians are Sunni Muslim. Christians, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, are now only about 1 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but are prominent in culture and politics and are a majority of Palestinians in Chile and Central America. Palestinian Christians are proud to call themselves among the oldest Christian communities in the world, and most share the national story fully.

  • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Palestinians in Latin America: Between Assimilation and Long-Distance Nationalism — Cecilia Baeza, Journal of Palestine Studies (2014)

Secular and religious, Fatah and Hamas. Palestinian politics spans secular nationalists, leftists and Islamists. Fatah leads the PLO and the Palestinian Authority; Hamas, an Islamist movement designated a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the EU and others, ruled Gaza from 2007.

  • Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance — Tareq Baconi, Stanford University Press (2018)
  • Hamas: A Beginner's Guide — Khaled Hroub, Pluto Press (2010)

Old families and new generations. Urban notable families, villagers, Bedouin and camp refugees have different histories, and young Palestinians often criticise all the factions.

  • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)

Meeting someone

Conversation starters

  • Where their family is from. Asking “where is your family from originally?” is welcome; you may hear about a village that no longer exists.
    • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
  • Food and the olive harvest. Whose mother makes the best maqluba, and how this year’s oil tastes, are inexhaustible topics.
  • Poetry, music and embroidery. Darwish, dabke, tatreez patterns or a Palestinian football club in Chile all open doors.
    • Art of embroidery in Palestine, practices, skills, knowledge and rituals — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO (2021)
    • Palestinians in Latin America: Between Assimilation and Long-Distance Nationalism — Cecilia Baeza, Journal of Palestine Studies (2014)

Topics to approach carefully

  • Gaza. Assume loss. Listen first; don’t open with questions about Hamas.
  • “Do you condemn…?” Being asked to justify oneself before being treated as human is a common, bitter experience.
  • Israel’s existence and violence. Views range from full peace with Israel to rejection of it. Many draw lines between resisting soldiers and attacking civilians; others do not. Don’t assume.
  • Words. “Arab Israelis”, “Judea and Samaria”, “disputed territories” and “terrorist” all carry political weight. Ask how someone describes themselves.

Common misconceptions

  • “All Palestinians are Muslim.” Christians have been part of Palestinian society since its earliest days.
    • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • “Palestinians all live in camps.” Most refugees no longer live in camps, and many Palestinians are not refugees.
    • UNRWA in Figures — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA (2024)
  • “Palestinian identity was invented in 1964.” Historians trace it to the late Ottoman period, well before the PLO.
    • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • “Palestinians are all Hamas.” Hamas is one faction among several, and opinion about it varies widely.
    • Palestinian Public Opinion Polls — Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, PSR
    • Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance — Tareq Baconi, Stanford University Press (2018)
  • “The conflict is ancient religious hatred.” It is a modern conflict over land, statehood and security, which began in the late nineteenth century, though religion and holy places add heat.
    • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)

People everyone knows

Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat

1929–2004

Co-founder of Fatah and chairman of the PLO from 1969, "Abu Ammar" put the Palestinians back on the world map after 1948 and became the symbol of their cause, keffiyeh and all. To most Israelis he was the man behind decades of attacks, many on civilians. He addressed the UN in 1974, accepted a two-state framework in 1988, signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 and shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, then led the Palestinian Authority until his death in Paris in 2004. Palestinians still argue over whether he won or squandered their best chance.

  • Yasser Arafat — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 — Yezid Sayigh, Oxford University Press (1997)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)

Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

1941–2008

The national poet. Born in al-Birwa in Galilee, he fled with his family in 1948 and came back to find the village gone, growing up as an "internal refugee" inside Israel. His 1964 poem "Identity Card" ("Write down: I am an Arab") made him famous; years of exile in Beirut, Paris and elsewhere followed. He drafted the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence and wrote poems of loss, love and ordinary life that many Palestinians know by heart. He is buried in Ramallah.

  • Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems — Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché), University of California Press (2003)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica

Edward Said

Edward Said

1935–2003

A Jerusalem-born Christian Palestinian who became a leading literary scholar at Columbia University. His Orientalism (1978) changed how the West studies the Middle East, and The Question of Palestine (1979) brought the Palestinian story to English-speaking readers. He sat on the Palestine National Council but broke with Arafat over Oslo, which he saw as a surrender. With the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of young Arab and Israeli musicians in 1999.

