When did the Israeli-Palestinian conflict start?

The dated record gives no single start date, and its earliest official statement of the conflict comes from Britain’s Palestine Royal Commission. In a report signed on 22 June 1937, the Commission described “an irrepressible conflict” between “two national communities” and traced it to obligations Britain had undertaken “some twenty years ago.” Israel’s founding Declaration of 14 May 1948 and the legal records built after it fix a break at 29 November 1947. Gershon Shafir’s 1989 Cambridge University Press study places the origins in 1882, so the earliest and latest of these dates sit 66 years apart.

Key Findings

• Britain’s Palestine Royal Commission wrote in 1937 that “an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities.” It found that the obligations Britain undertook “some twenty years ago” had “proved irreconcilable” (Palestine Royal Commission, 1937, Chapter XX).
• The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 is a single sentence of 67 words. It pairs “a national home for the Jewish people” with a safeguard for “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” (His Majesty’s Government, 1917).
• Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the state’s official statistics agency, counts the population from 806,000 at the establishment of the State in 1948. Its preliminary estimate for April 2026 is 10.244 million (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026).
• Gershon Shafir’s 1989 study dates the origins of the conflict to 1882, the year the First Aliyah began, and runs them to 1914 (Shafir, 1989).
• Israel’s absentee-property definition and the UN Conciliation Commission’s 1951 property valuation both use 29 November 1947 as their cut-off date (Forman and Kedar, 2004; United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961).

When did an official inquiry first describe a national conflict?

Britain’s Palestine Royal Commission described a national conflict in a report signed on 22 June 1937 and presented to Parliament in July 1937. It wrote: “An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country” (Chapter XX, paragraph 5). Earl Peel chaired the Commission, and the British government appointed it to review Britain’s own conduct as the Mandatory power.

The same chapter places the source of the conflict about two decades before the Commission sat. Paragraph 17 reads in full: “Nor do we suggest that the obligations Britain undertook towards the Arabs and the Jews some twenty years ago have lost in moral or legal weight through what has happened since. The trouble is that they have proved irreconcilable; and, as far ahead as we can see, they must continue to conflict. To put it in one sentence, we cannot, in Palestine as it now is, both concede the Arab claim to self-government and secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home.”

The report therefore carries two dates at once. One is the year an official British record named the dispute as a conflict between two national communities. The other is the period, “some twenty years” before 1937, that the Commission treated as the origin of the incompatible undertakings. A later section of this report examines the Balfour letter of 2 November 1917, which falls inside that window.

The Commission also described the administration caught between the two undertakings. In Chapter V, paragraph 47, it called the Government of Palestine one “poised as it is above two irreconcilable communities, compelled to follow a path between them marked out by an elaborate, yet not very lucid, legal instrument.” The instrument in question is the Mandate for Palestine.

The report is a British government-commissioned finding. It is not a neutral third-party one: the Mandatory power commissioned a review of its own obligations, and the conclusions are that review’s conclusions. The report numbers its chapters and paragraphs, and those numbers are cited here because page numbering differs across editions and scans. The Commission signed the report on 22 June 1937, and the Secretary of State for the Colonies presented it to Parliament in July 1937. Both dates are correct and refer to different events.

A wider reading of these dated instruments appears in the Institute’s report on the origins of the conflict.

Why do most short answers start the conflict in 1948?

Israel’s Provisional Government declared “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL” on 14 May 1948. Israel’s official records count the state, its institutions and its statistics from that day. The 1947 to 1948 sequence is when the dispute first involved a sovereign state, and that is the sense in which a 1948 start is directionally accurate.

The 37 members of the People’s Council signed the Declaration, with David Ben-Gurion signing first. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics begins its population series at the same point. It records a population of 806,000 at the establishment of the State and a preliminary 10.244 million on the eve of the 78th Independence Day, current to 22 April 2026, which the Bureau describes as “more than 12.5 times” the 1948 figure. The 2026 estimate rests on the 2022 census. From 2023 onward the series also includes foreigners staying in Israel, so the series is not continuous with earlier years.

The Declaration itself looks back well before 1948. Its recitals set out a chain of events: the First Zionist Congress of 1897, convened by Theodor Herzl; the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917; the League of Nations Mandate; and the UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947. The Declaration calls the recognition given by that resolution one that “is irrevocable.” These recitals are the Declaration’s own historical narrative, not independent findings. The Declaration does not give a date for the start of a conflict.

The Declaration also addresses the Arab population inside the new state. In the Knesset’s published English text, it appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”

Which scholars date the conflict’s origins to 1882?

Gershon Shafir’s 1989 Cambridge University Press study, “Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914,” dates the conflict’s origins to 1882. That is the year the First Aliyah, the first wave of Jewish agricultural settlement, began, and the study runs to the eve of the First World War. The 1882 start appears in the book’s title.

