DUBAI (AlArabiya.net)
Palestine, for long inhabited mainly by Arabs, was part of the Ottoman Empire until captured by the British in 1917-18.
A 1947 U.N. partition plan split Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, giving the Jews 56 per cent of the land. Arabs rejected the plan and war broke out.
Israel was created in May 1948 out of much of British-controlled Palestine.
Britain ended its mandate and fighting continued until the 1949 ceasefire which left Israel in control of 75 per cent of historic Palestine – more than allotted under by U.N. plan – including West Jerusalem. Jordan annexed the West Bank including East Jerusalem. The Gaza Strip was administered by Egypt.
Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East War, when it also seized the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai peninsula from Egypt. War again erupted in 1973. Egyptian and Syrian forces made inroads into territory Israel had seized in 1967 but later drew back.
The 1978 Camp David agreement brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter paved the way for a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and the handback, completed in April 1982, of the Sinai.
Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982 with the declared aim of pushing back Palestinian guerrillas and surrounded West Beirut. Israel withdrew most troops in 1985 and set up a border occupation zone.
A Palestinian uprising, known as the intifada, broke out against Israeli rule in the occupied territories in December 1987 and lasted for almost seven years.
Arab-Israeli peace talks began in Madrid in 1991, emerging from the U.S.-led Arab alliance against Iraq in the Gulf War. The centre-left Labor Party led by Yitzhak Rabin secretly negotiated a self-rule deal with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, signed in Washington in September 1993.
Under the "Oslo accord", an interim deal pending a final peace, the Palestinians took control of much of Gaza and the West Bank city of Jericho in May 1994. Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in October 1994. A deal expanding Palestinian self-rule to other West Bank towns was signed in September 1995.
The Golan Heights and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, remain under Israeli occupation.
Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Palestinians have established limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza under interim peace deals signed in the 1990s that envisage a final treaty creating a Palestinian state in both territories alongside a secure Israel.
