History of Palestine.

History of Palestine
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The History of Palestine is the account of events in Palestine from ancient times to the present. For the history of the term "Palestine" and its application in the region, see Boundaries and name of Palestine region.
Contents[hide]
1 Prehistoric times
2 Canaanite and Israelite Periods
3 Persian and Hellenistic periods
4 Roman Period
4.1 The renaming of the Roman province from Judea to Palestine
5 Byzantine Period
6 Arab Caliphate Period
7 Crusader Period
8 Mamluk Period
9 Ottoman Period
10 The British Mandate period
11 Post-Mandate
12 Intifada, Separation Barrier, Road Map
13 See also
14 References
15 External links
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Prehistoric times
The Mousterian Neanderthals were the earliest inhabitants of the area known to archaeologists, and have been dated to c. 200,000 BCE. The first anatomically modern humans to live in the area were the Kebarans (conventionally c. 18,000 - 10,500 BCE, but recent paleoanthropological evidence suggests that Kebarans may have arrived as early as 75,000 BCE and shared the region with the Neanderthals for millennia before the latter died out). They were followed by the Natufian culture (c. 10,500 BCE - 8500 BCE), the Yarmukians (c. 8500 - 4300 BCE) and the Ghassulians (carbon dated c. 4300 - 3300 BCE). (All of these cultures are named after archeological sites, in the absence of any indication of what they called themselves.)
The Semitic culture followed the Ghassulians. People became urbanized and lived in city-states, including Jericho. The area's location at the center of routes linking three continents made it the meeting place for religious and cultural influences from Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor. It was also the natural battleground for the great powers of the region and subject to domination by adjacent empires, beginning with Egypt in the late 3rd millennium BCE.
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Canaanite and Israelite Periods
A Semitic speaking culture followed the Ghassulian culture. Archaeologists refer to the culture as Canaanite, corresponding to the Bronze Age. This usage differs from that of the Bible and related literature where the term is used in a more narrow sense for one group within the culture. Some historians regard it as part of a wave of migration of semitic-speaking peoples out of the Arabian Peninsula, while others suggest that they had been there ever since the original Semitic emigration from Africa.

Terra Sancta sive Palæstina. (1759 map)
Later, the Israelites appeared, corresponding to the Iron Age. Archaeologists regard them as an outgrowth of the Canaanite culture. According to the Bible they were descended from Jacob whose sons generally had Biblical Canaanite wives. The Bible describes them as returning following the Exodus from Egypt, conquering, exterminating, and sometimes absorbing the tribes they found there and reclaiming the land it says God promised them. Successive waves of migration brought other groups onto the scene. Around 1200 BCE the Hittite empire was conquered by allied tribes from the north. The Phoenicians (which are a different group than the Canaanites conquered by the Israelites) were temporarily displaced, but returned when the invading tribes showed no inclination to settle. The Egyptians called the horde that swept across Asia Minor and the Mediterranean Sea the Sea Peoples. The Philistines (whose traces disappear before the 5th century BCE) are presently considered to have been among them, giving the name Philistia to the region in which they settled.
For further discussion on the very early ethnic history of the region, see:
Canaan
Israelites
Philistines
History of ancient Israel and Judah
Eventually, the Israelites established the Kingdom of Israel, which later split between a northern Kingdom of Israel and a southern Kingdom of Judah. In 722 BCE, the northern Kingdom of Ephraim (commonly referred to as Israel, sometimes as Samaria) was destroyed by the Assyrians, the elite amongst its inhabitants were deported (giving rise to the legend of "the Lost Tribes") and replaced by settlers from elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire. Many however fled to their southern Israelite sister kingdom, and many stayed behind; they (mixed with deportees from Mesopotamia) became the Samaritans. The Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar conquered the (southern) Kingdom of Judah in 597-586 BCE, and deported the middle and upper classes of the Jews to Babylonia in the Babylonian captivity, where they flourished. Most regard the collapse of the Israelite kingdoms as the beginning of the Jewish diaspora.
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Persian and Hellenistic periods
Cyrus II of Persia conquered the Babylonian Empire by 539 BCE and incorporated Palestine into the Persian Empire. Cyrus organized the empire into provincial administrations called satrapies. The administrators of these provinces, called satraps, had considerable independence from the emperor. The Persians allowed Jews to return to the regions that the Bablyonians had exiled them from.
The exiled Jews who returned to their traditional home encountered the Jews that had remained, surrounded by a much larger non-Jewish majority. One group of note (that exists up until this day) were the Samaritans, who adhered to most features of the Jewish rite and claimed to be descendants of the Assyrian Jews; they were not recognized as Jews by the returning exiles for various reasons (at least some of which seem to be political). The return of the exiles from Babylon reinforced the Jewish population, which gradually became more dominant and expanded significantly.