The University of California Press reissued the book in an updated edition in 1996. Its description says Shafir “challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise.” The book is interpretive historical sociology, not measurement. It contributes a periodization and a framing built on land and labour, and no rate or count is drawn from it.

Yuval Ben-Bassat’s peer-reviewed 2009 article in the Journal of Palestine Studies covers the same years from the ground level. It studies the six Judean colonies southeast of Jaffa from 1882 to 1903. The article draws on Ottoman records, the Rothschild Bank Archive and the local archives of five of the six colonies, including “logbooks, personal letters, receipts, contracts, maps, and pictures.” Ben-Bassat studies encounters, not the start date of a conflict.

His findings on violence are qualitative: “Massive clashes with neighboring Arab villagers were not common, but they did occur from time to time in several of the colonies (Gederah, Rehovot, and Qastina), culminating in injuries and even deaths.” He adds: “The immediate causes were generally disputes over property boundaries and grazing.” On labour, he writes that economic ties “predominantly revolved around the employment of low-wage day workers, especially during the high agricultural seasons,” a situation that “according to some indications, created pockets of resentment among the Arab workers.”

The article records a shift toward exclusion at the end of the period. In 1903 Gederah’s managing committee decided to stop leasing land to Arabs, and Rehovot and Rishon le-Zion approved similar decisions around the same time. Ben-Bassat reports the colonists’ stated reason as a claim, not an established fact: “the widespread theft and damage to property in the colonies claimed to have been committed by the Arab rural population.” The Institute’s report on early Zionist and Palestinian contact covers these colony records further.

Why do some accounts begin with the 1897 Zionist Congress?

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, issued in 1948, names the First Zionist Congress of 1897, convened by Theodor Herzl, in its historical recitals. That is the earliest year the recitals date. The date marks the organisation of political Zionism as a movement, and the Declaration presents it as the first link in the chain that led to the state.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has since placed the movement’s roots earlier. In a post on 31 July 2026, @IsraelMFA, the official account of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a party to the conflict, wrote: “The roots of modern Zionism reach back well before the First Zionist Congress of 1897.” The post named Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai as an early pioneer who “preached the return of the Jewish people to Zion decades before Theodor Herzl.” It added that Herzl’s grandfather, Shimon Leib Herzl (1797 to 1879), “served in Alkalai’s synagogue in Zemun and was part of that formative environment.” This is the ministry’s own published statement.

Both texts date a political movement, not a conflict. The Declaration counts from 1897 because it describes the movement that produced the state. The 2026 post moves that movement’s roots back by decades but does not address when a dispute with the Arab population began.

The two dates sit on either side of other records. Shafir’s 1882 start comes 15 years before the Congress, and the Judean colonies that Ben-Bassat studies were founded and recording disputes over boundaries and grazing before 1897. By 1917 the organised movement was a named addressee in British policy: Balfour’s letter closed, “I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”

The choice between 1882 and 1897 therefore reflects what is being dated. The first wave of agricultural settlement began in 1882, according to Shafir, while the political organisation dates to 1897, according to the Declaration’s own narrative.

What did Britain pledge each community in November 1917?

His Majesty’s Government’s declaration of 2 November 1917, sent by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, is a single sentence of 67 words that makes two undertakings. It supports “a national home for the Jewish people” and safeguards “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The 1937 Commission traced the conflict to these paired obligations, made roughly twenty years before it reported.

The operative sentence reads in full: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” It says “a national home,” not “a state.” The covering letter describes it as a declaration “submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.”

The letter is a statement of government policy, not a treaty. It gained legal force through the Mandate for Palestine, approved by the Council of the League of Nations in 1922. The Mandate’s preamble made the Mandatory “responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917.” Article 2 assigned it both “the establishment of the Jewish national home” and “safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.” Article 4 provided that “an appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body” to advise the Administration.

The Mandate restated the letter in different words, and the two texts are quoted separately below.

The dual undertaking in this sentence is what the Royal Commission found in 1937 had “proved irreconcilable.”

Which outbreak of violence did Britain’s 1936 inquiry set out to explain?

Britain’s Royal Warrant of 7 August 1936 directed the Palestine Royal Commission “to ascertain the underlying causes of the disturbances that broke out in Palestine in April 1936.” The April 1936 outbreak is the dated violence that an official British record identifies as the reason for the inquiry. The Commission’s 1937 report is the result of that inquiry.

The Royal Warrant also directed the Commission to examine how the Mandate was being implemented “in relation to Britain’s obligations towards the Arabs and the Jews respectively,” and to recommend remedies. The Commission held all its formal sessions in Jerusalem from November 1936. It heard 60 witnesses at 30 public sessions and 53 witnesses at 40 private sessions.

