The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a long-standing military and political conflict in the Levant that dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The conflict is over who gets what land and how its controlled. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs both want the same land, and a compromise has proven difficult to find. The roots of the conflict can be traced back to the United Nations vote in 1947 to partition land in the British mandate of Palestine into two states – one Jewish, one Arab – following the destruction of much of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The conflict has its origins in major nationalist movements among the Jews and among the Arabs, both geared towards attaining sovereignty for their people in the Middle East.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been marked by violence and military confrontations, including the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, the six-day war in 1967, and the ongoing 2023 Israel-Hamas war. The conflict has also been characterized by disagreements over key issues such as the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees, and the presence of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The internationally supported political solution to the broader conflict, endorsed in the past by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, is a so-called “two-state solution.” That would establish Palestine as an independent state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, leaving Israel in control of the rest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.