This timeline history of Israel traces the land’s ancient and biblical significance through millennia of foreign rule to the founding of the modern State of Israel.
Ancient and Biblical History
The land known in antiquity as Canaan, and later as Israel and Judah, has a documented history stretching back thousands of years, holding central religious and historical significance for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to the Hebrew Bible, a united Israelite kingdom was established around 1000 BCE under Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, with Jerusalem becoming its political and religious capital and the site of the First Temple, traditionally attributed to Solomon. The historical scope and scale of this united monarchy remain debated among archaeologists and historians, with some evidence suggesting a smaller polity than the biblical narrative describes. Following Solomon’s reign, tradition holds that the kingdom split into the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah; the former was conquered by the Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BCE, an event followed by the dispersal of Israelite tribes described in later tradition as the “Ten Lost Tribes.”
Temple Periods and Foreign Rule
In 586 BCE, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple, and exiled a substantial part of the Judean population to Babylon, an event of lasting significance in Jewish religious memory. Persian rule under Cyrus the Great later permitted the exiles’ return and the construction of the Second Temple in the late 6th century BCE. The region subsequently came under Hellenistic and then Roman control; a major Jewish revolt against Rome ended in 70 CE with the destruction of the Second Temple by forces under Titus, followed by further unrest culminating in the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE. In the centuries that followed, the region passed through Byzantine Christian rule before Arab-Muslim forces took Jerusalem in 638 CE, beginning a long era of predominantly Islamic governance interrupted by the Crusader kingdoms of the 11th–13th centuries and later continued under the Mamluks and, from 1517, the Ottoman Empire, which administered the region, then generally referred to as Palestine, for four centuries until the First World War.
The Path to the Modern State of Israel
Jewish communities maintained a continuous, if often small, presence in the region throughout these centuries, and from the late 19th century the Zionist movement emerged in Europe advocating for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in the historic land of Israel, spurring waves of Jewish immigration to Ottoman, and later British-administered, Palestine. In 1917, amid the First World War, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, a document whose interpretation and consequences remain a subject of historical discussion. Britain administered the territory as a League of Nations mandate after the war, a period marked by growing Jewish immigration, Arab opposition to that immigration, and repeated intercommunal violence that British authorities struggled to contain. Following the Second World War and the Holocaust, the United Nations approved a plan in 1947 to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. As the British Mandate ended, Jewish leaders declared the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, an event followed immediately by war with neighboring Arab states: the beginning of a modern regional conflict whose various dimensions continue to be addressed through ongoing political processes.