Palestine, historic region, the extent of which has varied greatly
since ancient times, situated on the eastern coast of the Mediter-
ranean Sea, in southwestern Asia. Palestine is now largely divided 
between Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories, parts of which 
are self-administered by Palestinians.


THE LAND 

The region has an extremely diverse terrain that falls generally into
four parallel zones. From west to east they are the coastal plain; the
hills and mountains of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea; the valley of the
Jordan River; and the eastern plateau. In the extreme south lies the
Negev, a rugged desert area. Elevations range from 400 m (1312 ft)
below sea level on the shores of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the
surface of the earth, to 1020 m (3347 ft) atop Mount Hebron. The
region has several fertile areas, which constitute its principal
natural resource. Most notable of these are the Plain of Sharon,
along the northern part of the Mediterranean coast, and the Plain of
Esdraelon (or Jezreel), a valley north of the hills of Samaria.
The water supply of the region, however, is not abundant, with
virtually all of the modest annual rainfall coming in the winter
months. The Jordan River, the region's only major stream, flows south
through Lake Tiberias (the region's only large freshwater lake) to the
intensely saline Dead Sea.


HISTORY 

The Canaanites were the earliest known inhabitants of Palestine.
During the 3rd millennium  BC they became urbanized and lived in city-
states, one of which was Jericho. They developed an alphabet from
which other writing systems were derived; their religion was a major
influence on the beliefs and practices of Judaism, and thus on
Christianity and Islam.
Palestine'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 3rd
millennium BC.
Egyptian hegemony and Canaanite autonomy were constantly challenged
during the 2nd millennium BC by such ethnically diverse invaders as
the Amorites, Hittites, and Hurrians. These invaders, however, were
defeated by the Egyptians and absorbed by the Canaanites, who at that
time may have numbered about 200,000. As Egyptian power began to
weaken after the 14th century BC, new invaders appeared: the Hebrews,
a group of Semitic tribes from Mesopotamia, and the Philistines (after
whom the country was later named), an Aegean people of Indo-European
stock.


THE ISRAELITE KINGDOM 

Hebrew tribes probably immigrated to the area centuries before Moses
led his people out of serfdom in Egypt (1270? BC), and Joshua
conquered parts of Palestine (1230? BC). The conquerors settled in the
hill country, but they were unable to conquer all of Palestine.
The Israelites, a confederation of Hebrew tribes, finally defeated the
Canaanites about 1125 BC but found the struggle with the Philistines
more difficult. The Philistines had established an independent state
on the southern coast of Palestine and controlled a number of towns to
the north and east. Superior in military organization and using iron
weapons, they severely defeated the Israelites about 1050 BC. The
Philistine threat forced the Israelites to unite and establish a
monarchy. David, Israel's great king, finally defeated the Philistines
shortly after 1000 BC, and they eventually assimilated with the
Canaanites.
The unity of Israel and the feebleness of adjacent empires enabled
David to establish a large independent state, with its capital at
Jerusalem. Under David's son and successor, Solomon, Israel enjoyed
peace and prosperity, but at his death in 922 BC the kingdom was
divided into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. When nearby
empires resumed their expansion, the divided Israelites could no
longer maintain their independence. Israel fell to Assyria in 722 and
721 BC, and Judah was conquered in 586 BC by Babylonia, which
destroyed Jerusalem and exiled most of the Jews living there.


PERSIAN RULE
 
The exiled Jews were allowed to retain their national and religious
identity; some of their best theological writings and many historical
books of the Old Testament were written during their exile. At the
same time they did not forget the land of Israel. When Cyrus the Great
of Persia conquered Babylonia in 539 BC he permitted them to return to
Judea, a district of Palestine. Under Persian rule the Jews were
allowed considerable autonomy. They rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem
and codified the Mosaic law, the Torah, which became the code of
social life and religious observance. The Jews believed they were
bound to a universal God, Yahweh, by a covenant; indeed, their
concept of one ethical God is perhaps Judaism's greatest contribution
to world civilization.


