Palestinian Arab Republic

The Palestinian Arab Republic (Arabic: الجمهورية العربية الفلسطينية al-jumhūriyah al-‘arabīyah al-falasṭīnīyah; Hebrew: הרפובליקה הערבית הפלסטינית ha-republiqah ha-'araviyat ha-palestiniyat), informally known as Palestine (فلسطين falasṭīn; פלסטין palestin), is one of the Arab Union's 20 republics, located in the Levant region of the country and bordering, clockwise from the north, its fellow union republics of Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Nasser City, the federal capital of the Arab Union, is separated from Palestine by the River Jordan and Sea of Galilee, and directly on the other side of Nasser City is the republic of Syria. Home to 23.155 million people as of January 2020, the Palestinian Arab Republic is the eighth-most populous republic of the Arab Union, after Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Morocco, the Peninsular Republic and Yemen. Palestine is one of the most economically developed republics of the Arab Union, and has the fourth-highest standard of living average in the union. Its capital is Jerusalem and largest city is Port Said; other major cities include Jaffa, Gaza, Haifa, Hebron, Ramallah, Netania, Nablus, Nazareth, Tiberias and Beersheba.

Palestine is one of the world's oldest and most diverse regions. The site of the ancient Land of Israel, many Biblical events are said to have taken place in the region over thousands of years. Originally the home of Judaism, and then Christianity, the majority of the local population were converted to Islam in the 7th century AD and became Arabised in culture, as Arabic was the only contemporary literary and liturgical language following the spread of the Quran, and thus the only scholarly incarnation of language to which one could compare the local languages (which were already Semitic dialects closely related to Arabic and mutually intelligible to varying degrees. This complex superstructural Arabisation and substructural assimilation of native dialects ultimately resulted in the development of the modern-day local dialects of Levantine Arabic, the Palestinian dialect being a variation of the Southern Levantine group of dialects. Despite being a province of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century, Palestine remained Arab in identity, and for much of its existence as an Ottoman vassal was left to its own domestic affairs, with de facto home rule afforded the local community or rather, body of local communities, considering the multitudes of religious and ethnic minorities which had official protection in the Ottoman Muslim state, a custom dating from the Arab caliphates period which continues to this day under the secular policy of the Ba'athist government. In 1920, following the First World War and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine was separated from Constantinople by a British military occupation, which was later "civilianised" and formalised into the Mandate for Palestine, essentially a British colony with a new government consisting primarily of local officials formed under the auspices of the British. Palestine, as a state, was separated from other nearby formerly integrated Arab regions, such as Syria and Lebanon, which became French mandates, and Egypt, which was a separate state entirely which functioned as a British–Egyptian condominium jointly ruling the Sudan. This was essentially Palestine's first nominal experience as a nation-state, albeit one still under foreign control.

The British Mandate established an Arab administration loyal to its interests, mostly economical in nature, while simultaneously encouraging the mass immigration of Jewish refugees and later immigrants from the whole Jewish diaspora and allowing the growth of a zionist proto-state within the Mandate. This friendly, enabling policy the British had toward the zionist movement inevitably resulted in the outbreak of a series of civil wars during the 1930s between the Palestinian Arab community and the rapidly growing Jewish community, resulting in the death of nearly 10% of the population on both sides by the start of the Second World War. The British pulled out of Palestine in mid-May 1948, officially ending the Mandate; the Jews in Palestine subsequently declared independence as the State of Israel, while the Palestine Arab Congress and Arab Higher Committee reasserted their 1928 declaration of independence as the Palestinian Republic, which had been formally recognised only by several Arab states and a handful of other states, the most significant of which was the Soviet Union. As the Israeli and Palestinian leadership claimed the same territory, on the evening of 15 May 1948, the same day the State of Israel declared independence, Palestine declared war on Israel, which began in earnest virtually instantaneously. Known as the Arab–Israeli War, following months of mostly stalemate, the conflict officially ended almost ten months later on 10 March 1949 with the signing of an armistice in the company of United Nations peacekeeping forces, which divided the claimed territory along the frontline between the Arab Legion and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as it existed upon the cessation of hostilities. Both states continued to claim Jerusalem as their undivided capital, and the city was thus placed under the exclusive administration of a United Nations-sanctioned international zone defended by the UN peacekeepers, a situation which would last for the better part of the following two decades.

