To Begin With: Scale
A Country Smaller Than New Jersey
Before anything else, grasp the geography. The entire argument is about a piece of land most Americans could drive across before lunch.
You can drive across Israel in roughly 20–25 minutes at its widest point. At its narrowest — the so-called "narrow waist" near Tel Aviv, where the majority of Israel's population and infrastructure is concentrated — the country is nine miles wide. A person with a rifle standing on a hilltop in the West Bank can see Ben Gurion Airport. This geography is not an abstraction: it means Israel has no strategic depth. Every security decision the country makes is shaped by the fact that a single breach anywhere on its perimeter puts its population center within minutes of attack. No other democracy in the world operates under this constraint.
Ancient History & The Modern Movement
A People's Unbroken Bond to a Land
The Jewish connection to the land of Israel is not a modern political invention. It is one of the most documented relationships between a people and a territory in human history.
The Jewish people have maintained a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years. Jerusalem has been the center of Jewish prayer and identity throughout the entire Jewish diaspora — mentioned three times daily in Jewish prayers, oriented toward in synagogues worldwide, invoked in every Passover Seder with "Next year in Jerusalem." Jewish communities survived in Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and Jerusalem itself through centuries of Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule. The connection was never broken.
The modern Zionist movement arose in the late 19th century directly in response to relentless, violent persecution of Jews across Europe — pogroms in Russia killed tens of thousands; governments stripped Jews of rights; mobs burned Jewish neighborhoods. Theodor Herzl, a secular Jewish journalist, concluded after witnessing the Dreyfus Affair — in liberal France — that Jews would never be truly safe without their own state. The Holocaust, which killed six million Jews just decades later, proved him right. Zionism was not a colonial project in search of resources. It was a survival project by a people who had been told, for centuries, they did not belong anywhere.
1920–1947
The British Mandate: Building a Nation Before a State
Jewish pioneers legally bought land and built the full infrastructure of a state — universities, hospitals, courts, an orchestra — before Israel existed. Britain, meanwhile, blocked Jewish refugees from entering even during the Holocaust.
In 1917, Britain's Balfour Declaration committed to "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Under the subsequent British Mandate, Jewish immigrants legally purchased land, established Hebrew University, built hospitals, founded newspapers, and created a symphony orchestra — essentially constructing a functioning civil society from scratch. The land was purchased, not seized. Many sellers were absentee landlords; much of it was arid scrubland that Jewish settlers made productive.
As Jews fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s and 1940s, Britain sharply restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine under Arab political pressure — including during and after the Holocaust. Ships carrying Jewish survivors were turned away or intercepted; survivors were interned in camps in Cyprus. The most famous was the Exodus 1947 — carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors — which was boarded by British forces and its passengers returned to Germany. Tens of thousands of Jews who might have been saved could not legally reach the land the British had promised them. This history is why Israelis view outside pressure on their security policies with profound and earned suspicion.
The original British Mandate included land on both sides of the Jordan River. In the early 1920s, Britain carved off the entire eastern portion — roughly 77% of the original Mandate territory — and gave it to the Hashemite royal family. This became Jordan in 1946. An Arab state had already been created from the large majority of British Mandate Palestine. The remaining land west of the Jordan River — the contested sliver — was what the 1947 UN partition plan proposed dividing further between Jews and Arabs.
1947–1949
Israel's Birth — and the War to Destroy It
Three years after the Holocaust, Jewish leaders accepted a UN compromise. Arab states declared a war of extermination. Israel survived. No Palestinian state was created — and it was the Arab states, not Israel, that prevented it.
