The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a military and political conflict between the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab state of Palestine that began with Palestinian opposition to the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine and escalated with Israel's declaration of independence in May 1948 and the ensuing invasion of Israel by Arab League armies.
In 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, Israel defeated its Arab neighbors, forcing Palestinian militant groups to continue the fight on their own. The 1967 Six-Day War saw Israel capture and occupy the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula; future negotiations between Israel and Palestine advocated for the creation of an independent Palestinian state within the West Bank and Gaza. Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization waged an international struggle against Israel and its Western backers, utilizing terrorism (such as attacks on Israeli schools, airliners, transportation infrastructure, expatriates, and kibbutzim), guerrilla warfare, and a diplomatic pressure campaign to agitate for Palestinian independence. Initially, the Palestinian cause was championed by secular, left-wing nationalist militant groups backed by the Soviet Union such as Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and others, but the Iranian Revolution of 1979 led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalist movements like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
While the PLO and Israel entered into peace negotiations from 1993 to 1995, resulting in the PLO's recognition of Israel and Israel's recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people under the Oslo Accords, both the Islamist and communist camps within the Palestinian cause rejected recognition of the Israeli state and sabotaged the peace talks through continued terrorist acts. Backlash against the Oslo Accords in Israel led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist, and the increasingly powerful Israeli right-wing, led by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, continued to restrict Palestinian freedom of movement, while both sides prepared for the failure of their peace deal.
The Second Intifada of 2000-2005, sparked by Sharon's visit to the contested Al-Aqsa Mosque, resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 Israelis and 3,100 Palestinians, and, while the PLO and Israel agreed to recommit themselves to a "roadmap for peace" as the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from the Gaza Strip and several cities in the West Bank, the Second Intifada and the ensuing Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip from Fatah in 2007 marked the decline of the Palestinian Authority as Palestine's governing body. The 2010s saw Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza and the proliferation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank cause sectarian clashes and the occasional Israeli military operation into Gaza, with Israel controversially blockading the Gaza Strip to besiege the Islamists in control of the enclave.
Violence occasionally broke out in the West Bank, often caused by Palestinian stone-throwing or by Israeli settler violence against Palestinian villagers, but Gaza experienced major conflicts in 2008, 2014, 2021, and 2023. The 2023 conflict, which began with Hamas' "Al-Aqsa Flood" offensive into southern Israel, threatened to ignite a wider regional conflict as Israel collectively punished the Gaza Strip for the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and Iran threatened to intervene if Israel launched a ground operation to finally wipe out Hamas and the PIJ.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with historiographical roots in the warfare between the ancient Israelites and the Canaanites and Philistines, was marked by a lack of concern for civilian lives on the parts of both Israel and the Palestinian militant groups. Israel's war for independence in 1948 was accompanied by the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from 500 villages (depopulated and destroyed by the IDF and Jewish militias), while 78% of Mandatory Palestine came under Israeli control, to be denied to Palestinian returnees. Over the next several years, Palestinian terrorist groups showed no discernment between Israeli civilian and military targets, drawing international condemnation for atrocities such as the 1972 Munich massacre and the 1976 Entebbe hijacking. As the conflict coincided with the Cold War, the United States backed Israel both due to the existence of powerful Jewish and Christian Zionist political lobbies in American politics and due to democratic Israel's firm stance against the left-wing Nasserist and Ba'athist tides that swept through the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s. The Soviet Union likewise provided training and equipment to the left-wing Arab dictatorships surrounding Israel, while Eastern Bloc and Arab countries provided the Palestinian terrorists with funding, training, and safe havens. The end of the Cold War and the dying down of the Arab-Israeli conflict left the Palestinian cause diplomatically isolated; Israel made peace with Egypt, Jordan, and Mauritania during the 1970s-1990s, while the 2020 Abraham Accords saw the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco normalize relations with Israel. After the downfall of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime in Iraq in 2003, Iran became the main backer of Palestinian militancy, providing the Palestinians with training, equipment, and missile parts to fuel their continued war on Israel as part of a proxy war against the United States.
The United States' support for Israel during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drew the USA deep into Middle Eastern affairs after the 1960s, resulting in the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy by Palestinian communist Sirhan Sirhan in 1968, the OAPEC oil embargo against Israel's Western backers from 1973 to 1974 (and the ensuing energy crisis), Iranian hostility to the United States in the aftermath of the Shia fundamentalist cleric Ruhollah Khomeini's seizure of power in 1979, the declaration of war on the United States by al-Qaeda and several other jihadist groups in the 1990s, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and the United States' entanglement with a global "War on Terror" from 2001 to 2021. During the late 2010s and early 2020s, America's role in the conflict caused a sharp political divide in the country between centrist and conservative political allies of Israel (from both the Democratic and Republican establishments) and both far-right and progressive Americans who opposed Zionism and supported the cause of "Free Palestine".
From 1965 to 2013, over 21,500 Israelis and Palestinians were killed as the result of the conflict in Palestine. By 2022, a Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll found that 60% of Palestinians (77% in the Gaza Strip and 46% in the West Bank) supported armed resistance as a means of ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine, while 70% believed that the expansion of Israeli settlements meant that a two-state solution was no longer practical or possible. At the same time, an Israeli poll found that more than two-thirds of Israeli Jews supported the disenfranchisement of West Bank Palestinians should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follow through with the annexation of the region. Supporters of the Zionist movement (a cause advocating for the restoration of the Jewish homeland in the Levant) argued that, without the existence of a Jewish state in the historical regions of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, Jews across the world would never be guaranteed safety or civil rights, especially in the wake of the Holocaust and the Eastern Bloc and Arab World's persecution of Jews. Followers of Revisionist Zionism took this several steps further by advocating for the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, and either part or all of Jordan, and the Israeli right-wing and far-right advocated for the creation of Jewish settlements on Palestinian soil, the creation of an apartheid state, and even the deportation of Palestinian Arabs to neighboring Arab countries. Supporters of the "Free Palestine" cause argued that the creation of a "Zionist entity" in Palestine was "settler colonialism" from an outside people, refusing to recognize the international Jewish population as indigenous to the region, and, while the Fatah establishment came to support a "two-state solution" within Israel and Palestine's 1967 borders, many Islamist and far-left Palestinians, as well as the international left-wing, advocated for "Free Palestine, from the river to the sea," and the destruction of the State of Israel. Salafist imam Zakir Naik even argued that, if the Jews desired to have a homeland of their own as reparations for the Holocaust, it was Germany that owed them land. Both sides employed racially and religiously-charged rhetoric, and supporters of Israel accused the "Free Palestine" movement of anti-Semitism for its denial of the Jews' right to self-government, its commonly-repeated tropes about "Zionist" interests taking control of Western governments and steering them in support of Israel, and Palestinian militants' repeated attacks on Jewish civilians from both Israel and the Jewish diaspora.