Map of Alexander's empire (1913 map)
In the early 330s BCE, Alexander the Great conquered the region, beginning an important period of Hellenestic influence in Palestine.
After Alexander's death in 323 BCE, his empire was partitioned, and the competing Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires occupied various portions of the eastern Mediterranean, including different parts of Palestine. The Jews were divided between the Hellenists who supported the adoption of Greek culture, and those who believed in keeping to the traditions of the past, which resulted in the Maccabean revolt of the 2nd century BCE.
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Roman Period

Roman Province of Judea
Following the Roman conquest in 63 BCE, parts of Palestine - first a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, after year 6 CE Iudaea Province, after year 135 CE province Syria Palaestina - was in nearly constant revolt (see Jewish-Roman Wars). A number of events with far-reaching consequences took place, including religious schisms, such as Christianity branching off of Judaism.The Great Jewish Revolt in 66-73 resulted in the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem (70) and the sacking of the entire city by the Roman army led by Titus Flavius and the estimated death toll of 600,000 to 1,300,000 Jews (see Josephus Flavius).
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The renaming of the Roman province from Judea to Palestine

Roman Province of Palestina
In 135 CE, the costly victory in Bar Kokhba's revolt by Hadrian resulted in 580,000 Jews killed (according to Cassius Dio) and an effort to ethnically cleanse Judea of Jews, including the establishment of the pagan polis Aelia Capitolina on the site of the ruins of Jerusalem, in which Jews were forbidden to set foot. Hundreds of thousands were taken as slaves throughout the Empire. It was during this time that the Romans gave the name Syria Palaestina to the geographic area, to complete the disassociation with Judaea.[1]
Over several centuries, the Jewish Diaspora grew even further. In addition to the large Jewish community in Babylon, large numbers of Jews settled in Egypt, and in other parts of the Hellenistic world and in the Roman Empire.
The frequent conflict contributed to Jewish emigration, both as refugees, through deportation, and by reducing economic opportunities in the region. It also led to many deaths among the Jewish population - deaths in battles with the Romans and others, deaths due to massacres, and deaths due to the famine and disease that so often accompany armed conflict. However, the Jewish population in the north of Palestine remained large for several centuries.
Meanwhile, Palestine was increasingly Christianized and probably had a Christian majority by the time of Diocletian. Some areas, like Gaza, were well known as pagan holdouts, remained attached to the worship of Daqon and other deities as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. Gaza was probably an Arabic-speaking city by this time: it is referred to as an Arab city by 430 BCE. The Arabic language, meanwhile, was spreading as the majority language throughout the Roman epoch. Southern Palestine had been thoroughly Arabized by the Idumaeans and Nabataeans around the turn of the Era while the regions further north became Arabic in speech by no later than the fourth century.
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Byzantine Period
Palestine became part of the Byzantine Empire after the division of the Roman Empire into east and west (a fitful process that was not finalized until 395). Under Byzantine rule, the region became a center of Christianity, while retaining significant Jewish and Samaritan communities (although the Samaritans were greatly reduced following Julianus ben Sabar's revolt.) During a protracted conflict with the Byzantine Empire, the Sassanian Empire under Khosrau II briefly wrested control of the region from the Byzantines. An invasion of Mesopotamia by Byzantine Emperor Heraclius forced the Sassanians to withdraw.
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Arab Caliphate Period

The territory of the Caliphate in 750. (1926 map)
After 634, Palestine, under the Arabic name Filastin, became part of the newly established Islamic Caliphate, ruled by the "Rightly Guided" caliphs, then the Umayyads until they were overthrown by the Abbasids in 750. Over the following centuries it acquired a Muslim, Arabic-speaking majority, through conversion, language shift from Aramaic, and immigration.

