1948 Arab–Israeli War

The 1948 Arab–Israeli War was fought between the newly declared State of Israel and a coalition of Arab states, together with Palestinian Arab forces, from May 1948 to early 1949. It followed months of civil war in British-ruled Palestine after the United Nations voted to partition the territory. Israel survived and enlarged the area it held, Jordan and Egypt took control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and some 700,000 or more Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled. Israelis call it the War of Independence; Palestinians remember the displacement as the Nakba, the "catastrophe".

Britain had governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate since the early 1920s, during which Jewish immigration and Arab opposition to it led to repeated violence. In 1947 Britain handed the question to the United Nations. On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international administration. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan; the Palestinian Arab leadership and the Arab states rejected it. Fighting between Jewish and Arab militias broke out almost at once. In early 1948 Arab forces besieged Jerusalem's Jewish population, and from April Jewish forces went on the offensive, taking cities such as Haifa and Jaffa. In April fighters of the Irgun and Lehi groups killed over a hundred villagers at Deir Yassin, and in May Arab forces killed many defenders and residents of the Jewish settlement bloc of Kfar Etzion after its fall. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had already left or been driven from their homes before the British withdrew.

On 14 May 1948, as the mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel. The next day forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq entered the former mandate territory, with Lebanese and other Arab contingents also involved. Jordan's Arab Legion took the Old City of Jerusalem, and Egyptian forces advanced up the coast. The fighting was interrupted by UN-brokered truces in June–July and from July to October 1948, during which Israel strengthened its army and obtained weapons from abroad.

Between the truces and afterwards, Israeli forces gained the upper hand. In July they captured Lydda and Ramle, whose inhabitants, tens of thousands of people, were expelled, with killings of civilians reported. Later offensives in Galilee and the Negev drove back Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian forces. In September the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in Jerusalem by members of Lehi. In December the General Assembly adopted Resolution 194, which stated that refugees wishing to return home and live at peace should be permitted to do so.

Between February and July 1949 Israel signed separate armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The ceasefire lines, later called the Green Line, left Israel with about 78 per cent of the former mandate. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and annexed them in 1950, while Egypt administered the Gaza Strip. No Arab state of Palestine was created. Israel lost more than 6,000 dead, roughly one per cent of its Jewish population; estimates of Arab deaths are less certain, but commonly range from several thousand to well over ten thousand.

Most Palestinian refugees ended up in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and were not allowed to return; their descendants number in the millions. In the following years hundreds of thousands of Jews left or were driven from Arab countries, many of them settling in Israel. Why the Palestinians left has long been contested. Earlier Israeli accounts stressed flight urged by Arab leaders, while Palestinian historians emphasised deliberate expulsion. Since the late 1980s, research in opened archives by historians such as Benny Morris has shown a mixture of causes, including fear, the collapse of Palestinian society, military attacks and expulsions, though scholars still disagree on how far it was planned.

Our 1945 map shows British-ruled Palestine, and our 1960 map shows Israel within the armistice lines, with the West Bank under Jordan and Gaza under Egyptian administration.