Human settlement in this land goes back to deep prehistory: at Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, there are remains of settlement that make it one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, with stone walls more than ten thousand years old. During the Bronze Age, the region was home to peoples that Egyptian and biblical sources call Canaanites: a constellation of city-states that spoke Semitic languages, worshipped deities such as El and Baal, and often fell within Egypt's orbit. The earliest known mention of the word 'Israel' appears on the Egyptian Merneptah Stele, around 1208 BC, where it is the name of a people in the region.
Between the 11th and 10th centuries BC, two Hebrew kingdoms emerged in the highlands. The biblical tradition describes them as a united monarchy under Saul, David and Solomon that later split in two: Israel in the north, with its capital eventually at Samaria, and Judah in the south, with its capital at Jerusalem and its Temple. It's worth being precise here, because there is legitimate historical debate: archaeology confirms that both kingdoms existed — a 9th-century BC inscription found at Tel Dan mentions the 'House of David' — but the reach and splendour of David and Solomon's united monarchy, as the Bible paints it, are disputed among specialists. What is established is that an identity and a religion that would shape world history were forged in those centuries.
These kingdoms were brought to an end by the great Mesopotamian empires. In 722 BC, the Assyrian Empire conquered the kingdom of Israel and deported much of its population, the origin of the legend of the 'ten lost tribes'. In 586 BC, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II took Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon's Temple and deported Judah's elites to Babylon: this is the so-called Babylonian exile, a founding trauma that Jewish tradition never forgot. Decades later, the Persian king Cyrus the Great, after conquering Babylon, allowed the Jews to return and rebuild the Temple.
The period historians call the Second Temple period runs from the rebuilding of the Jerusalem sanctuary, around 516 BC, to its destruction in AD 70. It was an extraordinarily dense era. Persian rule was followed by Hellenism, brought by the conquests of Alexander the Great, and with it came tension between Greek culture and Jewish tradition. That tension exploded in the Maccabean Revolt (167-160 BC) against the Seleucid kings, which gave rise to the Hasmonean dynasty and a brief independent Jewish kingdom, still remembered today in the festival of Hanukkah.
In 63 BC, the Roman general Pompey entered Jerusalem and the region came under Rome's orbit. Rome ruled first through client kings — the most famous being Herod the Great, who expanded the Temple into one of the wonders of the ancient world — and later through prefects and procurators. It is in this setting, a restless and messianic Judea, that the life of Jesus of Nazareth unfolded. His preaching and his crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate would give birth to Christianity, a faith that began as a movement within Judaism and eventually broke away from it.
Roman pressure led to two great rebellions. The First Jewish-Roman War (AD 66-73) ended with the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus's legions in the year 70, a blow from which religious Judaism never returned to its old form: with no Temple and no sacrifices, the faith reorganised itself around the study of the Torah, prayer and synagogues, and Rabbinic Judaism was born. The second great rebellion, the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132-135), was crushed by Hadrian, who devastated Judea, banned Jews from entering Jerusalem, refounded the city as Aelia Capitolina and renamed the province Syria Palaestina. Huge numbers of Jews died, were sold into slavery or emigrated, accelerating a diaspora that already existed. A widely told story deserves some nuance: the diaspora was not a single 'exile' imposed by Rome all at once, but a long process; a Jewish population went on living in the land, especially in Galilee, for centuries.
When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century, the province of Palestine was completely transformed. Christianity went from the faith of a persecuted minority to the religion of the empire, and the region where Jesus had lived became the Holy Land, a destination for pilgrims from across the Mediterranean world. Empress Helena, Constantine's mother, travelled to Jerusalem around 326 and, according to tradition, identified the sites of the crucifixion and burial, over which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and dozens of other churches and monasteries were also built.
During the Byzantine centuries, from the 4th to the 7th, Palestine went through a period of relative prosperity and dense population, with thriving cities, dazzling mosaics — such as the famous Madaba Map — and a strong monastic presence in the Judean Desert. Most of the population was Christian, but they lived alongside Jewish communities, especially in Galilee, where the Jerusalem Talmud and important rabbinic texts were compiled, and alongside Samaritans, whose revolts against Byzantine rule were harshly put down.
