The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the southern Levant region of western Asia, with Jerusalem as its capital. Israel is named for the Biblical Israelites and the Kingdom of Israel, and its territory was once known as Canaan, Palestine, and the Holy Land. According to the Old Testament, the Hebrews migrated from Mesopotamia to Canaan during the time of Abraham, were forced to migrate to Egypt during a time of famine in Canaan, and reconquered Canaan in the 15th century BC after the Exodus from Egyptian slavery. Because of its location at a continental crossroad, the region was conquered by various empires, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks. The Romans expelled the Jews from Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba Revolt of the 130s AD, and the rise of Christianity and the formation of a Jewish diaspora across the Roman Empire led to the Jewish population declining to 25% by 300 AD. After the Rashidun Caliphate's conquest of Roman Palestine in the early 7th century AD, the region underwent Islamization that further detached the Land of Israel from its Jewish roots, and the migration and integration of Arab tribes in the region led to the region spawning a "Palestinian" identity between the 1830s and 1890s. European anti-Semitism led to a remigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine from the late 19th to 20th centuries as part of the "Zionist" movement, with these refugees seeking the restoration of a Jewish homeland as an alternative to persecution abroad. Jewish immigration, combined with British colonial policy, led to intercommunal conflict betwen Jews and Arabs that resulted in the Great Arab Revolt of the 1930s and the First Arab-Israeli War of 1947-1949. After the Arabs rejected a United Nations partition plan for Mandatory Palestine in 1948, the Zionist movement declared the independence of Israel on 14 May 1948, and Israel spent the next several decades fighting off invasions by its Arab neighbors and expanding its boundaries, expelling Arab villagers from their homes and replacing them with Jewish refugees from the Muslim world. The 1967 Six-Day War saw Israel occupy the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights; while Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1982, illegal Israeli settlements were founded in Israeli-occupied Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza and in the formerly Syrian Golan Heights. Israel has since normalized relations with several Arab countries, but efforts towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians in the 1990s were sabotaged by the Israeli right-wing (led by Benjamin Netanyahu) and by Palestinian Islamists like Hamas. Because of the religious nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, several Muslim countries refuse to recognize Israel's existence, while several Western allies of Israel withheld recognition of Palestinian statehood until the Israel-Hamas War of the 2020s led to an upsurge in international support for Palestinians.
By 2024, Israel had a population of 9.9 million people, of whom 73% were Jewish, 18.1% Muslim, 1.9% Christian, 1.6% Druze, and 4.8% others.
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