Its borders varied much during the centuries. Sometimes, they merge in north with the Lebanese river Litani - the Leontès antique -, include the towns of Gaza and Beersheba in the south, and go from the Mediterranean, in the west, to the Jordan and with the Dead Sea, the east. During the British mandate (1922-1948), Palestine coincides roughly with the territory defined in 1917 by the Balfour Declaration like “Jewish national hearth”. Today, this area is bordered in south-west by the peninsula of the Sinai, in the west by the Mediterranean, north by Lebanon and Syria and in the east by the Jordan, the Dead Sea and the valley of Araba.    

Although its surface (26 ' 000 m2) does not exceed that of the department of Normandy, no area in the world played such an important role in the history of humanity, nor generated such bloody conflicts. Cradle of two great religions, the Judaism and Christianity, Palestine is also a ground crowned for Islam.

Bound since Antiquity to the religion of also various people, this territory could only become the object of desire and of conflict. In addition, Palestine offers a fertile ground between the sea and the desert, and constitutes the required passage of the merchants, the armies and the travellers between the valley of the Nile, Mésopotamie and minor Asia. This strategic position explains why the wandering tribes, the rival cities, the empires and the colonial powers often made their battlefield of it. At the time contemporary, after having been related during a certain time to the antagonism of the United States and the USSR at the time of the cold war, the conflict crystallized on the divergent interests of the Jews and the Arabs. Palestine thus represents much more for the world that the actual value of its thin resources.