1948 Arab-Israeli War: The First War over Israel and Palestine

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was the conflict that accompanied the end of British rule in Palestine and the founding of Israel. It began as a civil war between Jewish and Arab communities after the UN partition vote of November 1947 and widened on 15 May 1948, when neighbouring Arab states invaded. Israel survived and enlarged its territory, while some 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled, an event Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”).

Background

Britain had ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate since the early 1920s. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had promised support for a Jewish national home, and Jewish immigration grew sharply in the 1930s as persecution in Europe increased. Palestinian Arabs, who formed the majority, opposed the Zionist project and demanded independence.

By 1947 the Jewish population was about 600,000–650,000 and the Arab population about 1.2–1.3 million. Exhausted by insurgency and post-war debts, Britain referred the issue to the United Nations. On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly approved the UN Partition Plan, Resolution 181, which divided the territory into a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international zone around Jerusalem.

The Jewish leadership accepted the plan. Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab League rejected it, arguing that the UN had no right to divide a country against the wishes of its majority.

Phase one: civil war (November 1947 – May 1948)

Violence began the day after the vote. In the early months Arab irregulars, including local militias and the volunteer Arab Liberation Army under Fawzi al-Qawuqji, attacked Jewish convoys and isolated settlements. The road to Jerusalem, home to about 100,000 Jews, was largely cut, and the city’s Jewish quarters faced siege.

Jewish forces, led by the Haganah with the smaller underground groups Irgun and Lehi acting separately, were initially on the defensive. In April 1948 they shifted to the offensive under Plan Dalet, which aimed to secure the territory allotted to the Jewish state and the routes to Jewish communities outside it.

April and May brought decisive changes. The Palestinian commander Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was killed in the battle for the village of al-Qastal on 8 April. The next day Irgun and Lehi fighters killed about 100–110 villagers in the Deir Yassin massacre, news of which spread fear across Arab Palestine. Haifa fell to Jewish forces on 21–22 April, Jaffa surrendered on 13 May, and the Arab populations of these and many other towns largely fled.

On 13 May, Arab forces including Transjordan’s Arab Legion captured the Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements south of Jerusalem, where many defenders were killed after surrendering. By mid-May the Palestinian Arab military effort had largely collapsed.

Phase two: the Arab invasion (May – June 1948)

David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel on 14 May, and the Israeli Declaration of Independence took effect at midnight as the mandate ended. The next day the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq crossed into the former mandate, with a limited Lebanese contribution. The Arab League declared that it was intervening to restore order and protect the Arab population.

The Arab states’ aims differed. King Abdullah of Transjordan wanted to annex Arab parts of Palestine, especially the West Bank and Jerusalem, and his British-officered Arab Legion under John Bagot Glubb was the most effective Arab force. Egypt, partly to block Abdullah’s ambitions, sent columns up the coast towards Tel Aviv and into the Negev.

The fighting was fierce. The Egyptians were halted at Ashdod (Isdud) in late May. In Jerusalem, the Arab Legion took the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, which surrendered on 28 May. Repeated Israeli attacks on the Legion’s position at Latrun failed, so Israel built a rough bypass, nicknamed the “Burma Road”, to supply West Jerusalem. On 26 May the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were formally established.

Truces and the Ten Days

A UN-brokered truce took effect on 11 June 1948 and lasted four weeks. Both sides used it to rearm, but Israel gained more: it received weapons from Czechoslovakia despite a UN arms embargo and rapidly expanded its forces. By most estimates Israeli strength rose from about 30,000–35,000 fighters in May to around 100,000 or more by early 1949, outnumbering the Arab expeditionary forces in the field.

Fighting resumed on 8 July in what Israelis call the Ten Days. Israeli forces captured Nazareth and the towns of Lydda (Lod) and Ramle, from which some 50,000–70,000 inhabitants were expelled or fled. A second truce began on 18 July.

The UN mediator, the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte, proposed a new plan that would have given the Negev to the Arabs and Galilee to Israel. On 17 September 1948 he was assassinated in Jerusalem by members of Lehi. His deputy, the American diplomat Ralph Bunche, took over.

