War · 1947–1949
The creation of Israel, the 1948 war and the Nakba
Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine (Israel)
On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration; Jewish leaders accepted the plan, Palestinian Arab and wider Arab leaders rejected it, and civil war broke out. On 14 May 1948, as the British Mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel in Tel Aviv, and the next morning Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraqi forces invaded; when the 1949 armistice agreements ended the war, Israel held about 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine, Transjordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt held the Gaza Strip.
During the fighting an estimated 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, about half the Arab population of Palestine, fled or were expelled from their homes and hundreds of Arab towns and villages were depopulated, events Palestinians call the Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe").
Why it mattered
Israelis remember the war as their War of Independence, which secured the Jewish state that the Zionist movement had sought since the late 19th century; Palestinians mark the Nakba each year on 15 May, and the fate of the refugees, whose return or compensation the UN General Assembly called for in December 1948, remains a key issue in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Elsewhere
Israel lost 6,373 people, about 1 percent of its population; Arab deaths are uncertain, with estimates in the thousands. In the three years after the war a similar number of Jews migrated, fled or were expelled from Arab states, about 260,000 of whom went to Israel.
Related
- The world in 1945: Victory, Ruin and the Atom chapter
- Indian independence and Partition previous moment · 1947
- People's Republic of China proclaimed next moment · 1949