Who Attacked
First?

Verdict: Arab riots and pogroms, decades before statehood.

The violence predates the state, the "occupation," and the refugees, which means it cannot be explained by any of them. In April 1920 the Nebi Musa riots in Jerusalem killed 5 Jews; in May 1921 rioters in Jaffa killed 47. In August 1929, after the Mufti Amin al-Husseini spread the lie that Jews planned to seize the al-Aqsa mosque, Arab mobs murdered 133 Jews in a week, including 67 in Hebron, where a community over two thousand years old was slaughtered and expelled. The 1936 to 1939 Arab Revolt killed hundreds more. Every one of these attacks targeted Jews who had bought land legally under Ottoman and British law, decades before a single refugee existed. The longer history →

Verdict: Arab attacks began within 24 hours of the vote.

On 29 November 1947 the UN voted to partition the land into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership said yes. The Arab Higher Committee said no, and the next morning, 30 November, Arab gunmen ambushed two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva and killed seven people, the opening shots of the civil war. Weeks earlier, Arab League secretary-general Azzam Pasha had already promised "a war of extermination and momentous massacre" if partition passed. The war over Israel's birth began as a war to prevent it, declared by the side that refused half rather than share the whole. Statehood →

Verdict: five Arab armies invaded the day-old state.

Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, inside the borders the UN had drawn. Within hours, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon crossed into the new state. No serious historian disputes who invaded whom: the Arab states announced the invasion themselves, in writing, to the UN. The war Palestinians call the Nakba was a war their leadership and five Arab governments started, and lost. Had they accepted partition instead, a Palestinian state would be turning eighty. The rejection record →

Verdict: Israel fired first. The blockade and the raids came first.

Israel struck first, invading Sinai on 29 October 1956 in coordination with Britain and France, and an honest page says so. What preceded the shot: Egypt had closed the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, in defiance of Security Council Resolution 95, and for seven years had armed and dispatched fedayeen raiders from Gaza and Sinai who killed and wounded hundreds of Israeli civilians. A blockade is an act of war in international law, and it was years old before Israel moved. First shot: Israel. First act of war: Egypt.

Verdict: Israel struck first. Egypt committed the first act of war.

On 5 June 1967 Israel destroyed Egypt's air force on the ground, the most famous preemptive strike in modern history. Here is the month that produced it: in May, Nasser expelled the UN peacekeepers from Sinai, massed roughly 100,000 troops and 900 tanks on Israel's border, signed war pacts with Jordan and Iraq, and on 22 May closed the Straits of Tiran, a blockade, the textbook act of war, while announcing that "our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel." Israel struck the armies openly assembled to destroy it. And on the eastern front the question doesn't even arise: Israel begged Jordan to stay out, and Jordan attacked first, shelling Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on the war's first morning. That choice, not the preemption, is why the West Bank changed hands. Why 1967 started →

Verdict: Egypt, by its own declaration.

Within months of losing the Six-Day War, Egypt began shelling Israeli positions along the Suez Canal, and in 1969 Nasser formally declared a war of attrition to reverse 1967's result by bleeding Israel slowly. It followed the Arab League's Khartoum Resolution of September 1967: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it. Israel had offered land for peace within weeks of the war's end. Khartoum was the answer.

Verdict: Egypt and Syria, by surprise, on the holiest day of the Jewish year.

Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973, when Israel's soldiers were in synagogue and its country at a standstill. The detail that matters most: Israel had hours of warning that morning, and its cabinet explicitly decided not to preempt, accepting the first blow and thousands of casualties rather than fire first again. Whoever says Israel always shoots first has to explain 1973, the war where it knowingly chose not to.

Verdict: Israel launched the invasion, after years of PLO attacks from Lebanon.