The Byzantine balance broke in the 7th century. Between 614 and 628 there was a brief and violent Sasanian Persian occupation that damaged Jerusalem, and although Emperor Heraclius recovered the city, the Byzantine Empire came out of its wars with Persia exhausted. That exhaustion left the door open to a new force coming from the south, from the Arabian Peninsula, which within a few years would change the map of the entire Near East.
Around 636, a few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslim Arab armies defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Yarmouk and took control of the region. Jerusalem surrendered around 637-638, according to tradition to Caliph Umar himself. This marked the start of Islamic rule that, under different dynasties and with a long Crusader interlude, would last nearly thirteen hundred years, until the 20th century.
Jerusalem holds a central place in Islam. It is the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina, and it was the first qibla, the direction the earliest Muslims faced in prayer before Mecca was set. According to Islamic tradition, it was from the rock on the Esplanade (the Haram al-Sharif, 'Noble Sanctuary') that the Prophet Muhammad made his night journey and ascension to heaven. Over that rock, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik had the Dome of the Rock built around 691, with its unmistakable golden dome, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built nearby. For Judaism, that same space is the Temple Mount, the holiest site, where both Temples stood: which is why it is one of the most contested spots on the planet.
Under the successive caliphates — the Umayyads from Damascus, the Abbasids from Baghdad, and later the Fatimids from Cairo — the region was generally on the periphery, but connected to major trade and cultural networks. The population, mostly Christian and Jewish at first, gradually became Arabised in language and, more slowly and partially, Islamised in religion. Christians and Jews lived as dhimmis, protected communities with subordinate status who paid a special tax, under a system that combined relative tolerance with legal inequality. There were harsher periods too — such as the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre ordered by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in 1009 — that echoed through Christian Europe.
In 1095, Pope Urban II called the First Crusade, a military expedition to wrest Jerusalem and the Holy Places from Muslim rule. In July 1099, after a brutal siege, the Crusaders took Jerusalem and massacred much of its Muslim and Jewish population: chronicles from the time, both Christian and Muslim, agree on the bloodbath, although the death toll is disputed and the highest figures are usually considered exaggerated. On the back of that conquest, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was founded, one of the Crusader states that stretched along the Levantine coast.
For almost two centuries, the region was the stage for an on-and-off clash between the European Crusader kingdoms and the Muslim powers. The turning point came in 1187, when Sultan Saladin, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of the Horns of Hattin and retook Jerusalem. Unlike in 1099, Saladin generally allowed the inhabitants to leave and respected Christian sites, a gesture that earned him a reputation for chivalry even among his European enemies. The Third Crusade, led by Richard the Lionheart, failed to recover the city.
The Crusaders left an impressive physical legacy: the walls and port of Acre, the fortified city of Caesarea, castles and churches that can still be visited. But in the long run their presence was an interlude. In the 13th century, the Mamluks — a military caste of slave origin that ruled from Egypt — drove out the last Crusaders; the fall of Acre in 1291 ended the Latin presence in the Holy Land. The Mamluks would rule the region until the early 16th century, when another great empire took it over.
In 1516-1517, the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks and brought Palestine, Syria and Egypt into his empire. This began a four-century era, the longest period of rule by a single power since Antiquity, which would last until the First World War. Under the Ottomans, the region was not a political unit called 'Palestine'; instead it was divided among several administrative districts (sanjaks) that answered to larger provinces such as Damascus.
The great Ottoman builder in the area was Suleiman the Magnificent, who in the 1530s ordered the construction of the walls of Jerusalem's Old City that still stand today. After an early period of some prosperity, much of the Ottoman era brought stagnation and relative depopulation inland, with a farming economy and an administration that was often distant and demanding when it came to taxes. Most of the population was Arab and Muslim, with Christian minorities from several churches and Jewish communities concentrated in Judaism's four 'holy cities': Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. In the 16th century, Safed, in Galilee, became a flourishing centre of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah.
