Israel has become a regional economic and military powerhouse, leveraging its prosperous high-tech sector, large defense industry, and concerns about
Iran to foster partnerships around the world. The State of
Israel was established in 1948. The UN General Assembly proposed in 1947 partitioning the British Mandate for
Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state. The Jews accepted the proposal, but the local Arabs and the Arab states rejected the UN plan and launched a war. The Arabs were subsequently defeated in the 1947-1949 war that followed the UN proposal and the British withdrawal.
Israel joined the UN in 1949 and saw rapid population growth, primarily due to Jewish refugee migration from Europe and the Middle East.
Israel and its Arab neighbors fought wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973, and
Israel signed peace treaties with
Egypt in 1979 and
Jordan in 1994.
Israel took control of the West Bank, the eastern part of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights in the course of the 1967 war. It ceded the Sinai back to
Egypt in the 1979-1982 period but has continued to administer the other territories through military authorities.
Israel and Palestinian officials signed interim agreements in the 1990s that created a period of Palestinian self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The most recent formal efforts between
Israel and the Palestinian Authority to negotiate final status issues occurred in 2013 and 2014, and the US continues its efforts to advance peace.
Israel signed the US-brokered normalization agreements (the Abraham Accords) with
Bahrain, the UAE, and
Morocco in 2020 and reached an agreement with
Sudan in 2021. Immigration to
Israel continues, with more than 44,000 estimated new immigrants, mostly Jewish, in the first 11 months of 2023.
Former Prime Minister Benjamin NETANYAHU returned to office in 2022, continuing his dominance of
Israel's political landscape at the head of
Israel's most rightwing and religious government. NETANYAHU previously served as premier from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009 to 2021, becoming
Israel's longest serving prime minister.
On 7 October 2023, HAMAS militants launched a combined unguided rocket and ground terrorist attack from Gaza into southern
Israel. The same day
Israel’s Air Force launched air strikes inside Gaza and initiated a sustained air campaign against HAMAS targets across the Gaza Strip. The following day, NETANYAHU formally declared war on HAMAS, and on 28 October, the
Israel Defense Forces launched a large-scale ground assault inside Gaza.
The Israeli economy has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last 30 years, led by cutting-edge high-tech sectors. Offshore gas discoveries in the Mediterranean place
Israel at the center of a potential regional natural gas market. In 2022, a US-brokered agreement between
Israel and
Lebanon established their maritime boundary, allowing
Israel to begin production on additional gas fields in the Mediterranean. However,
Israel's economic development has been uneven. Structural issues such as low labor-force participation among religious and minority populations, low workforce productivity, high costs for housing and consumer staples, and high income inequality concern both economists and the general population. The current war with Hamas disrupted
Israel’s solid economic fundamentals, but it is not likely to have long-term structural implications for the economy.