State of Israel Founded
On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state in the former British Mandate of Palestine, to be called Israel. The declaration, read in Tel Aviv on the eve of the Mandate's expiry, fulfilled the central goal of the Zionist movement and created a new country within hours. It also set off the first full-scale Arab-Israeli war and a displacement of Palestinians that remain at the heart of one of the world's most enduring conflicts. The summary's phrase that the conflict "begins" is a simplification, since tensions between Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine were decades old.
Zionism emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe, partly in response to persecution and rising nationalism, and encouraged Jewish immigration to Ottoman-ruled Palestine. After the First World War, Britain governed the territory under a League of Nations mandate. Its 1917 Balfour Declaration had expressed support for a "national home" for the Jewish people, while also promising that the rights of existing non-Jewish communities would not be prejudiced. Jewish immigration grew, especially in the 1930s as Nazi persecution intensified, and Arab opposition produced riots and the major Arab revolt of 1936-1939. The Holocaust then made the question of Jewish refuge more urgent still.
Exhausted and unable to reconcile the two sides, Britain referred the problem to the United Nations. In November 1947 the General Assembly voted to recommend partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international administration. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, while Arab leaders and the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it. Fighting between the two communities began almost immediately. After Israel's declaration, armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon entered the former Mandate territory.
The war lasted into 1949 and ended with a series of armistice agreements rather than peace treaties. Israel held more territory than the partition plan had allotted it, Transjordan took control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt administered Gaza. No Arab state was established in Palestine. Roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe." Historians continue to debate the balance of flight, fear and deliberate expulsion, and Israel did not allow most refugees to return.
In the following years, hundreds of thousands of Jews left or were pushed out of Arab countries, and many settled in Israel alongside survivors from Europe. Israel joined the United Nations in 1949 and built a democratic state with a rapidly growing population. The unresolved questions of borders, refugees, Jerusalem and Palestinian statehood shaped later wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973, and they still define the region's politics today.