The 19th century brought rapid change. The European powers, increasingly interested in a declining Ottoman Empire, opened consulates, took religious communities under their protection and funded institutions. Western pilgrims and archaeologists rediscovered the Holy Land. And towards the end of the century, the first immigrants of the Zionist movement began to arrive, in a land where an Arab majority lived with its own society, its own cities and its own rural life. The spark of what was to come had been lit.
Zionism was born in late 19th-century Europe as a Jewish national movement seeking a homeland for a scattered and persecuted people. The backdrop was persistent and sometimes violent antisemitism: the pogroms in the Russian Empire, which triggered mass migration, and the Dreyfus affair in France, which showed how strong anti-Jewish hatred was even in liberal Europe. In 1896, the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl published 'The Jewish State', and in 1897 he organised the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which set the goal of creating a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
Even before Herzl, Jewish immigrants had already begun arriving in Ottoman Palestine. Historians speak of successive waves of migration, the aliyot: the First Aliyah (1882-1903), made up of pioneers who founded farming colonies; and the Second (1904-1914), more ideological and socialist, which created the first kibbutzim — collective communes — and, in 1909, the city of Tel Aviv. Many of these immigrants came from the Russian Empire, fleeing persecution.
From the very beginning, this process had a conflictual flip side. The land was inhabited by an Arab majority that, for the most part, was not Zionist and gradually developed its own Palestinian national consciousness. Land purchases by Zionist organisations, sometimes from large absentee landowners, and the displacement of the Arab peasants who worked that land created early tensions. The two national narratives that would clash throughout the 20th century — one that saw a legitimate return to an ancestral land, the other that saw the arrival of settlers threatening its presence — began to take shape in these first decades.
During the First World War, the British Empire made promises that would turn out to be contradictory. On the one hand, in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (1915-1916), it encouraged the Arabs to rebel against the Ottomans with the expectation of a large independent Arab state. On the other, in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), it divided control of the region with France. And on 2 November 1917 it issued the Balfour Declaration, a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in which the British government viewed 'with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', with the proviso that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities'. That short and deliberately ambiguous text is one of the founding documents of the conflict: for Zionism it was historic backing; for Palestinian Arabs, it was a foreign power promising their land to another people.
After the war, the League of Nations gave Britain the Mandate for Palestine, which included the obligation to facilitate the Jewish national home. Under British administration, between 1920 and 1948, Jewish immigration grew strongly, especially in the 1930s as people fled Nazism in Europe. The Jewish population went from around 10% at the start of the Mandate to nearly a third towards the end.
The period was marked by growing violence among the three parties: the Jewish community (the Yishuv), the Palestinian Arab community and the mandatory power. There were outbreaks in 1920, 1921 and 1929, and above all the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, a Palestinian uprising against British rule and Jewish immigration that was harshly suppressed. In response, Britain restricted Jewish immigration with the White Paper of 1939, just when European Jews most needed a refuge from the advance of Nazism. The Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were murdered, decisively strengthened the case for a state of their own and made the status quo untenable. Exhausted, Britain handed the problem over to the newly created United Nations.
On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly approved Resolution 181, which recommended dividing Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem and its surroundings under a special international regime. The plan allocated about 55% of the territory to the Jewish state and around 42% to the Arab state, at a time when Arabs made up nearly two thirds of the population and owned most of the land. The vote was 33 in favour, 13 against and 10 abstentions. The Zionist leadership accepted the plan as the legal basis for its state; the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership rejected it, considering it unjust and refusing to see a territory with an Arab majority divided up.
The rejection immediately gave way to a civil war between the Jewish and Arab communities. On 14 May 1948, as the British withdrew, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel. The next day, the armies of several Arab countries — Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon — entered the territory, and the civil war became the first Arab-Israeli war. Israel held out and, when the war ended in 1949, controlled about 78% of the former Mandate's territory, considerably more than the UN plan had allocated to it.