The Commission did not treat April 1936 as the start of the conflict. Its mandate was to find causes underlying the outbreak, and its answer, quoted in the first section, pointed back to the obligations of about 1917. In this record the 1936 violence is the occasion for the inquiry, and the twenty-year-old undertakings are its diagnosis.

The remedy it proposed followed from that diagnosis. Chapter XXII, paragraph 1 reads: “We return, then, to Partition as the only method we are able to propose for dealing with the root of the trouble.” The close of Chapter XX reads: “Partition seems to offer at least a chance of ultimate peace. We can see none in any other plan.” The plan called for treaties under which “two sovereign independent States would be established,” one Arab and one Jewish, alongside a new Mandate for the Holy Places.

The partition plan was a recommendation and was never enacted. It records what a British government-commissioned inquiry proposed in 1937, not what Britain did.

Why do the 1948 legal records count from November 1947?

Israel’s absentee-property law defined an absentee as anyone who, “on or after 29 November 1947 (the date of the United Nations General Assembly resolution to partition Palestine),” met its tests, according to Forman and Kedar’s peer-reviewed 2004 legal history. That date falls five and a half months before the 14 May 1948 Declaration. Israel’s land law therefore set its cut-off at the partition vote, not at the founding of the state.

Forman and Kedar place this definition in the 1948 Absentee Property Regulations. The Absentee Property Law, enacted by the Knesset in March 1950, replaced those regulations and carried the definition forward. The definition covered anyone who, from that date, had been “(a) a citizen or subject of one of the Arab countries at war with Israel; (b) in any of these countries, or in any part of Palestine outside the jurisdiction of the regulations; or (c) a citizen of Palestine who abandoned his or her normal place of residence.”

The authors describe the result: “practically no Jewish Israelis, but tens of thousands of Arab Israeli citizens, were classified as absentees, assuming the paradoxical legal identity of ‘present absentee’.” A second statute, the Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law of July 1950, completed the transfer mechanism. Under it, the Custodian of Absentee Property could sell only to the Development Authority, and the Authority could sell only to the state and the Jewish National Fund.

A UN body chose the same date for a different reason. The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine’s working paper A/AC.25/W/81/Rev.2, dated 2 October 1961, reports a valuation its Refugee Office made in September 1951. According to the paper, 29 November 1947 “was chosen because it was the last date before the exodus of refugees when land values in Palestine were reasonably stable.” The Office rejected the Custodian’s records as a basis for its estimate, because it would be “inappropriate to assess compensation entirely on the basis of information furnished by an interested party.” It described its own figures as estimates that “must inevitably be regarded as approximate ones.”

The two records serve different purposes but share one date. In Israel’s legislation, 29 November 1947 marks the point after which a person’s location or nationality determined the status of their property. In the Commission’s valuation, it marks the last stable land market before displacement. Both treat the partition resolution, not the Declaration, as the dividing line. The Institute’s report on the absentee law covers the property record in more detail.

Methodology and limitations

The evidence comes from three source types:

• Official and primary records. These are the Palestine Royal Commission’s report (Command Paper Cmd. 5479, 1937); the Balfour letter of 2 November 1917 and the Mandate for Palestine, both read in the Avalon Project transcription at Yale Law School; the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read in the Knesset’s English text; the Central Bureau of Statistics’ 2026 Independence Day release; and the UN Conciliation Commission’s 1961 working paper.
• Peer-reviewed research. These are Ben-Bassat (2009) and Forman and Kedar (2004).
• Scholarly book. This is Shafir (1989), which is interpretive scholarship. The details cited here are verified from the publisher’s records and three journal reviews published from 1990 to 1992, not from the book’s own pages, so no passage of the book is quoted.

One further source is a party’s own published statement: the @IsraelMFA post of 31 July 2026, labelled as the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s statement.

The Royal Commission is cited by chapter and paragraph. Its report carries two correct dates: it was signed on 22 June 1937 and presented to Parliament in July 1937.

The Declaration’s two official English texts differ on one word. The Knesset’s text reads “citizens” where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ text reads “inhabitants,” and both are translations of the Hebrew original. The Central Bureau of Statistics’ 2026 figures are preliminary. They rest on the 2022 census, and the series is not continuous before and after 2023.

The question of when the conflict started is a question of periodization, and the records disagree because each one dates a different event: a wave of settlement, a political congress, a government undertaking, an outbreak of violence, a legal cut-off, and a declaration of statehood. Of these records, only the Royal Commission’s report addresses the conflict’s origin directly, and it does so by reference to obligations made “some twenty years ago” rather than by naming a date.

