Flags of Israel

State of Israel

Who & why: on 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending that Mandatory Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an internationally administered Jerusalem; the Jewish Agency accepted the plan, the Arab League and the Arab Higher Committee rejected it, and fighting began between Jewish and Arab communities inside Palestine. The British Mandate formally ended on 14 May 1948, and that same day David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv. The next day, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq entered the war. Armistice agreements, negotiated on the island of Rhodes, were signed between Israel and each of its neighbors through 1949.

What it represents: a white field with two horizontal blue stripes and a central blue Star of David, adopted in 1948, based on the pattern of the tallit (Jewish prayer shawl) and on the flag the Zionist movement had itself used since the late 19th century.

British Mandate for Palestine

Who & why: British forces took the region from Ottoman control in 1917, the same year the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, stating its support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," while also stating that nothing should "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine was formalized at the April 1920 San Remo Conference and administered from Jerusalem. The Mandate ended on 14 May 1948, giving way to the State of Israel above.

What it represents: the British Union Flag flew as the mandatory power's flag over Mandatory Palestine throughout this period.

Ottoman Empire

Who & why: Ottoman conquest in 1516–17 absorbed the region into the wider provincial system of Ottoman Syria (organized in part as the Sanjak of Jerusalem), without a separate administrative unit corresponding to modern Israel's borders. Four centuries of Ottoman rule followed, ending when British forces took the region during World War I in 1917.

What it represents: the Ottoman state flag, a red field with a white crescent and star, flown across all Ottoman provincial territory.

Mamluk Sultanate

Who & why: the Mamluks, ruling from Cairo, took Acre — the last mainland stronghold of the Kingdom of Jerusalem — in 1291, ending Crusader presence in the region, and administered it through provincial governors until the Ottoman conquest of 1516–17.

What it represents: Mamluk heraldry used gold and other emblematic blazons tied to individual sultans and officers rather than one fixed state flag; the design here is an informed reconstruction, not a documented single national banner.

Kingdom of Jerusalem (Crusader)

Who & why: the First Crusade took Jerusalem in July 1099, and Godfrey of Bouillon became the new Kingdom of Jerusalem's first ruler. Saladin's Ayyubid forces retook Jerusalem itself in 1187, reducing the kingdom to a shrinking coastal strip; the kingdom's mainland presence ended with the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291.

What it represents: the "Jerusalem cross" — one large cross with four smaller crosses in its quarters, gold on white — is the kingdom's well-documented heraldic banner.

Early Islamic rule / Fatimid Palestine

Who & why: following the Rashidun conquest of the 630s, the region was organized as Jund Filastin ("the Palestine district"), a military-administrative district centered on Ramla and Jerusalem under the Umayyad and then Abbasid caliphates. Fatimid Egypt took control in the 10th century and held the region, with interruptions, until the First Crusade in 1099. This span is treated here as one honest bridging entry.

What it represents: no single fixed flag is documented across this whole span; plain white (the color most consistently associated with Umayyad banners) is shown here as representative of the earlier part of it, with Fatimid rule later associated with green.

Ancient & biblical Israel through Roman Judea

Who & why: this span covers the Israelite and Judahite kingdoms of the biblical period; the First and Second Temple periods in Jerusalem; Roman-era Judea, first as a Herodian client kingdom and then as a direct Roman province; the Jewish revolts against Roman rule in 66–73 CE and 132–135 CE (the latter led by Bar Kokhba); and the centuries of Jewish diaspora that followed those revolts, alongside continued Jewish presence in the land. Byzantine rule followed Rome's, lasting until the Muslim conquest of 636.

What it represents: no securely documented flag survives from this span; national and civic flags as a concept postdate it entirely. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

Bronze Age Canaan

Who & why: Canaan in this period is a patchwork of independent city-states rather than a single kingdom; Pharaoh Thutmose III's victory at Megiddo (c. 1457 BCE) brings the region under Egyptian New Kingdom suzerainty, and local vassal kings' correspondence with the Egyptian court survives in the 14th-century BCE Amarna letters. Egyptian control recedes amid the wider Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE; the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription conventionally dated to about 1208 BCE, records a campaign against a people called "Israel" already settled in the highlands — the earliest known reference to that name outside the Hebrew Bible itself.

What it represents: no flag survives from Bronze Age Canaan, and the concept of a national or civic flag postdates this era entirely; individual city-states used their own seals and emblems on correspondence and pottery instead. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

World context: this span runs alongside the height of the Egyptian New Kingdom itself — the great temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor, and the burial of Tutankhamun (c. 1323 BCE) — as well as the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Mycenaean Greece; all three contract or collapse within decades of one another around 1200 BCE, in the wider Late Bronze Age collapse that also ends Egyptian control over Canaan.