The same event has two names and two memories. For Israel it is the War of Independence, the birth of the state after two thousand years and a refuge for Holocaust survivors. For Palestinians it is the Nakba, the 'catastrophe': during the war, somewhere between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinians — most of the Arab population of what would become Israel — fled or were expelled from their homes and were not allowed to return; hundreds of villages were emptied or destroyed. The causes of this exodus are the subject of intense historical debate: some historians emphasise deliberate expulsions and massacres — such as the one at Deir Yassin — while others point to wartime panic and calls by Arab leaders to leave; today's academic consensus recognises that there was both flight and expulsion, in proportions that are still debated. The fact that some historians have described the process as ethnic cleansing, while others reject the term, shows how much the events of 1948 remain contested ground. Meanwhile, in the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries emigrated or were expelled and settled in Israel.
The 1949 armistice did not bring peace, only ceasefire lines. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian administration, and the West Bank (of the Jordan), including East Jerusalem, came under Jordanian control. Israel and its Arab neighbours remained in a latent state of war that would erupt several times. In 1956, Israel joined Britain and France in the Suez Crisis against Egypt, but withdrew from Sinai under international pressure.
The decisive turning point was the Six-Day War, from 5 to 10 June 1967. Faced with Egyptian mobilisation, the closure of the Straits of Tiran and the rhetoric of annihilation from some Arab leaders, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground and gave it air superiority. In just six days, Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank with East Jerusalem, and the Syrian Golan Heights. Around 20,000 Arabs and some 800 Israelis are estimated to have died, and between 280,000 and 325,000 Palestinians and about 100,000 Syrians fled or were displaced. The war multiplied the territory under Israeli control several times over and placed more than a million Palestinians under military occupation: this was the birth of the question of the occupied territories, which dominates the conflict to this day. The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories in exchange for peace and recognition, in ambiguous wording that each side interprets differently.
In 1973, on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack to recover the territories lost in 1967. Israel suffered serious setbacks at first, but managed to turn the situation around after fierce fighting and a massive US airlift of supplies. The war ended without major territorial changes, but its consequences were enormous: it shook Israeli confidence, gave Egypt enough prestige to negotiate, and led, after Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem, to the Camp David Accords (1978) and the 1979 peace treaty, under which Israel returned Sinai to Egypt. It was the first peace between Israel and an Arab country, and it cost Sadat his life: he was assassinated by extremists in 1981.
In 1987 the First Intifada broke out, a popular Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories against Israeli occupation that combined protests, strikes and clashes, and changed how the world saw the conflict. In that climate, and after the end of the Cold War, a path to negotiation opened up. In 1993, after secret talks in Norway, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the Declaration of Principles, the first of the so-called Oslo Accords. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat shook hands at the White House in front of President Bill Clinton, in an image that went around the world.
The Oslo Accords established mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and created the Palestinian National Authority, which took over the government of parts of the West Bank and Gaza for a five-year transition period. The idea was that, at the end of that period, the hardest issues — the 'final status' — would be negotiated: borders, Israeli settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. Those core issues were deliberately left unresolved, and they never were resolved.
The Oslo process went off the rails. In 1995, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli Jewish extremist opposed to the accords. The expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — illegal according to most of the international community, though Israel disputes this — carried on. The 2000 Camp David Summit failed, and that same year the Second Intifada broke out, far more violent, with waves of Palestinian suicide bombings and harsh Israeli military operations. Israel built a separation barrier in the West Bank and in 2005 withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, where the Islamist movement Hamas took control in 2007, after which Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade. Several wars in Gaza have followed since. The causes of Oslo's failure are debated: each side blames the other, and historians also point to the ambiguities of the process itself and the weakness of its guarantees.
Twenty-first-century Israel is a country of sharp contrasts. It is a parliamentary democracy with an advanced economy, nicknamed the 'start-up nation' for its powerful tech sector, and a diverse society that brings together Jews of European origin (Ashkenazim), Jews from Arab countries and North Africa (Sephardim and Mizrahim), Ethiopians, Russians and many others, as well as a minority of Arab citizens making up around 20% of the population. It is both the world's only Jewish-majority state and a country where secular and religious currents live side by side, in tension, including a fast-growing ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community.
