History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: what Wikipedia removed

This article is the overview of the decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. At the October 6, 2023 snapshot the opening said the conflict “has been marked by violence, including terrorist attacks by Palestinian militants and military operations by Israel.” Today the opening carries no mention of terrorism at all, describing only the conflict’s 19th-century origins and the Balfour Declaration; the word survives 27 times in the body. A reader today does not learn that terrorist attacks were ever named as a defining feature of the conflict in the article’s own opening.

The word “terror” appeared 1 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 6 October 2023. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 27. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.

Where this comes from

We saved this article’s opening paragraph at 6 moments between 2005 and 2025. Everything below is Wikipedia’s own text, quoted from those saved copies. The interactive version, with every snapshot side by side and each removal marked in place, is at ilroot.com/case/history-of-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict.

The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot

word	2005	2010	2015	2020	6 October 2023	2025
terror	0	0	0	0	1	0
militant	0	0	0	0	1	0

Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.

What was taken out

• The passage on Palestinian statehood aims was reworded, not removed.
• The characterization of the conflict as marked by terrorist attacks by Palestinian militants and military operations by Israel is gone from the opening, replaced by a historical narrative that does not mention terrorism at all.

How it opened then, and now

2005 (revision 16396916):

Template:TotallyDisputed The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the account of events of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beginning in the 1880s and continuing to present day.

2025 (revision 1297836636):

The region today: Israel , the West Bank , the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights The history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict traces back to the late 19th century when Zionists sought to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Ottoman-controlled Palestine , a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 , issued by the British government, endorsed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which led to an influx of Jewish immigrants to the region. Following World War II and the Holocaust , international pressure mounted for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, leading to the creation of Israel in 1948 . The esta…

Related

• The drift report: what changed across all 61,944 watched articles
• The case file for this article, with every snapshot and every marked removal
• Who made the cuts: removals grouped by the account that made them
• The live article on Wikipedia

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