Portal:Palestine

Portal • Project • Resources

The Palestine portal

Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. It encompasses the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, both of which are occupied by Israel. These territories are collectively known as the Palestinian territories, or occupied Palestinian territory. They share the vast majority of their borders with Israel, with the West Bank bordering Jordan to the east and the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt to the southwest. It has a total land area of 6,020 square kilometers (2,320 sq mi) while its population exceeds five million. Its proclaimed capital is Jerusalem, while Ramallah serves as its de facto administrative center. Gaza was its largest city prior to Israel's forced evacuations in 2023, following Hamas's October 7 attacks.

Situated at a continental crossroad, the Palestine region was ruled by various empires and experienced various demographic changes from antiquity to the modern era. It was regularly visited by the Nile and Mesopotamian armies and merchants from North Africa, China and India. The region has religious significance. The ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict dates back to the rise of the Zionist movement, supported by the United Kingdom during World War I. The war saw Britain occupying Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, where it set up Mandatory Palestine under the auspices of the League of Nations. Increased Jewish immigration led to intercommunal conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which escalated into a civil war in 1947 after a proposed partitioning by the United Nations was rejected by the Palestinians and other Arab nations.

The 1948 Palestine war saw the forcible displacement of a majority of the Arab population, and consequently the establishment of Israel; these events are referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba ('catastrophe'). In the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which had been held by Jordan and Egypt respectively. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) declared independence in 1988. In 1993, the PLO signed the Oslo Accords with Israel, creating limited PLO governance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip through the Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel withdrew from Gaza in its unilateral disengagement in 2005. In 2007, internal divisions between political factions led to a takeover of Gaza by Hamas. Since then, the West Bank has been governed in part by the Fatah-led PA, while the Gaza Strip has remained under the control of Hamas.

The Gaza Strip has long been subject to Israeli military occupation and an illegal blockade. Israel has also constructed large settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, which currently house more than 737,000 Israeli settlers, which are illegal under international law. Following the October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel, Israel launched a large-scale military campaign in Gaza that has killed over 72,000 Palestinians, caused mass population displacement, a humanitarian crisis, and a famine in the Gaza Strip; these acts have been recognised as constituting genocide against the Palestinian people by a growing scholarly consensus. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

edit

Selected article

The First Crusade was a crusade launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II to regain control of the sacred city of Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Land from Muslims. What started as a minor call for aid quickly turned into a wholesale migration and conquest of territory outside of Europe. Both knights and peasants from many different nations of western Europe, with little central leadership, travelled overland and by sea towards Jerusalem and captured the city in July 1099, establishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the other Crusader states. Although these gains lasted for fewer than 200 years, the Crusade was a major turning point in the expansion of Western power, and was the only crusade out of the many that followed to achieve its stated goal.

More selected articles...

Read more...

edit

Selected picture

Credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim

Tanzanians protesting the 2008-2009 Gaza bombardment.

More selected pictures...

More...

edit

Did you know...

...that on December 17, 1973 Pan Am Flight 110 was attacked by six gunmen of the Abu Nidal Organization at Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Rome?
...that Palestinian presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouthi is a distant cousin of Marwan Barghouti, another presidential candidate?
...that in Lebanon, the spice mixture Za'atar is thought to bring physical strength and keep the mind alert?

More did you know...

More...

edit

Selected quote

Both the Germans and the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestine. The Germans preferred to have them out of Western Europe, and the Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible. (...) In both cases, the purpose was a kind of 'ethnic cleansing', that is, a violent change in the ratio of ethnic groups in the population.

— Slavoj Žižek, discussing a meeting between Feivel Polkes and Adolf Eichmann

More selected quotes...

More...

edit

WikiProjects

You are invited to participate in WikiProject Palestine, a WikiProject dedicated to developing and improving articles about Palestine.

Parent projects: Asia • Countering systemic bias • Western Asia • Arab World • Countries •

Main project: WikiProject Palestine

Sub-projects

WikiProjects

Middle Eastern military history

Related projects: Geography • Egypt • Iraq • Israel • Jordan • Lebanon • Islam • Syria

What are WikiProjects?

edit

Selected biography

Norman Gary Finkelstein (born December 8, 1953) is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust, an interest motivated by the experiences of his parents who are Jewish Holocaust survivors. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and, most recently, DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007. In 2007, after a highly publicized row between Finkelstein and a notable opponent of his, Alan Dershowitz, Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul was denied. Finkelstein was placed on administrative leave for the 2007–2008 academic year, and on September 5, 2007, he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on generally undisclosed terms.

More selected biographies...

More...

edit

Featured content

This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs) (typically on Saturdays). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Palestine}}) or categorized correctly and wait for the next update. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.