Phase three: Israeli offensives (October 1948 – March 1949)

In October Israel launched Operation Yoav against Egyptian forces in the south, capturing Beersheba and isolating an Egyptian brigade in the Faluja pocket. Operation Hiram, at the end of October, took the whole of upper Galilee from the Arab Liberation Army and pushed into southern Lebanon. In both operations, villages were emptied and some massacres of civilians occurred.

Operation Horev in December 1948 and January 1949 drove the Egyptians out of most of the Negev and briefly crossed into Sinai, until British pressure forced an Israeli withdrawal. On 7 January 1949 Israeli fighters shot down five British aircraft, a sign of how close the war came to drawing in a great power. In March 1949 Israeli forces reached the Red Sea at Umm Rashrash, where the city of Eilat was later built.

The Palestinian exodus

The war produced one of the largest refugee crises of the post-war world. Between about 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, more than half of the Arab population of the mandate, left or were driven from their homes. Some 400–500 Arab villages were depopulated, and most were later destroyed or resettled.

Historians long disagreed about the causes. Older Israeli accounts stressed voluntary flight and calls by Arab leaders to leave temporarily, but research by Walid Khalidi, Benny Morris and others found little evidence of general orders to evacuate. Most scholars now see a combination of causes: direct military attack, expulsions in some places, fear spread by massacres, economic collapse and the departure of local elites.

In December 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194, whose paragraph 11 stated that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace should be allowed to do so. Israel refused a large-scale return. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was established in December 1949 to support the refugees, and their descendants today number in the millions.

In the years after the war, several hundred thousand Jews left or were forced out of Arab countries, many of them settling in Israel. The two migrations are often discussed together, although their causes and circumstances differed.

Armistices and new borders

Under Bunche’s mediation, talks that opened on the island of Rhodes in January 1949, followed by separate negotiations on the other fronts, produced a series of armistice agreements: with Egypt on 24 February 1949, Lebanon on 23 March, Transjordan on 3 April and Syria on 20 July. Iraq signed none, leaving its front to Jordan. Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for this work.

The armistice lines, marked in green on the negotiators’ maps and hence called the Green Line, left Israel with about 78 percent of mandate Palestine. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem and formally annexed them in 1950. Egypt administered the Gaza Strip, which became crowded with refugees. Jerusalem was divided between Israel and Jordan.

By the numbers

Legacy

No peace treaties followed the armistices, and the unresolved issues of borders, Jerusalem and refugees fed later conflicts, from the Suez Crisis of 1956 to the Six-Day War of 1967. Defeat discredited Arab governments, contributing to the overthrow of Egypt’s monarchy in 1952 and other coups.

Israelis remember the war as the War of Independence, fought for survival three years after the Holocaust. Palestinians remember it as the Nakba, the loss of their land and society. Since the late 1980s Israeli “New Historians”, using newly opened archives, have challenged older national narratives on both sides, and the war remains one of the most debated events of the twentieth century.

Timeline

• 1947, 29 November: The UN adopts the partition plan; fighting begins the next day.
• 1948, April: Jewish forces adopt Plan Dalet; Deir Yassin massacre on 9 April.
• 1948, 14 May: Israel declares independence in Tel Aviv.
• 1948, 15 May: Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq invade.
• 1948, 28 May: The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City surrenders to the Arab Legion.
• 1948, 11 June – 8 July: First truce.
• 1948, 8–18 July: The Ten Days; Lydda and Ramle fall.
• 1948, 17 September: UN mediator Folke Bernadotte is assassinated.
• 1948, October – 1949, January: Israeli offensives Yoav, Hiram and Horev.
• 1949, 24 February – 20 July: Armistice agreements signed with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Why it matters

The 1948 war created the map of the modern Middle East conflict. It established Israel as a state, left the Palestinians stateless and largely dispersed as refugees, and set Israel against its Arab neighbours for decades. The opposing memories of 1948, independence for one people and catastrophe for another, still shape politics and identity in the region today.