In 1947, the UN proposed dividing the remaining land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Jewish leaders accepted. The Arab League rejected it — not to negotiate better borders, but because they refused to accept any Jewish state of any size anywhere. The Arab League Secretary-General stated publicly they would wage "a war of extermination and momentous massacres." This was not a dispute about boundaries. It was a refusal to accept Jewish self-determination in any form.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel. The next day, the armies of five Arab nations invaded. Israel was barely organized, outnumbered, and arms-embargoed by the West. It survived anyway. After the armistice, Israel controlled more land than the UN had allocated. Egypt seized Gaza. Jordan seized and later annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. No Palestinian state was established — and it was Arab armies, not Israel, that occupied what might have been Palestinian territory. Jordan did not offer the West Bank's Palestinians a state; it annexed it.
About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees during the 1947–1949 war — an event Palestinians call the Nakba. They left for mixed reasons: some fled fighting, some were expelled by Israeli forces, some left at Arab leaders' urging expecting a quick Arab victory and a return. Arabs who stayed became Israeli citizens with full voting rights. Today one in five Israeli citizens is Arab. Contrast this with the Arab countries, which expelled or caused the flight of approximately 850,000 Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, and elsewhere — mostly in waves of state-sponsored persecution after 1948. Those Jews received no UN refugee agency, no "right of return" resolutions, and little international sympathy. Most came to Israel.
Both refugee crises were real. Only one has received sustained international attention.
"Israel accepted every partition plan offered to it. Each time, the response was invasion or terrorism. This pattern — offer, rejection, war — has repeated across seventy-five years."
1949–1967
No Peace, No Recognition, No Access
For 19 years Israel lived inside its armistice lines — boycotted, blockaded, and raided — while Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest sites and the PLO was founded to destroy the country entirely.
From 1948 to 1967, Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and barred Jews from the Western Wall — the holiest accessible site in Judaism — and from the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, where dozens of ancient synagogues were demolished. Egypt used Gaza as a launchpad for terrorist raids into Israel. Arab states maintained a total boycott of Israel and blockaded Israeli shipping. No Arab state recognized Israel's existence. During these 19 years, Israel controlled no West Bank, no Gaza, and no settlements — yet was still given no peace.
The PLO was founded in 1964 — three years before Israel captured the West Bank or Gaza. This fact is crucial: its stated goal was not to liberate the West Bank or Gaza, which were under Arab control, but to eliminate the State of Israel. The PLO founding charter explicitly denied Jewish peoplehood and called for Israel's destruction. The organization was not a response to occupation. It was a response to Israel's existence.
June 1967
The Six-Day War
Surrounded by mobilizing armies and explicit promises of annihilation, Israel struck first and won in six days — then immediately offered to trade the captured land for peace.
In May–June 1967, Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers, blockaded the Strait of Tiran (an internationally recognized act of war), massed 100,000 troops on Israel's border, and broadcast explicit threats to annihilate Israel. Jordan and Syria mobilized. Arab radio crackled with promises of a war to "push the Jews into the sea." Israel — nine miles wide at its narrowest — launched pre-emptive strikes. In six days it destroyed three Arab air forces, defeated three armies, and captured the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
For the first time in 19 years, Jews could pray at the Western Wall. In a gesture of religious pluralism rarely noted by critics, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan returned administrative control of the Temple Mount — Judaism's holiest site — to the Islamic Waqf authority. Israel declared Jerusalem open to worshippers of all three Abrahamic faiths — a promise Jordan had explicitly denied when it controlled the city. Israel immediately signaled willingness to return the captured territories in exchange for peace. The Arab League responded at Khartoum: "No peace, no recognition, no negotiations."
1968–1993
The PLO's Global Campaign of Terrorism
The Munich Massacre — September 5, 1972. PLO-affiliated Black September operatives broke into the Olympic Village in Munich, murdering two Israeli athletes immediately and taking nine more hostage. All nine were subsequently killed in a botched rescue attempt. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches died in total, in front of a global television audience of hundreds of millions. Black September operated with PLO leadership's knowledge; its operational commander, Abu Iyad, was a senior Fatah official. The world watched Jewish athletes die at the Olympics — 27 years after the Holocaust.