Israel invaded on 6 June 1982, and the war, especially how long it ran, remains contested inside Israel itself. What preceded it: the PLO had built a state-within-a-state in south Lebanon and spent a decade launching cross-border raids and rocket fire at Galilee towns, from the Avivim school-bus massacre to the Coastal Road massacre. The trigger was the 3 June shooting of Israel's ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, by the Abu Nidal group, a PLO rival, an honest complication the simple version skips. Sustained attacks came first; the invasion's scale is a fair argument. The hardest case →

Verdict: Palestinian uprisings; the second was planned by the leadership.

The First Intifada (1987) erupted from below, riots that spread after a fatal traffic accident in Gaza, and it was fought mostly with stones and firebombs against soldiers; it was an uprising, not a war Israel began. The Second Intifada (2000) is different, and the muddying here is deliberate: it began weeks after Yasser Arafat walked away from a state at Camp David, and PA communications minister Imad Falouji later admitted it "had been planned since Chairman Arafat's return from Camp David." Ariel Sharon's coordinated, unarmed visit to the Temple Mount was the pretext, not the cause. What followed was a suicide-bombing campaign that murdered over 1,000 Israelis on buses and in pizzerias. The offers refused →

Verdict: Hezbollah, across an internationally recognized border.

On 12 July 2006 Hezbollah fired rockets at Israeli towns as cover, crossed the UN-certified Blue Line into Israel, killed three soldiers and abducted two more, whose bodies were returned in 2008. Israel had withdrawn from every inch of Lebanon six years earlier, certified by the UN. There was no occupation to resist and no dispute to settle, only a border raid by an Iranian-built militia. Iran's ring of fire →

Verdict: every round opened with rockets or attacks from Gaza.

Israel removed every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005. Rockets followed, and Hamas seized the Strip by force in 2007. 2008: after a six-month ceasefire frayed (an Israeli November raid on a cross-border tunnel is the honest footnote), Hamas declared the truce over and fired dozens of rockets a day before Israel responded. 2012: days of rocket and anti-tank fire preceded Israel's strike on Hamas's military chief. 2014: a Hamas cell kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers, and rocket barrages followed. 2021: Hamas opened the war itself, firing rockets at Jerusalem. Four rounds, one pattern: the war begins in Gaza, and the response gets called the aggression. The fact-checks →

Verdict: Hamas, in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

At dawn on 7 October 2023, during a ceasefire, thousands of Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza fence and murdered some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, at a music festival, in their kitchens, in their beds, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza, from babies to Holocaust survivors. Every day of the war that followed traces to that morning, and to the hostages taken. There is no framing, no context, and no "cycle" that changes who attacked whom on October 7. The memorial →

Verdict: Hezbollah, unprovoked, the day after October 7.

On 8 October 2023 Hezbollah began firing rockets and anti-tank missiles into Israel "in solidarity" with Hamas. Israel had not touched Lebanon. Some 60,000 Israelis were driven from their homes in the north for over a year, a displacement almost never called by that name. Everything that followed, the exploding pagers, the death of Nasrallah, the fall of Hezbollah's arsenal, began with Hezbollah's own choice to open a second front against a country that had not attacked it. The same applies to the Houthis, who began launching missiles and drones at Israel and hijacking civilian ships from November 2023, a thousand miles from any front line. The proxy network →

Verdict: Israel struck first in June 2025, openly, against a nuclear program.

Take the exchanges in order. April 2024: Israel killed IRGC generals at Iran's Damascus compound, men running the proxy war against it; Iran answered with the first direct state attack, some 300 drones and missiles at Israeli territory. October 2024: Iran fired roughly 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli cities. June 2025: Israel struck first and said so, hitting Iran's nuclear program and military leadership the day after the IAEA board formally found Iran in violation of its nuclear obligations. Behind all three sits the longer answer: Iran had been attacking Israel through Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades, and its leaders openly call for Israel's destruction. A preemptive strike on a nuclear program built by a state sworn to erase you is first-shot, not first-aggression. Iran's ring of fire →