ROMAN PROVINCE 

Persian domination of Palestine was replaced by Greek rule when
Alexander the Great of Macedonia took the region in 333 BC.
Alexander's successors, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of
Syria, continued to rule the country. The Seleucids tried to impose
Hellenistic (Greek) culture and religion on the population. In the 2nd
century BC, however, the Jews revolted under the Maccabees and set up
an independent state (141-63 BC) until Pompey the Great conquered
Palestine for Rome and made it a province ruled by Jewish kings. It
was during the rule (37-4 BC) of King Herod the Great that Jesus was
born.
Two more Jewish revolts erupted and were suppressed-in AD 66 to 73 and
132 to 135. After the second one, numerous Jews were killed, many were
sold into slavery, and the rest were not allowed to visit Jerusalem.
Judea was renamed Syria Palaistina.
Palestine received special attention when the Roman emperor
Constantine the Great legalized Christianity in AD 313. His mother,
Helena, visited Jerusalem, and Palestine, as the Holy Land, became a
focus of Christian pilgrimage. A golden age of prosperity, security,
and culture followed. Most of the population became Hellenized and
Christianized. Byzantine (Roman) rule was interrupted, however, by a
brief Persian occupation (614-629) and ended altogether when Muslim
Arab armies invaded Palestine and captured Jerusalem in AD 638.


THE ARAB CALIPHATE 

The Arab conquest began 1300 years of Muslim presence in what then
became known as Filastin. Palestine was holy to Muslims because the
Prophet Muhammad had designated Jerusalem as the first qibla (the
direction Muslims face when praying) and because he was believed to
have ascended on a night journey to heaven from the area of Solomon's
temple, where the Dome of the Rock was later built. Jerusalem became
the third holiest city of Islam.
The Muslim rulers did not force their religion on the Palestinians,
and more than a century passed before the majority converted to Islam.
The remaining Christians and Jews were considered "People of the
Book." They were allowed autonomous control in their communities and
guaranteed security and freedom of worship. Such tolerance (with few
exceptions) was rare in the history of religion. Most Palestinians
also adopted Arabic and Islamic culture. Palestine benefited from the
empire's trade and from its religious significance during the first
Muslim dynasty, the Umayyads of Damascus. When power shifted to
Baghdad with the Abbasids in 750, Palestine became neglected. It
suffered unrest and successive domination by Seljuks, Fatimids, and
European Crusaders. It shared, however, in the glory of Muslim
civilization, when the Muslim world enjoyed a golden age of science,
art, philosophy, and literature. Muslims preserved Greek learning and
broke new ground in several fields, all of which later contributed to
the Renaissance in Europe. Like the rest of the empire, however,
Palestine under the Mamelukes gradually stagnated and declined.


OTTOMAN RULE
 
The Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor defeated the Mamelukes in 1517 and,
with few interruptions, ruled Palestine until the winter of 1917 and
1918. The country was divided into several districts (sanjaks), such
as that of Jerusalem. The administration of the districts was placed
largely in the hands of Arabized Palestinians, who were descendants
of the Canaanites and successive settlers. The Christian and Jewish
communities, however, were allowed a large measure of autonomy.
Palestine shared in the glory of the Ottoman Empire during the 16th
century, but declined again when the empire began to decline in the
17th century.
The decline of Palestine-in trade, agriculture, and population-
continued until the 19th century. At that time the search by European
powers for raw materials and markets, as well as their strategic
interests, brought them to the Middle East, stimulating economic and
social development. Between 1831 and 1840, Muhammad Ali, the moder-
nizing viceroy of Egypt, expanded his rule to Palestine. His policies
modified the feudal order, increased agriculture, and improved educ-
ation. The Ottoman Empire reasserted its authority in 1840, institu-
ting its own reforms. German settlers and Jewish immigrants in the
1880s brought modern machinery and badly needed capital.
The rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, and especially
the intensification of anti-Semitism during the 1880s, encouraged
European Jews to seek haven in their "promised land," Palestine.
Theodor Herzl, author of  The Jewish State (1896; translated 1896),
founded the World Zionist Organization in 1897 to solve Europe's
"Jewish problem". As a result, Jewish immigration to Palestine greatly 
increased.
In 1880, Arab Palestinians constituted about 95 percent of the total
population of 450,000. Nevertheless, Jewish immigration, land
purchase, and claims were reacted to with alarm by some Palestinian
leaders, who then became adamantly opposed to Zionism.