Palestine as described by the medieval Arab geographers. (19th century map)
In the 900s, the Fatimids, a self-proclaimed Shia caliphate, took control. In the next century, Seljuk Turks invaded large portions of West Asia, including Asia Minor and Palestine.
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Crusader Period
The proximate cause of the Crusades, following 1095, by the Christian European powers was the desire to reconquer the birthland and holy land of Christianity, which had been lost to the Islamic Arab invasion of the byzantine Roman empire in the 7th century. It was also to protect non muslim lands from the 200 years of prior warfare from Muslims on all non Muslim peoples.

Crusader states. (1911 map)
The Christian forces established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted from 1099 until 1291, though Saladin reconquered the city of Jerusalem in 1187.
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Mamluk Period
The Ayyubid Sultanate, founded by Saladin, controlled parts of the region until 1250, when it was defeated by the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. The Mamluk Sultanate ultimately became a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of campaigns waged by Selim I in the 16th century.
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Ottoman Period

Image:Ottoman empire 1481-1683. (1923 map)
In 1516 the Ottoman Turks occupied Palestine. The country became part of the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople appointed local governors. Public works, including the city walls, were rebuilt in Jerusalem by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1537. Napoleon of France briefly waged war against the Ottoman Empire (allied then with Great Britain). His forces conquered and occupied cities in Palestine, but they were finally defeated and driven out by 1801. Turkish rule lasted until World War I.
Jewish immigration to Palestine, particularly to the "four sacred cities" (Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron) which already had significant Jewish communities, increased particularly towards the end of Ottoman rule; Jews of European origin lived mostly off donations from off-country, while many Sephardic Jews found themselves a trade. The rise of Zionism, a political movement seeking to have Jews return to their ancient homeland in Palestine, in Europe and Russia in the 19th century increased the trend. By 1920, the Jewish population of Palestine had reached 11% of the population.[2]
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The British Mandate period
main article: British Mandate of Palestine

Cisjordan and Transjordan Palestine were incorporated (under different legal and administrative arrangements) into the British Mandate of Palestine, issued by the League of Nations to Great Britain on 29 September, 1923.
In World War I, Turkey sided with Germany. As a result, it was embroiled in a conflict with Great Britain, leading to the British capture of Palestine in a series of battles led by General Allenby. (See Third Battle of Gaza and Battle of Beersheba). Allenby famously dismounted from his horse when he entered captured Jerusalem as a mark of respect for the Holy City. He was greeted by the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic leaders of the city with great honor.
At the subsequent 1919 Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles, Turkey's loss of its Middle East empire was formalized. The British had in the interim made two agreements. In the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence there was an undertaking to form an Arab state in exchange for the Great Arab Revolt and in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to "favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" while respecting the rights of the indigeneous majority.
McMahon's promises are seen by Arab nationalists as a pledge of immediate Arab independence, an undertaking violated by the region's subsequent partition into British and French League of Nations mandates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 which became the real cornerstone of the geopolitics structuring the entire region. Prior to the conference Emir Faisal, British ally and son of the king of the Hijaz, had agreed in the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement to support the immigration of Jews into Palestine as part of a larger Arab state. When the conference did not produce that Arab state, Faisal called instead for Palestine to become part of his new Arab Syrian kingdom.
In 1920 the Allied Supreme Council meeting at San Remo offered a Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain, but the borders and terms under which the mandate was to be held were not finalised until September 1922. Article 25 of the mandate specified that the eastern area (then known as Transjordan or Transjordania) did not have to be subject to all parts of the Mandate, notably the provisions regarding a Jewish national home. This was used by the British as one rationale to establish an Arab state, which it saw as at least partially fulfilling the undertakings in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. On 11 April 1921 the British passed administration of the eastern region to the Hashemite Arab dynasty from the Hejaz what later became part of Saudi Arabia as the Emirate of Transjordan and on 15 May 1923 recognized it as a state.
Under the Mandate, Jewish immigration to Cisjordan Palestine increased substantially with a rise in Jewish nationalism, which encouraged Zionism, a return to the ancient land of the Jews. Between 1920 and 1945, Jews went from less than 1% to 31% [citation needed] of the rapidly expanding population, due in part to an influx of Jewish refugees from Nazism in Europe and the refusal of the USA, France, Britain and other countries to allow Jewish immigration.
Palestinian Arab leaders strongly opposed the immigration. In 1936 the British Peel Commission advised that the western part of Palestine be divided between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs then launched the Great Uprising against British rule in an effort to end the immigration. The Jews, for their part, organized milita groups like the Irgun and Lehi to fight the British and the Haganah and Palmach to fight the Arabs. By the time order was restored in March of 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 Britons were killed.
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Post-Mandate