Conclusion

The dated record does not settle on one starting point. A British government-commissioned inquiry named a conflict between “two national communities” in 1937. That inquiry was set up to explain the disturbances of April 1936, and it traced their causes to obligations made about twenty years earlier. Its answer pointed back to the period of the 67-word letter of 2 November 1917, which promised a national home to one people and protected the civil and religious rights of another in the same sentence.

On either side of that letter, the record moves the line in both directions. Shafir dates the origins to the settlements of 1882, and Ben-Bassat’s colony logbooks from those years document disputes over boundaries and grazing. Israel’s Declaration begins its own account with the Congress of 1897, and the Foreign Ministry’s 2026 post pushes the movement’s roots further back. Israel’s land law and a UN commission both drew their line at 29 November 1947. The state, and the population series that begins at 806,000, start on 14 May 1948. Each of these dates is fixed in a document, and each document marks a different event.

That leaves the question of what counts as a beginning. It could be the first dispute recorded in a colony logbook, the first government sentence that bound two peoples’ futures to one territory, or the first official page that called the result a conflict. The date a society chooses determines which grievance comes first in the account it tells.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much Jewish immigration did the Peel Commission recommend?

The Palestine Royal Commission recommended a “political high level” of Jewish immigration “fixed for the next five years at 12,000 per annum” (Chapter X, paragraph 97). Like the partition plan, this was a recommendation in a British government-commissioned report.

What else did the 1937 partition plan propose?

The Palestine Royal Commission proposed ending the Mandate, replacing it “by a Treaty System in accordance with the precedent set in Iraq and Syria,” and creating a new Mandate for the Holy Places (Chapter XXII, paragraphs 4 to 6). It also recommended a grant of £2,000,000 to the proposed Arab State (Chapter XXII, paragraph 27).

How many immigrants has Israel received since 1948?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded more than 3.5 million immigrants between 1948 and 2026. About 1.68 million of them, or 47.8%, arrived from 1990 onward (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026). A further 158,000 or so immigrating citizens have arrived since 1970.

How much land was Jewish-owned by 1948?

Forman and Kedar (2004) report that 1.5 million of Mandate Palestine’s 26.3 million dunams were Jewish-owned by 1948. Israel’s borders then enclosed 20.6 million dunams, of which about 13.5%, or 2.8 million dunams, was under formal state or Jewish ownership.

How much land did the UN Conciliation Commission estimate was abandoned?

The Conciliation Commission’s Refugee Office estimated in September 1951 that 16,324 square kilometres of abandoned land had passed into Jewish hands, valued at £P100 million, with 4,574 square kilometres of it cultivable (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961). The figure measures abandoned land, not land that passed through Israel’s absentee-property system.

Who sold the land on which the Judean colonies were built?

Ben-Bassat (2009) writes that “about a dozen absentee landlords owned property in the region,” and that these landlords, “in many cases Christians from nearby Jaffa,” sold the colonists much of the land on which settlement there took place.

Does Israel’s 1948 Declaration promise equal rights?

In the Knesset’s English text, the Declaration says the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex” (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ English text reads “all its inhabitants” in the same clause.

What role did the Mandate give a Jewish agency?

Article 4 of the Mandate for Palestine provided that “an appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine” (His Majesty’s Government, 1917, Mandate text). No equivalent article named an Arab body.

Sources

• Ben-Bassat, Yuval, 2009. Proto-Zionist-Arab Encounters in Late Nineteenth-Century Palestine: Socioregional Dimensions. Journal of Palestine Studies 38(2), 42 to 63. DOI 10.1525/jps.2009.38.2.42. Peer-reviewed.
• Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026. Israel’s Independence Day 2026. Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2026/117/11_26_117e.pdf. Official record (preliminary estimates).
• Forman, Geremy, and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, 2004. From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(6), 809 to 830. DOI 10.1068/d402. Peer-reviewed.
• His Majesty’s Government, 1917. The Balfour Declaration, letter of 2 November 1917, and its restatement in the Mandate for Palestine (1922). Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp and https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda.asp. Primary and official record.
• IsraelMFA (@IsraelMFA), 2026. Post of 31 July 2026. X. https://x.com/IsraelMFA/status/2083185967150563809. A party’s own statement (Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
• Palestine Royal Commission, 1937. Report of the Palestine Royal Commission (Cmd. 5479). His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London. https://archive.org/details/palestine-royal-commission-report. Official record (government-commissioned review).
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, Tel Aviv; Knesset English text at main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Primary and official record.
• Shafir, Gershon, 1989. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Middle East Library 20; reissued University of California Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0521353007. Scholarly book.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961. Historical Survey of Efforts to Secure the Implementation of Paragraph 11 of General Assembly Resolution 194 (III): Question of compensation. A/AC.25/W/81/Rev.2. https://unispal.un.org/pdfs/3E61557F8DE6781A052565910073E819.pdf. Official record (intergovernmental commission working paper).