At the start of the 1900s, Palestine was a religiously diverse region (roughly 76% Muslim, 14% Jewish and 10% Christian) living together under Ottoman rule, generally peacefully. Around this time, the Zionist movement was founded by Jews in Western Europe. Zionists asserted that Jews deserved a nation of their own and put forth Palestine as the place to found it, despite the fact that Palestine was already occupied by over 600,000 people, more than three quarters of them Muslim.

From the beginning, Zionism was an explicitly colonial and racist state-building project. In the foundational Zionist book “The Jewish State” published in 1896, Theodore Herzl says that creating a Jewish state will require them to “clear a country of wild beasts… [by] throw[ing] a melinite bomb into their midst,” and says that a Jewish state in Palestine would be “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Over the next four decades, especially accelerated by the Holocaust, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased dramatically, as did violence and tensions between the Jews and Palestinians, as largely European Jews took over land that Palestinians had lived on for centuries.

In 1947, the United Nations partitioned Palestine into Israeli and Palestinian areas, formally establishing an Israeli state for the first time, and allotting 62% of Palestinian land, including the majority of the fertile coastal regions, to Jewish settlers who were only 30% of the population, and the majority of whom had lived in the area for less than 20 years [source].

When in 1948, Palestinians fought back against this settler colonial seizure of their land, Israel pushed well past the borders initially established by the UN. Israeli forces destroyed 531 Palestinian villages and expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, creating a Palestinian refugee population whose descendants today number around 6 million around the world. Palestinians today view 1948 as a pivotal year in their dispossession, and call that year the Nakba, or “catastrophe” [source].

In 1967, Israel carried out an undercover attack against Egypt, which launched a war between Israel and neighboring Gulf states that also solidified their control over even more Palestinian land, including the Golan Heights in the North. This left Palestinians confined to the regions we are familiar with today, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (named because it’s the West Bank of the Jordan River).

Since 1967, Israelis have continued to partition and settle in the West Bank, confining Palestinians to smaller and smaller regions that are isolated from each other by Israeli military checkpoints. Gaza has been under a suffocating military blockade for over 15 years, with most residents lacking adequate access to water, electricity or healthcare, and unemployment close to 50% [[source]](https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=4421#:~:text=Unemployment rate among labour force,13%25 in the West Bank.). Palestinians have continually resisted Israeli colonization, most notably in the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000, as well as in many daily acts of resistance.