Domestic politics is shaped by deep debates: the weight of religion in the state, military service, the cost of living and, above all, the relationship with the Palestinians and the nature of the system itself. In recent years, judicial reform plans pushed by right-wing governments sparked some of the largest protests in the country's history. Israel also maintains a close strategic relationship with the United States and, since 2020, has normalised relations with several Arab countries through the so-called Abraham Accords.
But the underlying conflict remains unresolved and shapes everyday life. The West Bank remains under Israeli military occupation with steady settlement expansion; Gaza has been through devastating wars; and the status of Jerusalem, claimed as a capital by both Israel and the Palestinians, is still one of the hardest knots to untie. The two-state solution, long held up as the goal, is in deep crisis, while debate over alternatives grows. Presenting this present-day picture fairly means acknowledging hard realities for everyone: the trauma and search for security of Israelis after generations of wars and attacks, and the occupation, displacement and lack of a state of their own endured by Palestinians. It is a story that is still unfolding, and this text does not aim to deliver verdicts, but to offer the facts and the perspectives as honestly as possible.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Few cities in the world carry the symbolic weight of Jerusalem. For Judaism it is the city of David, site of the two Temples and the holiest place of the faith; the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall), the last remnant of the retaining wall of Herod's Temple Mount, is its most revered place of prayer. For Christianity it is where Jesus was crucified, buried and, according to the faith, rose again: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marks that spot and has drawn pilgrims since the 4th century. For Islam it is the third holy city, with the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Haram al-Sharif, the same space that Judaism reveres as the Temple Mount.
This overlapping of holy places on a tiny patch of land makes the Old City a unique mosaic, traditionally divided into four quarters — Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian — inside the walls that Suleiman the Magnificent had built in the 16th century. It is also the root of centuries of disputes, because the same square metre can be the most sacred place for two peoples at once.
According to archaeology, Jerusalem has been conquered, destroyed and rebuilt dozens of times over its history. Beneath its streets lie the layers of all its masters: the Jebusite and Davidic city in the so-called City of David, south of today's walls; the remains of Solomon's Temple, destroyed by Babylon in 586 BC; the Second Temple, enlarged by Herod and razed by Rome in AD 70; Hadrian's Roman Aelia Capitolina; the Byzantine churches; the Umayyad buildings of the Haram; and the Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman constructions.
Digging in Jerusalem is always delicate, because every find touches competing religious and national claims. Sites such as the Western Wall Tunnels or the excavations near the Temple Mount have caused tensions and even clashes. The city is, quite literally, an archive in stone where history is not in a museum but under your feet and constantly in dispute.
The status of Jerusalem is one of the hardest problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in international law. The 1947 UN partition plan envisaged a special international regime for the city (corpus separatum), which was never put into effect. After the 1948 war, the city was divided: West Jerusalem under Israeli control and East Jerusalem, with the Old City, under Jordanian control. In the 1967 war, Israel took East Jerusalem and later annexed it, a step most of the international community does not recognise.
Israel considers Jerusalem its 'eternal and undivided' capital; the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Most countries historically kept their embassies in Tel Aviv so as not to prejudge the city's status, although some, such as the United States in 2018, moved them to Jerusalem in a highly controversial decision. Presenting the question fairly means saying that both sides see the city as the core of their identity, and that dividing it is one of the knots no negotiation has managed to untie.
The Jerusalem area and the centre of the country hold some of the most history-laden places in the entire Levant. A few kilometres away, already in the West Bank, lie Bethlehem, with the Church of the Nativity, and other Christian pilgrimage sites. Around the city stretch the Judean Desert, with its ancient monasteries, and hills where battles have been fought since biblical times.
The region lives largely off this historical and religious weight: it draws pilgrims of all three religions and travellers from all over the world. But it is also a territory where the geography of the conflict is ever-present, with the line separating West Jerusalem from East Jerusalem and the West Bank drawing borders that are invisible yet very real in the daily lives of its inhabitants, Israelis and Palestinians alike.
In 1981, the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls were inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and the following year added to the List of World Heritage in Danger, a reflection of the tensions surrounding their conservation. Packed into less than one square kilometre are more than two hundred monuments: the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa, the Western Wall, synagogues, churches of almost every Christian denomination, madrasas and markets that have been going for centuries.
