The history of Israel covers an area of the Southern Levant also known as Canaan, Palestine or the Holy Land, which is the geographical location of the modern states of Israel and Palestine. From a prehistory as part of the critical Levantine corridor, which witnessed waves of early humans out of Africa, to the emergence of Natufian culture c. 10th millennium BCE, the region entered the Bronze Age c. 2,000 BCE with the development of Canaanite civilization, before being vassalized by Egypt in the Late Bronze Age. In the Iron Age, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were established, entities that were central to the origins of the Jewish and Samaritan peoples as well as the Abrahamic faith tradition. This has given rise to Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, Islam, Druzism, Baha'ism, and a variety of other religious movements. Throughout the course of human history, the Land of Israel has seen many conflicts and come under the sway or control of various polities and, as a result, it has historically hosted a wide variety of ethnic groups.
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
Avraham Gabriel "Boolie" Yehoshua was an Israeli novelist, essayist, and playwright. The New York Times called him the "Israeli Faulkner". Underlying themes in Yehoshua's work are Jewish identity, the tense relations with non-Jews, the conflict between the older and younger generations, and the clash between religion and politics.
The coastal road massacre occurred on 11 March 1978, when Palestinian militants hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murdered its occupants; 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed as a result of the attack while 76 more were wounded. The attack was planned by the influential Palestinian militant leader Khalil al-Wazir and carried out by Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist party co-founded by al-Wazir and Yasser Arafat in 1959. The initial plan of the militants was to seize a luxury hotel in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and take tourists and foreign ambassadors hostage to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
Sami Michael was an Israeli author, having migrated from Iraq to Israel at the age of 23. From 2001, Michael was the President of The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).
Mati Shemoelof, is an Israeli author, poet, editor, journalist and activist. His first short story collection, "Remnants of the Cursed Book", won the 2015 award for Best Book of the Year of "Yekum Tarbut" website. "Bagdad - Haifa - Berlin" - His first Bi-Lingual collection of poems was published in Germany by Aphorisma Verlag.
Dan Schueftan is an Israeli academic and chairman of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. He also serves as a senior lecturer at Haifa University's School of Political Sciences. He has taught at the Israel Defense Force's National Security College and the IDF's Command and Staff College.
Neo-Zionism is a far-right, ultranationalistic, and religious ideology that appeared in Israel following the Six-Day War in 1967 and the capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Neo-Zionists consider these lands part of Israel and advocate their settlement by Israeli Jews. Some advocate the transfer of Arabs not only from these areas but also from within the Green Line.
Sasson Somekh was an Israeli academic, writer and translator. He was professor emeritus of Modern Arab Literature at Tel Aviv University.
Reuven Snir is an Israeli Jewish academic, Professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Haifa, Dean of Humanities, and a translator of poetry between Arabic, Hebrew, and English. He is the winner of the Tchernichovsky Prize for translation (2014).
Karen Alkalay-Gut is a poet, professor, and editor who lives in Israel and writes in English.
Motti Lerner is an Israeli playwright and screenwriter.
Sami Shalom Chetrit is a Moroccan-born Hebrew poet an inter-disciplinary scholar and teacher, and Israeli social and peace activist.
Joseph Ginat was an Israeli anthropologist, author, political advisor, and soldier.
Boycotts of Israel in sports refer to various disqualifications and denial of Israeli athletes due to the refusal of some countries to recognize the state of Israel. As part of a more or less systematic boycott of Israel, Israeli athletes and teams have been barred from some competitions. In many international competitions, where Israel does take part, such as the Olympic Games, some Arab and Muslim competitors avoid competing against Israelis. Some countries, most notably Iran, even compel their athletes not to compete against Israelis or in Israel.
Ilana Salama Ortar is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work focuses on issues of migration, uprooting, exile and architecture of emergency.
Nidaa Khoury is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in the Department of Hebrew literature. She is also the first Arab-Israeli poet to be included within the literature Bagrut curriculum in Israel.
David Semah was an Israeli scholar of Arabic literature in Israel, and a professor at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. As one of the founders, he remained closely involved in the Department's activities from its establishment in the mid-1960s and until his death.
Ido Aharoni Aronoff is an Israeli career diplomat, advisor to international companies, public speaker and university lecturer, writer and investor. He was born in Jaffa, Israel. Aharoni spent his entire diplomatic career in the United States. He is a 25-year veteran of Israel's Foreign service. He is a public diplomacy specialist, founder of the Brand Israel Program, and a place positioning practitioner. Aharoni has served as a member of the Board Governors of Tel Aviv University and its cabinet since 2015 and as a lecturer at the university's Coller School of Management since 2018 and is the host of TAU Unbound, the official English language podcast of Tel Aviv University. In April 2024, Aharoni, was appointed a Global Distinguished Professor of Business at Touro University and in August 2024 he was appointed as a Visiting Professorship at San Diego State University (SDSU) School of Business and University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Global Policy. He is the co-founder and Global Ambassador for the Genius 100 Visions community and serves as a consultant to international companies such as MasterCard APCO Worldwide, The Libra Group, Bank Leumi USA and Value Base, He is a co-founder of Israel-based consultancy Emerson Rigby Ltd. and of British-Israeli investment company EA2K.
In Israel, the mixed cities or mixed towns are the eight cities with a significant number of both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. The eight mixed Jewish-Arab cities, defined by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics as those with more than 10% of the population registered as "Arabs" and more than 10% of the population registered as "Jews", include the following seven Israeli cities: Haifa, Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, Acre, Nof HaGalil, and Ma'alot Tarshiha. Approximately 10% of the Arab citizens of Israel live in these seven cities. The eighth city is Jerusalem, in which the Arab part of the city, East Jerusalem, has been annexed by Israel but is not recognized as such under international law.