Egypt and Syria had unified formally in 1958 to form the United Arab Republic, and from that point actively sought new member states of the burgeoning union. In 1965, the Palestinian Regional Branch of the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party, which governed the UAR in coalition with President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Socialist Union Party, came to power in a military coup; the new Ba'athist government of Palestine pledged its allegiance to the UAR in any and all future conflicts with Israel. In the Six-Day War of early June 1967, Israel grounded the Palestinian Air Force and much of the Arab Air Force and gained near-air supremacy, allowing the IDF to occupying all of the Palestinian Republic, most of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. The War of Attrition, which began on 30 September 1967, was launched jointly by Palestine and the UAR to regain control of all territory occupied by Israel earlier that year; in spite of initially slow progress involving several setbacks which lasted into the summer of 1968, the combined forces of the Arab Army, the Palestinian Ba'athist militias (essentially partisans of the Palestinian Army formally disbanded in 1967), and an array of allied pan-Arabist militias proved a significant challenge for the IDF, which could no longer gain air superiority as Arab forces began to receive significant close air support from the Soviet Air Force, which also conducted nightly bombing runs which seriously demoralised the Israeli public. By the start of 1969, the IDF was rapidly losing territory as the Arab forces advanced on three fronts, while the highly unpredictable and destructive irregular warfare operations of the Fedayeen, mostly striking Israel from within, added further to the demoralisation of Israeli soldiers and civilians alike. The Battle of Haifa, the final battle of the war which involved the war's largest naval battle, took place between 28 August and 10 September, and ended in the sinking of most of the Israeli Navy and capture by the Arab Navy's Amphibious Corps of the city of Haifa, the last IDF stronghold, officially ending the war. The Israeli government went into exile in London and the IDF was disbanded by the Arab Army, although many IDF personnel escaped the POW camps and went off the grid, subsequently forming the Zionist Resistance Front (ZRF), which began a mostly low-intensity guerrilla war against the new Arab authorities which continues to the present day. On 19 September 1970, following a national referendum, Palestine was admitted to the UAR as its third member state by presidential executive order of Gamal Abdel Nasser, his last significant act before his death eleven days later on 28 September 1970.

Following Nasser's death and the election of Hafez al-Assad, former Regional Secretary of the Ba'ath Party's Syrian Regional Branch, the Arab Socialist Union merged with the Ba'ath Party under Assad, who went on to pass bills in the Arab Congress giving the three constituent states of the UAR their own devolved governments. In November 1970, the Palestinian government ceded to the UAR central government approximately 65 square kilometres of land on the east bank of the River Jordan and the south coast of the Sea of Galilee, bordering Jordan and Syria to the east; construction of a new capital began on this site in May 1971. Completed in February 1975, the new capital was named Nasser City in honour of the late Gamal Abdel Nasser, first President of the Arab Union, and the UAR government apparatus relocated to the new capital between March and May 1975. Despite the formal dissolution of the Zionist state, the great majority of Jewish communities remained in Palestine, and today constitute a highly educated and pioneering demographic. The population of the State of Israel in 1967 prior to the Six-Day War and War of Attrition was 2.5 million, the majority of whom were Jews; today, the Jewish community in Palestine numbers at 7.73 million, over a third of the total population of Palestine. There are many Jewish-majority small cities, towns and kibbutzim, and all major cities consist of a significant Jewish population, especially Jerusalem, the western half of which is nearly 75% Jewish. Palestine is also the only Arab republic to feature two equal official languages, namely Hebrew and Arabic.

Economically versatile and home to a highly educated and innovative population, Palestine today is one of the most cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and culturally diverse republics of the Arab Union. On top of its major construction, manufacturing, shipping, shipbuilding, and arms development sectors, most of which rival their counterparts around the globe, the republic also has a major tourism industry due to its many historical sites including 11 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and of course its central historical role in the three major Abrahamic faiths. Furthermore, Palestine has an extensive and robust entertainment and service industry, and even more impressively is considered the Silicon Valley of the Arab Union, due to its unparalleled, exponentially growing tech sector, which includes not only established, world-renowned corporations but also a plethora of promising startups, more than the rest of the Arab Union combined. Palestine is home to the headquarters of most major internet and mobile corporations of the Arab Union, and also many other information technology companies and research and development firms, as well as traditional telecom companies and related enterprises. In August 2019, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa became the first cities in the Arab Union to install 5G-capable infrastructure, which was implemented by Palcom, one of the largest mobile service providers in the Arab Union, which was originally established in Palestine in 1928 as the country's first phone company. The Palestine Stock Exchange in Ramallah is the third-largest securities exchange in the Arab Union, after the Cairo Stock Exchange and the Union Stock Exchange in Nasser City.