The nomination was submitted by Jordan, a detail that shows just how tangled up in the political dispute heritage management itself is. Walking the Old City — along the Via Dolorosa, through the souks, up to the rooftops where you can take in the whole scene — is one of the most intense experiences the region offers: the physical sense of being in a place where the history of much of humanity is concentrated, prayed over and, still today, fought over.
The Negev Desert covers roughly half of Israel's land area but is home to only a small share of its population. It's an arid and spectacular region, with canyons, unique erosion craters such as Makhtesh Ramon, and landscapes that range from yellow to red. For thousands of years it was a crossing point for caravans: the Nabataeans, the same people who built Petra, founded towns and routes here for the incense trade between Arabia and the Mediterranean, and their remains are now a World Heritage Site.
The Negev is also the historical homeland of the Bedouin, Arab peoples who were traditionally nomadic or semi-nomadic and whose way of life has changed radically in recent decades. Their relationship with the State of Israel is complex: there are recognised Bedouin towns and also 'unrecognised' villages whose legal status and access to services are in dispute. For the state's founder, David Ben-Gurion, making the Negev desert 'bloom' was almost a national mission; he himself retired to a kibbutz in the area, where he is buried.
Beersheba (Be'er Sheva) is the main city of the Negev and the gateway to the desert. Its name and history go back to the Bible: it's the 'Beersheba' of the patriarchs, linked to Abraham and Isaac, and its Tel (archaeological mound), with an ancient well system and Iron Age town planning, is one of the biblical sites declared a World Heritage Site.
In Ottoman times Beersheba was rebuilt as an administrative centre, and in the First World War it was the scene of a famous battle in 1917, when Australian cavalry took it from the Ottomans, a key episode in the British advance on Jerusalem. Today it's a modern, fast-growing city, home to a major university and an emerging tech hub, and the main urban centre of a region Israel is keen to develop to ease pressure on the crowded centre of the country.
On an isolated plateau beside the Dead Sea stands Masada, one of the most striking and symbolic sites in the region. In the 1st century BC, King Herod the Great built a luxurious palace-fortress there, with cisterns, baths and storerooms, taking advantage of how impregnable the site was. But Masada is famous above all for what happened at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War: according to the historian Flavius Josephus, a group of Jewish rebels took refuge there and held out against the Roman siege until, in 73 or 74 AD, with defeat imminent, they reportedly took their own lives together rather than be enslaved.
The story of Masada, passed down by a single ancient source, became a powerful Israeli national symbol of resistance to the end in the 20th century. That's why some historiographical caution is in order: archaeologists have confirmed the fortress and the siege, but some question the details of the mass suicide as Josephus told it. Either way, Masada, a World Heritage Site since 2001, remains a place of extraordinary power, especially at dawn, when the sun rises over the desert and the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea is one of the most unusual places on the planet: a hypersaline lake more than 430 metres below sea level, the lowest point on dry land on the Earth's surface. Its extremely high salt concentration means your body floats effortlessly and almost no organisms can live in it, hence its name. Its mud and minerals have been used for therapeutic and cosmetic purposes since Antiquity; Herod and Cleopatra already prized the area.
Its shores were the setting for major discoveries in the history of religion: in the caves of Qumran, near the sea, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found from 1947 onwards, the oldest known biblical and sectarian texts, more than two thousand years old. Today the Dead Sea faces a serious problem: its level drops by several metres every year, because the waters of the Jordan that feed it are diverted for human and agricultural use throughout the basin. Its shrinking, shared by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians, is one of the region's great environmental challenges.
In the middle of all that dryness, the desert hides some surprising oases. Ein Gedi, beside the Dead Sea, is a permanent spring surrounded by waterfalls and greenery, already mentioned in the Bible as a refuge of King David and today a nature reserve with ibex and hyraxes. For thousands of years these oases were vital water points for travellers and herds in a land where a spring could make the difference between life and death.