THE BRITISH MANDATE
                             
Aided by the Arabs, the British captured Palestine from the Ottoman
Turks in 1917 and 1918. The Arabs revolted against the Turks because
the British had promised them, in correspondence (1915-1916) with
Husein ibn Ali of Mecca, the independence of their countries after the
war. Britain, however, also made other, conflicting commitments. Thus,
in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement with France and Russia (1916), it
promised to divide and rule the region with its allies. In a third
agreement, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain promised the Jews,
whose help it needed in the war effort, a Jewish "national home" in
Palestine. This promise was subsequently incorporated in the mandate
conferred on Britain by the League of Nations in 1922.
During their mandate (1922-1948) the British found their contradictory
promises to the Jewish and Palestinian communities difficult to
reconcile. The Zionists envisaged large-scale Jewish immigration, and
some spoke of a Jewish state constituting all of Palestine. The
Palestinians, however, rejected Britain's right to promise their
country to a third party and feared dispossession by the Zionists;
anti-Zionist attacks occurred in Jerusalem (1920) and Jaffa (1921).
A 1922 statement of British policy denied Zionist claims to all of
Palestine and limited Jewish immigration, but reaffirmed support for
a Jewish national home. The British proposed establishing a legisla-
tive council,but Palestinians rejected this council as discriminatory.
After 1928, when Jewish immigration increased somewhat, British policy
on the subject seesawed under conflicting Arab-Jewish pressures.
Immigration rose sharply after the installation (1933) of the Nazi
regime in Germany; in 1935 nearly 62,000 Jews entered Palestine. Fear
of Jewish domination was the principal cause of the Arab revolt that
broke out in 1936 and continued intermittently until 1939. By that
time Britain had again restricted Jewish immigration and purchases of
land.


THE POST-WORLD WAR II PERIOD
                             
The struggle for Palestine, which abated during World War II, resumed
in 1945. The horrors of the Holocaust produced world sympathy for
European Jewry and for Zionism, and although Britain still refused to
admit 100,000 Jewish survivors to Palestine, many survivors of the
Nazi death camps found their way there illegally. Various plans for
solving the Palestine problem were rejected by one party or the other.
Britain finally declared the mandate unworkable and turned the problem
over to the United Nations in April 1947. The Jews and the Pales-
tinians prepared for a showdown.
Although the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews (1,300,000 to 600,000),
the latter were better prepared. They had a semiautonomous government,
led by David Ben-Gurion, and their military, the Haganah, was well
trained and experienced. The Palestinians, on the other hand, had
never recovered from the Arab revolt, and most of their leaders were
in exile. The Mufti of Jerusalem, their principal spokesman, refused
to accept Jewish statehood. When the UN proposed partition in November
1947, he rejected the plan while the Jews accepted it. In the military
struggle that followed, the Palestinians were defeated. Terrorism was
used on both sides.
The state of Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Five Arab armies,
coming to the aid of the Palestinians, immediately attacked it. Israeli
forces defeated the Arab armies, and Israel enlarged its territory.
Jordan took the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt took the Gaza
Strip.
The war produced 780,000 Palestinian refugees. About half probably
left out of fear and panic, while the rest were forced out to make
room for Jewish immigrants from Europe and from the Arab world. The
disinherited Palestinians spread throughout the neighboring countries,
where they have maintained their Palestinian national identity and the
desire to return to their homeland. In 1967, during the Six-Day War
between Israel and neighboring Arab countries, Israel captured the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as other areas.
In 1993, after decades of violent conflict between Palestinians and
Israelis, leaders from each side agreed to the signing of an historic
peace accord. Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat
and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin met in the United States on
September 13, 1993, to witness the signing of the agreement. The plan
called for limited Palestinian self-rule in Israeli-occupied
territories, beginning with the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of
Jericho. Palestinian administration of these areas began in 1994. In
September 1995 the PLO and Israel signed a second peace accord,
expanding limited Palestinian self-rule to almost all Palestinian
towns and refugee camps in the West Bank. Under the agreements,
Israel maintains the right to send armed forces into Palestinian areas
and controls the areas between Palestinian enclaves.


Contributed By: 

Philip Peretz



"Palestine," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia.
(c)1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.