Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

This atlas dates the conflict from 1948, the conventional start bound most reference treatments use for it as an armed dispute, naming its longer roots, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and communal violence in the British Mandate period, without adopting an earlier bound.

The 1947 to 1949 war, known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Palestinians as the Nakba, surrounded the State of Israel's founding in May 1948 by the Zionist movement's Jewish population in Mandatory Palestine, fought against the neighboring Arab states that intervened militarily. Combined deaths on both sides are recorded at roughly 11,000 to 21,000, drawn from Benny Morris's history; record keeping was less complete on the Arab side. Palestinian Arab wartime displacement is recorded at roughly 700,000 to 750,000, Morris's own reconstruction of the 1948 figure alone, not the larger, contested population of refugees and descendants today.

The 1967 Six-Day War began Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Two Palestinian intifadas followed. The Palestinian movement has since been represented by different bodies, among them the Palestine Liberation Organization, recognized by the Arab League from 1974 and later by Israel as a negotiating partner, and Hamas, governing Gaza since 2007.

A 1979 treaty normalized relations between Israel and Egypt, and a 1994 treaty did the same with Jordan. The 1993 to 1995 Oslo Accords set up limited Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza without resolving final borders, Jerusalem's status, statehood or refugee claims. No comprehensive settlement has followed; the conflict continued through repeated wars into the new century.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The conflict began, in its early twentieth century origins, as a contest between two national movements over the same land, the Zionist movement and the Palestinian Arab national movement, both substantially secular in their founding leadership; the Palestinian movement's own early leadership was partly Christian as well as Muslim. Mainstream historiography, following the historian Benny Morris, treats this national and territorial contest as the conflict's basic structure.

Layered onto that national contest is Jerusalem, whose sites carry religious significance to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a significance felt by adherents of all three faiths worldwide and not only by the parties living there.

Scholars of religious violence, among them Mark Juergensmeyer, argue that a distinct religious dimension has grown more central since the late twentieth century. Religious Zionist settlement theology, emerging after the 1967 conquest of the West Bank, reframed the territory as covenantal rather than merely national. The rise of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad since the 1980s cast resistance to Israel in explicitly Islamic terms, a religious duty rather than a nationalist claim alone.

This atlas records the nationalist reading as the conflict's basic structure and the growth of religious framing since as a debated addition to it, adopting neither position over the other.