At the far south, where the country narrows to a single point on the Red Sea, lies Eilat, Israel's only port on that sea and its big beach resort. Its access to the Red Sea had huge strategic value: the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, which lead to Eilat, was one of the triggers of the 1967 war. Today Eilat lives off tourism, year-round sunshine and its coral reefs, which are among the northernmost in the world and a paradise for diving. From its beaches you can see the coasts of four countries at once (Israel, Jordan, Egypt and, in the distance, Saudi Arabia), an image that sums up the crossroads position of this whole territory.
Long before Tel Aviv existed, this coast was home to Jaffa (Yafo), one of the oldest natural harbours in the Mediterranean, with more than three thousand years of documented history. It appears in Egyptian sources, in the Bible — the cedars of Lebanon for Solomon's Temple are said to have come in through here, and the prophet Jonah to have set sail from its port — and in Greek mythology, which placed here the rock where Perseus rescued Andromeda. Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders and Ottomans all controlled its port.
For centuries, Jaffa was the gateway for pilgrims and goods into the Holy Land. In the Ottoman period it was a prosperous Arab city famous for its oranges, the 'Jaffa' variety exported across much of Europe. In 1948 it saw heavy fighting and most of its Arab population fled or was expelled. Today its restored stone alleyways, art galleries and flea market sit alongside a mixed Jewish and Arab community, administratively part of Tel Aviv.
Tel Aviv was born in 1909, when a group of Jewish families bought sand dunes north of Jaffa to found a new neighbourhood, Ahuzat Bayit, which soon took the name Tel Aviv ('hill of spring'). It was conceived as the first modern Hebrew city — planned, secular and Hebrew-speaking — a symbol of the Zionist project of building a new urban life. It grew rapidly with the waves of immigration, especially in the 1930s with the arrival of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.
It was in Tel Aviv that David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, in a building that is now a museum. The city became the economic, cultural and nightlife heart of the country: the secular, cosmopolitan counterpoint to religious, historic Jerusalem. Today it is a Mediterranean metropolis of beaches, skyscrapers, tech and nightlife, often described as a 'bubble' because of how removed it feels from the tensions that mark the rest of the country.
One of Tel Aviv's most distinctive features is its architecture. In the 1930s and 1940s, European-trained Jewish architects — many from the German Bauhaus school, fleeing Nazism — put up an extraordinary collection of buildings in the Modern or International Style: clean lines, curved balconies, white façades designed for the Mediterranean climate. It is the largest collection of buildings in this style anywhere in the world, with more than four thousand of them.
In 2003, UNESCO inscribed this 'White City of Tel Aviv' as a World Heritage Site, recognising it as an outstanding example of modern urban planning and architecture adapted to a local context. Walking its tree-lined streets is like reading the story of a young city that wanted, from birth, to be a statement of modernity: avant-garde Europe transplanted to the sands of the eastern Mediterranean by people escaping Europe's catastrophe.
Further north along the coast lie the ruins of Caesarea Maritima, one of the great works of Antiquity in this land. King Herod the Great built it between 22 and 10 BC and dedicated it to the emperor Augustus (Caesar). Herod raised a monumental artificial harbour out of nothing, with huge blocks of hydraulic concrete sunk underwater, along with a theatre, a hippodrome, temples and aqueducts. For centuries Caesarea was the Roman administrative capital of the province of Judaea, seat of the prefects and procurators, among them Pontius Pilate, whose name turned up carved on a stone found at the site.
Caesarea also played a key role in early Christianity — according to the Acts of the Apostles, this is where the apostle Peter baptised the first Gentile convert — and was a Christian intellectual centre in Byzantine times. Later, the Crusaders fortified it with the walls you can still see. Today it is an archaeological park where the restored Roman theatre still hosts concerts facing the sea, and the aqueduct stands out against the beach: a perfect summary of the many layers of this coast.
The narrow plain running along the Mediterranean, from Gaza to Mount Carmel, has always been the region's main artery of communication and wealth: the Via Maris, the great trade route linking Egypt with Mesopotamia, passed through here, and armies and caravans moved along it for millennia. It is the flattest, most fertile and most habitable area, which is why it is home to most of Israel's population and economy today.