The Coastal Road Massacre — March 1978. Eleven Fatah terrorists — Arafat's own organization — landed on an Israeli beach, murdered an American nature photographer, hijacked a bus, and opened fire on civilian cars along Israel's main coastal highway. In total, 38 Israeli civilians were murdered, including 13 children. It remains one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Israeli history. Arafat's Fatah carried it out directly. It was not a rogue operation; it was PLO policy in action.
The Ma'alot Massacre — May 1974. PLO-affiliated terrorists crossed from Lebanon, murdered an Arab Israeli family in their home, then seized a school in Ma'alot and took more than 100 Israeli schoolchildren hostage. When Israeli forces attempted a rescue, 22 children and 3 adults were killed. The attack was specifically designed to murder children — it was not collateral damage. It was the goal. Arafat's PLO praised the operation.
The Achille Lauro Hijacking — October 1985. PLO-affiliated Palestine Liberation Front terrorists seized the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro with over 400 passengers. They singled out Leon Klinghoffer — a 69-year-old Jewish American confined to a wheelchair — shot him in the head and chest, and threw his body and wheelchair overboard into the sea. PLO chairman Arafat initially refused to condemn the attack. He subsequently sheltered the mastermind, Abu Abbas, in PLO-controlled Tunis for years.
Dawson's Field and the birth of modern hijacking. The PFLP — a PLO faction — hijacked three commercial airliners simultaneously in September 1970, diverting them to a Jordanian desert airstrip. After transferring the 310 passengers, they blew up all three jets on live television for maximum global impact. This single operation invented modern aviation security worldwide. Every security checkpoint, every X-ray machine, every rule about liquids you have ever endured at an airport traces directly back to PLO tactics.
Lod Airport Massacre — May 1972. Three Japanese Red Army terrorists, recruited and dispatched by the PFLP/PLO, opened fire with automatic weapons and grenades in the passenger terminal at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport. 26 people were killed and 80 wounded — including Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims and a prominent Israeli scientist. The attack illustrated PLO strategy: recruit international proxies, maintain plausible deniability. Arafat ran a global terror franchise decades before Al-Qaeda.
These are only a fraction of PLO operations. The PLO also murdered U.S. diplomats in Sudan (1973), carried out car bombings across Europe, machine-gunned passengers at Rome and Vienna airports (1985), and blew up a Swiss airliner (1970). Despite all of it, Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 after signing Oslo — a decision that remains deeply controversial. His later return to violence after Camp David 2000 vindicated the skeptics. The PLO pioneered modern international terrorism as a political instrument, and the world largely accommodated it.
The PLO is not the Palestinian people. Many Palestinians opposed PLO violence and corruption. But the PLO claimed to speak for all Palestinians and was recognized as their representative by the Arab League and the UN — meaning its choices shaped Palestinian fate.
"Every X-ray machine, every security checkpoint, every shoe removal at every airport in the world — all of it traces back to tactics pioneered by the PLO."
Israel's Character
The Only Liberal Democracy in the Middle East
Arab citizens of Israel have rights that Arab citizens of surrounding Arab countries do not. This is not propaganda — it is measurable, documented fact.
Arab citizens of Israel — approximately 2 million people, 21% of the population — have full voting rights, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, practice medicine and law, and serve as diplomats. One fifth of Israel's doctors are Arab Israelis. Arab political parties have participated in governing coalitions. An Arab judge, Salim Joubran, helped convict a former Israeli president of rape — a demonstration that no one, regardless of ethnicity, is above Israeli law. This level of legal equality for Arab citizens does not exist in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or any other state in the region.
Israel has full freedom of press, religion, and assembly. Israeli newspapers and television harshly criticize the government daily. Massive anti-government protests — including against judicial reforms — are routine and entirely protected. Mosques, churches, synagogues, Druze shrines, and Bahá'í temples all operate freely. LGBT rights in Israel are among the most advanced in the world — Tel Aviv is ranked one of the world's most LGBT-friendly cities — while homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death in Gaza under Hamas, and by imprisonment in much of the surrounding Arab world.