  • The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books (1979)
  • Out of Place: A Memoir — Edward W. Said, Alfred A. Knopf (1999)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)

Ghassan Kanafani

Ghassan Kanafani

1936–1972

Born in Acre and a refugee at twelve, he became one of the great Arabic writers of his generation. His novella Men in the Sun (1963), about three refugees who die in a water tank while being smuggled into Kuwait, is a founding text of Palestinian literature, and Returning to Haifa (1969) imagines a refugee couple meeting the Israeli family living in their old home. He was also spokesman of the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and was killed with his teenage niece by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972, widely attributed to Israel's Mossad after the PFLP-linked Lod airport massacre.

  • Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories — Ghassan Kanafani (trans. Hilary Kilpatrick), Lynne Rienner (1999)
  • Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 — Yezid Sayigh, Oxford University Press (1997)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)

Hanan Ashrawi

Hanan Ashrawi

born 1946

A Nablus-born Anglican and professor of English literature at Birzeit University who became the articulate, English-speaking face of the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid peace conference. A legislator and founder of the civil-society group MIFTAH, she became the first woman elected to the PLO Executive Committee in 2009 and resigned in 2020, calling for reform and new leadership. For many she represents the secular, democratic strand in Palestinian politics.

  • This Side of Peace: A Personal Account — Hanan Ashrawi, Simon & Schuster (1995)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)

Mahmoud Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas

born 1935

Born in Safed and made a refugee in 1948, a Fatah co-founder and one of the architects of the Oslo talks, "Abu Mazen" succeeded Arafat and was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005. He has long rejected armed struggle in favour of diplomacy and security coordination with Israel, but lost Gaza to Hamas in 2007 and has held no national election since 2006. Polls suggest many Palestinians see the ageing leadership as out of touch; many Israelis do not see him as a real partner.

  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance — Tareq Baconi, Stanford University Press (2018)
  • Palestinian Public Opinion Polls — Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, PSR

Try it yourself

The quickest way into a culture: a song, a film, a book and a dish.

“We have on this earth what makes life worth living.”
— Mahmoud Darwish, "On This Earth"
  • Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems — Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché), University of California Press (2003)
“Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
— Yasser Arafat, address to the UN General Assembly, 13 November 1974
  • Address to the United Nations General Assembly, 13 November 1974 — Yasser Arafat, United Nations (1974)
  • Yasser Arafat — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica

Listen

  • Dabke and Mohammed Assaf Line dancing with stamping feet at every wedding; Gaza-born singer Mohammed Assaf's 2013 Arab Idol win sent Palestinians into the streets in celebration.
    ▶ Listen

Watch

  • No Other Land Documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli collective (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor) about home demolitions in Masafer Yatta; it won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary feature.
    ▶ Watch
  • Wajib Annemarie Jacir's 2017 comedy-drama of a father and son hand-delivering wedding invitations around Nazareth, a tender look at Palestinians inside Israel.
    ▶ Watch

Read

  • Mahmoud Darwish, "Identity Card" The 1964 poem ("Write down: I am an Arab") that made Darwish the voice of a people; his later poems of exile and love are just as loved.
    Find it
  • Men in the Sun Ghassan Kanafani's 1963 novella about three refugees smuggled to Kuwait in a water tank, a founding parable of exile.
    Find it
  • Palestinian Walks Raja Shehadeh's 2007 account of hiking the Ramallah hills as settlements and roads transform them; it won Britain's Orwell Prize.
    Find it

Taste

  • Maqluba and musakhan Maqluba ("upside down") is rice, aubergine and chicken flipped out of the pot at the table; musakhan is taboon bread with sumac onions, chicken and new olive oil.
    Recipe

See & do

  • Tatreez (cross-stitch embroidery) Village dresses whose patterns and colours once told you which town a woman came from; inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2021.
    Look it up
  • The olive harvest Every October and November families go out together to pick, picnic and press.
    Look it up
  • Handala Naji al-Ali's cartoon refugee boy, drawn from 1969 always with his back turned, who will not grow up until he can go home.
    Look it up