In this coastal strip, around Tel Aviv, lies the so-called Gush Dan, the large conurbation where nearly half of all Israelis live and where the country's tech and financial heart beats. The 'start-up nation' has its epicentre here. This is the most outward-looking Israel, facing the Mediterranean and the West, built on centuries of port and trading history that began with the Phoenicians and Romans and carries on with today's glass towers.
The hilly region of Galilee, in the north, is greener and rainier than the rest of the country, and carries enormous religious weight: it is the landscape of Jesus's life. He spent his childhood in Nazareth, where the Basilica of the Annunciation stands over the spot where, according to Christian tradition, the angel Gabriel announced to Mary the birth of Jesus. Much of his preaching and many of his miracles are set on the shores of the Sea of Galilee — the freshwater lake where the Jordan widens out: Capernaum, the Mount of Beatitudes, Tabgha.
That is why Galilee, along with Jerusalem and Bethlehem, is one of the great destinations of Christian pilgrimage, with churches marking the Gospel sites around the lake. Nazareth is today the largest Arab city in Israel, with a Muslim majority and a significant Christian minority, a reminder of the demographic complexity of this land: the landscape of early Christianity is home to a diverse and very contemporary society.
Galilee also holds a central place in Jewish history. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135, the centre of Jewish life moved north, to Galilee. The Sanhedrin, the highest religious body, settled here, and in cities such as Sepphoris and Tiberias the sages who compiled the Mishnah and the Jerusalem Talmud, founding texts of rabbinic Judaism, did their work. The region's ancient synagogues, with their mosaics, bear witness to that continued presence.
Centuries later, in the 16th century, the town of Safed (Tzfat), in the mountains of Galilee, became the great world centre of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, with figures such as Isaac Luria. That continuity, from late Antiquity to Renaissance mysticism, makes Galilee one of the historical cradles of religious Judaism. It's a less well-known fact than its Christian fame, but just as important.
On the northern coast, Acre (Akko) is one of the most fascinating cities in the region. A port since Antiquity, it reached its peak during the Crusades: after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, it became the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and its main port, and the base of the military orders of the Hospitallers, Templars and Teutonic Knights. When Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291, the Crusader presence in the Holy Land came to an end.
What makes Acre remarkable is that the later Ottoman city was built on top of the Crusader one, preserving it almost intact underground: today you can walk through the knights' halls, the refectories and the medieval tunnels beneath the walled Ottoman city. Because of this double city, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 2001. In 1799 Acre also held out against Napoleon's siege, which failed before its walls. Today it's a city with a mixed population and an Old City with an Arab majority.
Haifa, the big city of the north, spreads across the slopes of Mount Carmel with views over the Mediterranean. It has been an important port since Ottoman times, and especially under the British Mandate, which built its modern port and linked it by rail. Today it's the main industrial and port hub of northern Israel and home to a leading technical university, the Technion.
Haifa is known as one of the cities where the country's different communities live together best: Jews and Arabs share neighbourhoods and daily life with less tension than elsewhere. Its most famous feature is the Bahá'í Gardens, spectacular landscaped terraces that run down the hillside and surround the Shrine of the Báb, one of the holiest sites of the Bahá'í faith, whose world administrative and spiritual centre is in Haifa and Acre. For these gardens and shrines, UNESCO inscribed them as a World Heritage Site in 2008.
The north is a strategic border region. It borders Lebanon and Syria, and close by are the Golan Heights, the plateau Israel took from Syria in the 1967 war and annexed in 1981, a move that is not recognised internationally. The wars and tensions with Lebanon, including those of 1982 and 2006, made Galilee a rear area and sometimes a front line, and many of its towns know their bomb shelters well.
The north is also the country's great water reservoir. For decades the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) was Israel's main source of fresh water, and it's the starting point of the National Water Carrier, which takes water to the centre and south. In a land where water has always been scarce and a source of dispute, including with neighbours over sharing the waters of the Jordan, this green, rainy north is worth far more than its beauty: it is, quite literally, a matter of survival.
Hardly anything that happened to Israel happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
