History of The Arab–Israeli Conflict - War of 1948

War of 1948

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, known as the "Israeli War of Independence" by Israelis or "al-Nakba" (The Disaster) by Arabs, 1948–1949, began after the November 1947 UN Partition Plan, which proposed the establishment of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. The Arabs had rejected the plan while the Jews had accepted it. By March 1948 however, the United States was actively seeking a temporary UN approved trusteeship rather than immediate partition, known as the Truman trusteeship proposal. The Jewish leadership rejected this. By now, both Jewish and Arab militias had begun campaigns to control territory inside and outside the designated borders, and an open war between the two populations emerged.

Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Saudi troops invaded Palestine subsequent to the British withdrawal and the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. Israel, the US, the Soviet Union, and UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie called this illegal aggression, while China broadly backed the Arab claims. The Arab states proclaimed their aim of a "United State of Palestine" in place of Israel and an Arab state. They considered the UN Plan to be invalid because it was opposed by Palestine's Arab majority, and claimed that the British withdrawal led to an absence of legal authority, making it necessary for them to protect Arab lives and property. About two thirds of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territories which came under Jewish control; the rest became Arab citizens of Israel. Practically all of the much smaller number of Jews in the territories captured by the Arabs, for example the Old City of Jerusalem, also fled or were expelled. The official United Nations estimate was that 711,000 Arabs became refugees during the fighting.

The fighting ended with signing of the several Armistice Agreements in 1949 between Israel and its warring neighbors (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria), which formalized Israeli control of the area allotted to the Jewish state plus just over half of the area allotted to the Arab state. The Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan until June 1967 when they were seized by Israel during the Six-Day War.