Israel's Druze and Bedouin Arab citizens serve voluntarily in the IDF, often in elite combat units, and have died defending the country. Circassian Muslims also serve. Opinion surveys consistently show that Israeli Arab citizens, while identifying strongly with Palestinian culture, prefer to live under Israeli law rather than Palestinian Authority or Hamas governance — a telling measure of what Israeli democracy means in practice. Discrimination against Arab citizens exists and Israeli civil society actively fights it, including through Arab-led political parties and Israeli courts.
The Ingathering of Exiles
One of the Most Diverse Nations on Earth
Israel has absorbed immigrants from over 100 countries across six continents — in a territory the size of New Jersey. Its diversity rivals the United States and exceeds virtually every other nation. It is a feat achieved not by immigration policy but by survival necessity.
Walk down a street in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and you will hear Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic, French, Yiddish, and Spanish within a single block. Israel's Jewish population includes people whose grandparents came from Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Russia, Ukraine, France, Argentina, India, China, and the United States — each bringing their own cuisine, music, religious customs, and linguistic traditions. No country of comparable size has absorbed this diversity and forged it into a functioning democracy. The United States is the only peer comparison, and it is 40 times larger.
Operation Magic Carpet (1949–1950) airlifted nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews — members of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, living in Yemen for over 2,500 years — to Israel. Many had never seen an airplane. Operation Moses (1984) and Operation Solomon (1991) airlifted tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews — the Beta Israel — from famine and civil war. Operation Solomon alone moved 14,325 people in 36 hours using 35 aircraft, with babies born midflight. It is one of the only times in recorded history that a country has airlifted Black Africans not into slavery but into full citizenship.
Today, Ethiopian-Israelis number over 160,000. They face real challenges including discrimination — which Israeli civil society, Arab and Jewish alike, actively fights. But Ethiopian-Israelis have also been elected to the Knesset, served as IDF officers, won Israel's national talent competitions, and in a single generation gone from famine-struck villages in the Horn of Africa to one of the world's most advanced technology economies. Israel also hosts the ancient Bene Israel Jews from India, Bukharan Jews from Central Asia, Kaifeng Jews from China, and Romaniote Jews from Greece — communities maintained for over a millennium before coming home.
"Operation Solomon moved 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israeli citizenship in 36 hours. The only comparison in scale and diversity of absorption is the United States — which is forty times larger."
The Most Complicated Chapter
Israeli Settlements in the West Bank
Settlements are where the pro-Israel case becomes genuinely difficult. The facts are contested, the legal arguments are real on both sides, and the trajectory is troubling even to many Israeli supporters.
Why This Is Complicated
Most of the pro-Israel case rests on firm moral and factual ground: Israel accepted partition plans that Arabs rejected; Israel is the only democracy in the region; Palestinian terror has been systematic and deliberate; peace offers have been refused. On settlements, the picture is harder. There are legitimate arguments on multiple sides, and honest Israel supporters — including many Israelis — acknowledge this.
Here are the facts as they stand in 2026, presented as clearly as possible.
The scale: Approximately 750,000 Israeli settlers now live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem across roughly 160 officially recognized settlements and nearly 200 unauthorized "outposts." This represents growth from near zero in 1967 to a population larger than Washington D.C. The pace has accelerated: the current Israeli government has approved more settlement units than any in the country's history — approximately 48,000 units since 2022. Israel's Finance Minister has publicly vowed to double the settler population.
The legal question: The international community — including the United States, European Union, United Nations, and the International Court of Justice — considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law, specifically the Fourth Geneva Convention's prohibition on transferring civilian population into occupied territory. Israel disputes this interpretation, arguing the West Bank is not "occupied" in the legal sense since it was never a sovereign Palestinian state, and that Jews have historical and legal rights to build there. This is a genuine legal dispute, not just politics.