Where

Homeland Diaspora Significant place

Related

Israel · Islam · Jewish people

Sources & further reading

  • AFP tally of deaths in the 7 October 2023 attack, based on official Israeli figures — Agence France-Presse, AFP, 2024
  • Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory — Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Columbia University Press, 2007
  • Latest developments in Iran: US and Israeli strikes, death of Khamenei — Al-Monitor (with AFP), Al-Monitor, 2026
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press, 2012
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press, 2012
  • The Balfour Declaration — Arthur James Balfour, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, 1917
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton, 2014
  • Fatalities statistics, 1987 to the present — B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'Tselem
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press, 2004
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage, 2001
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press, 2008
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press, 2008
  • Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 — Beshara Doumani, University of California Press, 1995
  • Palestinians in Latin America: Between Assimilation and Long-Distance Nationalism — Cecilia Baeza, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2014
  • The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace — Dennis Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
  • The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books, 1979
  • The Morning After — Edward W. Said, London Review of Books, 1993
  • Out of Place: A Memoir — Edward W. Said, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999
  • Yasser Arafat — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Intifada — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 — Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), Cambridge University Press, 2007
  • The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan, Basic Books, 2009
  • Jewish People's Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism: EU Survey of Jewish People (third survey) — European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), FRA, 2024
  • The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 — Gershom Gorenberg, Times Books, 2006
  • Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories — Ghassan Kanafani (trans. Hilary Kilpatrick), Lynne Rienner, 1999
  • Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo I) — Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, United Nations Peacemaker, 1993
  • This Side of Peace: A Personal Account — Hanan Ashrawi, Simon & Schuster, 1995
  • Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors — Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, New York Review of Books, 2001
  • Lords of the Land: The War over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 — Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Nation Books, 2007
  • The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel — Ilan Pappé, Yale University Press, 2011
  • The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — Ilan Pappé, Oneworld, 2006
  • Gaza Strip: Famine Confirmed in Gaza Governorate (IPC Analysis) — Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, IPC, 2025
  • Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem — International Court of Justice, ICJ, 2024
  • Application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024 — International Court of Justice, ICJ, 2024
  • Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Advisory Opinion) — International Court of Justice, ICJ, 2004
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press, 2021
  • Hamas: A Beginner's Guide — Khaled Hroub, Pluto Press, 2010
  • Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems — Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché), University of California Press, 2003
  • Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East — Michael B. Oren, Oxford University Press, 2002
  • The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society, 1979
  • The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society, 1991
  • Report on the Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack (16 December 2025) — NPR, NPR, 2025
  • 2025 Report on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem — Office of the EU Representative (West Bank and Gaza Strip, UNRWA), European External Action Service, 2026
  • Palestinian Public Opinion Polls — Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, PSR
  • Palestinians at the End of 2025 — Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, PCBS, 2025
  • Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel — Provisional State Council of Israel, 1948
  • The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank — Raja Shehadeh, Quartet Books, 1982
  • Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape — Raja Shehadeh, Profile Books, 2007
  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press, 1997
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books, 2020
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press, 2006
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books, 2020
  • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press, 2009
  • The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development — Sara Roy, Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016
  • World Jewish Population, 2024 (American Jewish Year Book) — Sergio DellaPergola, Springer / Berman Jewish DataBank
  • Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to the Muslim Brotherhood — Tarek Osman, Yale University Press, 2013
  • Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance — Tareq Baconi, Stanford University Press, 2018
  • Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past — Ted Swedenburg, University of Minnesota Press, 1995
  • One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books, 2000
  • 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books, 2007
  • Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza under the Genocide Convention — UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, UN Human Rights Council, 2025
  • Area C of the West Bank: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations, 2017
  • Reported Impact Snapshot: Gaza Strip — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations, 2026
  • Art of embroidery in Palestine, practices, skills, knowledge and rituals — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO, 2021
  • General Assembly Resolution 181 (II): Future Government of Palestine — United Nations General Assembly, United Nations, 1947
  • UNRWA in Figures — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA, 2024
  • Security Council Resolution 242 — United Nations Security Council, United Nations, 1967
  • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992
  • Address to the United Nations General Assembly, 13 November 1974 — Yasser Arafat, United Nations, 1974
  • Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 — Yezid Sayigh, Oxford University Press, 1997
  • Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut (Kahan Commission) — Yitzhak Kahan, Aharon Barak and Yona Efrat, Government of Israel, 1983
  • Remarks at the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, White House, 13 September 1993 — Yitzhak Rabin, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1993
  • Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor — Yossi Klein Halevi, Harper, 2018