Portal:Israel

Location of Israel

Map of Israel

Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. It is bordered by Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan to the east, and Egypt to the southwest. Israel's western coast lies on the Mediterranean Sea, its southern tip reaches the Red Sea, and to the east is Earth's lowest point near the Dead Sea. Jerusalem is the government seat and proclaimed capital, while Tel Aviv is Israel's largest urban area and economic centre.

The Land of Israel, also called Palestine or the Holy Land, was home to the ancient Canaanites and later the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and Hasmonean Judea. Located near continental crossroads, its demographics shifted under various empires. 19th-century Jewish nationalism, alongside European antisemitism, fuelled the Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with an overwhelming Arab majority. The movement gained British support with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. After World War I, Britain occupied the region and established Mandatory Palestine. British rule and Jewish immigration in the leadup to the Holocaust intensified Arab-Jewish tensions with Arab opposition to Zionism driven largely by concerns of displacement and dispossession. The 1947 UN Partition Plan proposed separate Arab and Jewish states. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan while the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it, arguing it violated the principle of self-determination and constituted Western colonial interference. Civil war followed, and Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, shortly before the end of the mandate. The conflict subsequently escalated with the intervention of Arab states. (Full article...)