Different types of settlements: Not all settlements are the same. Some — like the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, rebuilt after Jordan's destruction of it — have strong historical and moral justification. Others are large suburban cities near the Green Line, where residents are simply living in affordable housing close to Jerusalem. Still others are ideological outposts built deep in the West Bank by religious-nationalist settlers who believe the entire land is biblically theirs. Lumping them together misrepresents the complexity — but the cumulative effect on Palestinian movement and territorial contiguity is real regardless of motive.
The impact on a two-state solution: This is the core problem. Settlements — especially those built in the interior of the West Bank rather than along its edge — physically fragment the territory in ways that make a contiguous, viable Palestinian state increasingly difficult to envision. Israel's approval in 2025 of the E1 settlement project, connecting Ma'ale Adumim to Jerusalem, would effectively cut the West Bank in two, severing the land connection between Ramallah in the north and Bethlehem in the south. Many Israeli security officials and former prime ministers have warned that continued settlement expansion undermines Israel's long-term security by making a two-state solution impossible and forcing a choice between democracy and Jewish majority.
Notably, the settlers most actively expanding into the West Bank interior are not motivated by security — they are motivated by religious ideology. This is a tension within Israeli society, not just between Israel and Palestinians.
Settler violence: Since October 7, 2023, settler violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank has increased dramatically. The UN documented over 1,000 settler attacks on Palestinians between October 2023 and March 2024 alone. In 2025, three Palestinians were shot and killed by settlers in a single week. Some settlers operate with effective impunity, sometimes accompanied by IDF soldiers. Israeli civil society organizations — including B'Tselem and Peace Now — actively document and protest this violence. It is a genuine moral stain, acknowledged by many Israelis themselves, including former military and intelligence officials.
The Honest Summary on Settlements
An honest supporter of Israel can and should acknowledge: the settlement enterprise — particularly the deep-interior outposts driven by religious ideology — is problematic. It creates daily hardship for Palestinian civilians. It makes a two-state solution harder. It gives Israel's enemies a legitimate grievance that they use to obscure their illegitimate ones. And it runs against the advice of many of Israel's own most experienced security officials.
What settlements do not do: justify terrorism, suicide bombings, hijackings, the Ma'alot massacre, the Munich massacre, or October 7. The PLO began its terror campaign in 1964 — three years before the first settlement. Hamas's founding charter calls for genocide of Jews worldwide, not just opposition to settlements. Settlements are a real problem. They are not the root of the conflict.
1978–2001
The Peace Offers — and Their Rejection
Israel has made genuine, painful concessions for peace and had them accepted by Egypt and Jordan. Every Palestinian leadership has rejected a negotiated state. This is the documented record.
The Camp David Accords (1978) prove that peace is possible when a partner is willing. Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula — larger than Israel itself, including oil fields — to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty. Egypt's President Sadat was assassinated by Islamists for making it. Israel kept every commitment. Peace with Jordan followed in 1994. Both treaties have held for decades. Israel is not congenitally incapable of returning land or making peace. It has done both when the other party was willing to actually end the conflict.
The Oslo Accords (1993) were the closest Palestinians ever came to a state. Israel recognized the PLO; the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist; the Palestinian Authority was created; Arafat returned from exile to govern. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin paid with his life — assassinated by a Jewish extremist who believed he was conceding too much. Rabin's murder stands as proof that Israel's peace movement was real, and that it has paid a price for seeking peace.
Camp David 2000 — Arafat Rejects a Palestinian State. U.S. President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state covering approximately 94–96% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem — including sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian Quarters of the Old City. It was the most generous offer any Israeli leader had ever made. Arafat said no. He made no counteroffer. President Clinton was furious and publicly blamed Arafat for the failure. Barak's chief negotiator said Arafat "never had any intention of ending the conflict." Clinton then offered the "Clinton Parameters" — an even more detailed framework — and Israel's government accepted it as a basis for negotiation. Arafat rejected that too. Arafat's response was not a counter-proposal. It was the Second Intifada.
