History of the Levant

Long before it had any of the names we argue over today, this narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River was known as Canaan. Through the Bronze and Iron Ages it was home to a patchwork of Canaanite peoples, living in walled towns and trading with the great powers on either side—Egypt to the south, Mesopotamia to the east.

By the Iron Age, archaeological and historical records point to two kingdoms in the highlands: the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. These were small states by the standards of the age, but their story would echo far beyond their size.

Sitting on the crossroads between continents made the region strategically priceless—and permanently vulnerable. Whoever ruled Egypt or Mesopotamia eventually wanted to rule the road between them.

The fall of Judah and the destruction of the First Temple was a catastrophe that would be remembered for millennia. The exile to Babylon became a defining event in Jewish memory—and, as it turned out, not the end of the story.

In 539 BCE the Achaemenid Persian Empire conquered Babylon, and its king Cyrus the Great did something unusual for a conqueror: he let exiled peoples go home. His decree allowed the Judeans to return to their land and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The Second Temple period had begun.

Persia's dominance did not last forever. In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great swept through the region, folding it into the Hellenistic world and bringing Greek language, cities, and culture in his wake.

Greek rule eventually collided with local religious life. Between 167 and 160 BCE, the Maccabean Revolt broke out against Hellenistic rulers who had interfered with Jewish worship. The revolt succeeded, and out of it came an independent Jewish state: the Hasmonean dynasty.

In 63 BCE the Roman Republic arrived. Judea first became a client kingdom and then, in time, a Roman province—governed from afar by an empire that tolerated local customs only so long as they did not threaten Roman order.

They often did. In 66 CE the First Jewish–Roman War erupted, and in 70 CE Roman forces stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. The loss reshaped Judaism permanently, shifting its center from Temple sacrifice to study, prayer, and law.

Rebellion flared again. The Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE was crushed, and in its aftermath the Roman Empire officially renamed the province of Judea as Syria Palaestina—the name from which “Palestine” descends.

When the Roman Empire split, the Levant passed in 390 CE to the Eastern Roman—Byzantine—Empire, and became increasingly Christian. For over two centuries it was a land of churches, pilgrims, and monasteries.

Then, in 636 CE, the Muslim Arab armies of the Rashidun Caliphate captured the region from Byzantium. It was the start of more than a thousand years during which the land would be governed, almost without interruption, by Muslim empires.

For centuries Jerusalem was a shared, layered city—until armies from far to the west decided it should be theirs.

In 1099 CE the armies of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Christian state carved out of the Levant by European knights. It was a bloody conquest and a fragile one.

In 1187 CE, Saladin—founder of the Ayyubid dynasty—retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders, a victory that made him one of the most celebrated figures in Islamic history and a byword, even among his enemies, for chivalry.

From 1260 to 1516 the region was ruled by the Mamluk Sultanate, based in Egypt—soldiers-turned-rulers who fended off both remaining Crusaders and the invading Mongols and held the Levant for two and a half centuries.

In 1516 the Ottoman Empire conquered the region and held it, almost continuously, for exactly 400 years. Under Ottoman administration the land was a quiet, mostly rural corner of a vast empire—home to a predominantly Arab Muslim population, alongside long-established Christian and Jewish communities.

Then, in the late 19th century, two modern political movements began to stir—far apart, but on a collision course.

Both movements were responding to the same 19th-century forces—the rise of the nation-state, the decline of empires—but each envisioned a very different future for the same land.

The First World War tore the Ottoman Empire apart, and the Levant fell within Britain's reach. In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”—while stipulating that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities.

By 1917–1918 British forces had defeated the Ottomans and occupied the region. In 1922–1923 the League of Nations formally granted Britain the Mandate for Palestine.

The Mandate years, through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, brought significant Jewish immigration, economic development—and escalating violence. Arab and Jewish communities clashed with growing frequency, and both groups at various points rose up against British rule itself.

By 1947 Britain had had enough. It announced its intention to end the Mandate and referred the question of Palestine to the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending that Mandatory Palestine be partitioned into independent Arab and Jewish states, with an international regime for Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League rejected it. Civil conflict between Arab and Jewish forces broke out almost immediately.

During the 1947–1949 conflict, an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes—an event Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”). That a mass displacement occurred is not in dispute. Why it occurred is one of the most intensely debated questions in modern history.

The fighting ended in 1949 with armistice agreements that established the “Green Line.” Israel controlled the territory within these lines. Egypt militarily occupied the Gaza Strip. Transjordan occupied—and then annexed—the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The upheaval ran in more than one direction. During and after 1948, and over the following decades, hundreds of thousands of Jews living across Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa left, fled, or were expelled. Most relocated to Israel.

In 1964 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded, giving Palestinian nationalism a formal political and armed body.

Three years later came the war that redrew the map. In 1967, after a period of escalating tensions, the Six-Day War broke out between Israel and neighboring Arab states. In under a week Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Some of those lines were later renegotiated. In 1979 Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, and as a condition Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. In 1994 Israel and Jordan signed their own formal peace treaty.

The early 1990s brought the closest thing to a framework for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In 1993 Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo I Accord, producing mutual recognition and creating the Palestinian Authority, granted limited self-governance over parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In 2006 Palestinian legislative elections gave Hamas a majority in the Palestinian Parliament. The following year, after severe internal armed conflict between the two major Palestinian factions, Hamas took full control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah in 2007.

That split still defines Palestinian governance: Hamas administering the Gaza Strip, and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority holding limited administrative control in parts of the West Bank.

In response to Hamas's takeover, Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza from 2007 onward, sharply restricting the movement of goods and people across its land, air, and sea borders. A series of armed conflicts followed.

Then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas and allied armed groups launched a surprise, coordinated assault from Gaza into southern Israel. Approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed and roughly 240 people were taken hostage into Gaza. Israel declared war and launched a comprehensive aerial and ground campaign in the Gaza Strip that continues into the present.

Three thousand years after the first Canaanite towns, the same narrow land between the river and the sea remains one of the most fought-over places on Earth. This page ends where the history is still being written—deliberately, because the story is not over, and the honest historian's job here is to mark the facts and leave the verdict to time and evidence.