The UN Partition Plan
Soon after World War II, the British decided to leave Palestine. The United Nations attempted to solve the dispute by putting forward the 1947 UN Partition Plan, dividing the land area between the two populations, on November 29, 1947; the Jewish Agency accepted the plan, while the Palestinian Arabs, along with their allies elsewhere in the Arab world, rejected it as inadequate. The Arab-Jewish fighting within Palestine escalated to full-scale war right after the UN partition plan was approved, and on May 14, 1948, the Jewish population declared independence as the state of Israel. The armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria then invaded, but did not succeed even in holding onto much of the areas reserved in the UN partition plan for the Arab state. (For a more detailed account, see 1948 Arab-Israeli War). Large numbers of Palestinian Arabs left or were expelled from their homes during the fighting and to this day most have not been allowed to return (see Palestinian exodus). Israel managed to maintain its independence and even expand its borders, but a new refugee problem, this one of Palestinian Arabs, was created, and was compounded by Jewish exodus from Arab lands.

West Bank

Gaza Strip
What remained of the territories allotted to the Arab state in Palestine was annexed by Jordan (the West Bank) or occupied by Egypt (the Gaza Strip) from 1948 to 1967.
Following threats by Egypt and Syria, backed by Egyptian president Nasser's request to UN to remove it's peace-keeping troops from the Egyptian-Israeli border, in June 1967 Israeli forces went to action against Egypt and Syria, and, after failing to persuade it to stay out of the conflict, Jordan, in what has come to be known as the Six-Day War. As a result of that war, the Israel Defense Forces occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula bringing them under military rule. The United Nation's Security Council passed Resolution 242, promoting the "land for peace" formula, which called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967 in return for the end of all states of belligerency. Since that time, the Palestinians refugees have struggled to assert their own independence, either in all the territories of Palestine or in the West Bank and Gaza Strip particularly. In the course of 1973 Yom Kippur War, the invading forces of Egypt and Syria were pushed back. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as part of the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel.

Map of the State of Israel today
After the First Intifada, attempts at the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were made at the Madrid Conference of 1991. As the process progressed, in 1993 the Israelis allowed Chairman and President of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yassir Arafat to return to the region.
Following the historic 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between Palestinians and Israel (the "Oslo Accords"), which gave the Palestinians limited self-government in some parts of the Occupied Territories through the Palestinian Authority, and other detailed negotiations, proposals for a Palestinian state gained momentum. They were soon followed in 1994 by the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace. An attempt was made to end the struggle at the Camp David 2000 Summit between Palestinians and Israel but no agreement was reached. To date, efforts to resolve the conflict have ended in deadlock, and the people of Palestine, Jews and Arabs, are engaged in a bloody conflict, called variously the "Arab-Israeli conflict" or "Israeli-Palestinian conflict".