The Olmert Offer, 2008. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an even more generous offer to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: 97% of the West Bank, a land-swap for the remaining 3%, half of Jerusalem, and an international committee to govern the Old City. Abbas has acknowledged receiving the offer and not responding to it. As of today, he has still given no formal answer. This was not the PLO rejecting a state — it was the supposedly "moderate" Palestinian Authority rejecting one.
The pattern is consistent: 1947, 2000, 2001, 2008. Every time a Palestinian state was on offer, Palestinian leadership declined it.
The Palestinian Leadership Question
How Palestinian Leaders Failed Their Own People
A genuinely sympathetic account of Palestinian suffering must grapple with a difficult truth: Palestinian leaders have consistently prioritized the destruction of Israel over the welfare of Palestinian people — and enriched themselves in the process.
Arafat stole billions from his own people. IMF and EU audits found that Arafat diverted at least $900 million to $1 billion in Palestinian Authority public funds between 1995 and 2000 alone into personal accounts he controlled. Arafat's financial adviser Mohammed Rashid was later convicted of embezzling $33.5 million from Palestinian public funds. Time magazine documented Arafat skimming $2 million per month from the Palestinian gasoline trade. Total estimates of Arafat's personal fortune at death range from $1.3 billion to as high as $6.5 billion — while Palestinian civilians lived in poverty and international donors poured in aid that vanished. His wife Suha and daughter lived in a Paris palace spending an estimated $50,000 per day.
Corruption did not end with Arafat. His successor Mahmoud Abbas — now in his 21st year of a 4-year term, having cancelled all elections — enriched his family in parallel. His two sons, Tareq and Yasser, built a business consortium called Falcon with an estimated worth of over $300 million, operating with monopoly privileges under Palestinian Authority protection. The EU determined the PA mismanaged 2 billion euros in European aid between 2008 and 2012. In a poll of 1,200 Palestinians, 95.5% — nearly everyone — agreed the PA was rampantly corrupt. Hamas, meanwhile, diverted billions in aid into its tunnel network rather than civilian infrastructure.
Palestinian poverty and suffering are real. A significant portion of their cause is Palestinian leadership, not just Israeli policy.
It is worth asking directly: do Palestinian leaders actually want a Palestinian state? The historical record gives reason for doubt. A Palestinian state would require compromise — accepting Israel's permanent existence, giving up the "right of return" as a practical matter, and building functional governance. Each of these things threatens Palestinian political elites more than continued conflict does. Continued conflict maintains external funding, preserves victimhood as political currency, and avoids the accountability that statehood demands. Arafat was offered a state and said no. Abbas was offered a state and didn't answer. Hamas's charter explicitly calls for genocide, not statehood. This is not the behavior of movements that want a state. It is the behavior of movements that want to destroy the one next door.
"Palestinian poverty is real. Palestinian suffering is real. But much of it is inseparable from Palestinian leadership — which stole billions, rejected statehood, and spent decades prioritizing Israel's destruction over its own people's welfare."
2005–2026
Gaza, October 7, and the World Today
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Hamas's response was a coup, a blockade-triggering terrorist campaign, and eventually the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. As of 2026, all 251 hostages have been accounted for.
In 2005, Ariel Sharon made the deeply painful decision to withdraw all Israeli soldiers and 8,000 settlers from Gaza — some forcibly evicted from homes they had lived in for decades. It was a wrenching, unilateral concession made in hope. Hamas's response: seize power in a violent 2007 coup, throw Fatah officials from rooftops, and immediately begin firing rockets at Israeli civilian communities. Hamas then diverted billions in international aid — including from Qatar, the EU, and the UN — into a 500-kilometer military tunnel network built beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques. The aid meant to build Palestinian civilian life built a war machine instead.
