Introduction	|	1920 Mandate	|	1947-48 Partition	|	1949 Armistice	|	1967 Six-Day War	|	1993 Accords

How Palestine became Israel

From antiquity until the 20th century the name Palestine more often described a region than a place with precise boundaries. It is derived from what the Greeks and Romans called the "Land of the Philistines," referring to an ancient people who were contemporaries of the biblical Israelites as early as the 12th century B.C.

In 1920, Palestine gained political borders for the first time in nearly 2,000 years under the British Mandate that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Follow the evolution of the region from 1920 to modern Israel.