October 7, 2023. At 6:29 a.m., Hamas broke through the Gaza border fence at 30 points simultaneously. In the hours that followed, approximately 3,000 Hamas fighters attacked 22 Israeli communities, a military base, and the Nova music festival. 1,195 people were killed — mostly civilians. Babies were murdered in their cribs. Women were gang-raped. Bodies were burned. Families were executed room by room. The attack was filmed by the perpetrators on body cameras and shared on social media as celebration. 251 people — including Holocaust survivors, toddlers, and foreign nationals — were taken hostage into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust, occurring 50 years and a day after the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Israel's military response was a comprehensive campaign to destroy Hamas's military and governing infrastructure. The war has caused severe destruction in Gaza. Palestinian health authorities report approximately 72,000 deaths since October 2023 — though these figures, provided by Hamas's own Ministry of Health, do not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel argues that Hamas's deliberate embedding of military infrastructure beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques — verified by independent journalists and military analysts — makes civilian casualties unavoidable. The Abraham Accords (2020) — which normalized relations with UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan — demonstrated that Israel can find peace with Arab states when those states choose coexistence over conflict.
The hostage crisis is resolved. All 251 hostages taken on October 7, 2023, have been accounted for. 168 were recovered alive; 87 were retrieved deceased. The last living hostages — 20 people — were released on October 13, 2025, as part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal under which Israel also released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. The final hostage, Master Sergeant Ran Gvili — who was killed in battle on October 7 while saving approximately 100 Nova festival survivors before being taken — had his remains recovered in Gaza on January 26, 2026. Israeli President Isaac Herzog publicly removed the yellow hostage pin he had worn for over two years. For the first time since 2014, Hamas holds no Israeli captives in Gaza.
A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into effect in October 2025, brokered by the United States under President Trump's 20-Point Peace Plan. The ceasefire is fragile — violations have been documented by both sides, with continued Israeli strikes and ongoing Palestinian casualties. As of May 2026, the fundamental questions remain entirely unresolved: Who governs Gaza after Hamas? Can a two-state solution survive the continued settlement expansion? Can Israeli-Saudi normalization resume? Mahmoud Abbas, in his 21st year of a 4-year term with no election held, has no mandate to speak for a post-war Palestinian order. The morning after has no plan.
"For the first time since 2014, Hamas holds no Israeli captives. All 251 have been accounted for. 168 came home alive. The cost of getting them back — in blood, treasure, and standing — is still being counted."
Conclusion
What the Record Shows
Israel is a country the size of New Jersey, nine miles wide at its thinnest point, born three years after the Holocaust and immediately invaded by five armies. In the 77 years since, it has:
Built the only democracy in the Middle East — where Arabs vote, serve on the Supreme Court, and sit in parliament. Absorbed over a million refugees from Arab countries, another million from the former Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews rescued by airlift, and immigrants from over 100 countries. Accepted every partition plan offered to it. Returned the Sinai to Egypt and Gaza to the Palestinians. Offered a Palestinian state in 2000 and 2008 and been turned down both times. Survived suicide bombers, hijackers, massacres, wars, and the worst single-day atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.
Its settlements in the West Bank are genuinely complicated and genuinely problematic — a real obstacle to peace that honest supporters must acknowledge. But settlements did not cause the terrorism. The PLO began attacking before the first settlement was built. Hamas's charter calls for genocide regardless of settlement policy.
Palestinian suffering is real. The people of Gaza have endured immense hardship. But a significant share of that hardship traces to their own leaders — who stole billions, rejected statehood, built war tunnels instead of hospitals, and have consistently chosen conflict over compromise.
The question for the future is whether any Palestinian leadership will emerge that chooses its people's welfare over Israel's destruction. Until it does, the pattern of the last 77 years will continue.