People & Histories
November 1947 – July 1949

1948: The War of Independence and the Nakba

After the UN votes to partition Palestine, war breaks out; Israel is born and survives, and some 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians flee or are expelled, never to return.

  • General Assembly Resolution 181 (II): Future Government of Palestine — United Nations General Assembly, United Nations (1947)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
  • The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 — Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1979)
  • World Jewish Population, 2024 (American Jewish Year Book) — Sergio DellaPergola, Springer / Berman Jewish DataBank
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
  • The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel — Ilan Pappé, Yale University Press (2011)
  • Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory — Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Columbia University Press (2007)
  • Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel — Provisional State Council of Israel (1948)
  • The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
  • The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — Ilan Pappé, Oneworld (2006)

Debated by historians warindependencerefugeeslandidentitymigrationpolitics

Part of the story of Israel, Palestinians and Jewish people.

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, for Resolution 181, which divided Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international zone around Jerusalem. The Jewish state was to get about 56 percent of the land, much of it the Negev desert, for a Jewish population that was about a third of the whole. The Jewish Agency accepted; the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it.

  • General Assembly Resolution 181 (II): Future Government of Palestine — United Nations General Assembly, United Nations (1947)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
Jews danced in the streets of Tel Aviv. The next day fighting began.

Civil war: November 1947 to May 1948

The first phase was a war between communities. Arab irregulars attacked Jewish traffic and besieged Jewish Jerusalem; Jewish forces attacked villages and neighbourhoods. From April 1948 the Haganah went on the offensive under Plan Dalet, a military plan to secure the territory of the Jewish state and its approaches, which allowed the destruction or expulsion of hostile villages.

  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
On 9 April Irgun and Lehi fighters killed more than 100 villagers in Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem; days later Arab forces killed about 78 Jewish doctors, nurses and others in a convoy to Hadassah hospital. News of Deir Yassin spread terror. Haifa and Jaffa fell, and their Arab populations largely fled.
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
  • The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 — Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), Cambridge University Press (2007)

Independence and invasion

On 14 May 1948, as the British left, David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel in Tel Aviv. The next day forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon entered Palestine. Israel was outnumbered at first, but its forces were better organised, grew rapidly with immigrants and arms from Czechoslovakia, and won most of the battles that mattered. The Arab states were divided and Jordan’s King Abdullah focused on taking the West Bank.

  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 — Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)

In July 1948 Israeli forces expelled most of the tens of thousands of residents of Lydda and Ramle; in the autumn, operations in the Galilee and the south were accompanied by further expulsions and massacres.

  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
Armistice agreements in 1949 left Israel with about 78 percent of Mandate Palestine. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Egypt the Gaza Strip; the Arab state never came into being.
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)

The refugees

Between about 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinians, more than half the Arab population, became refugees. Walid Khalidi’s survey documents 418 villages depopulated, most later demolished or resettled.

  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
In December 1948 the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194 said refugees wishing to return and live in peace should be allowed to do so. Israel refused, arguing a hostile population would destroy the new state, and used the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law to take over their land and homes.
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
About 150,000 Arabs who remained inside Israel became citizens, but lived under military rule until 1966.
  • The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel — Ilan Pappé, Yale University Press (2011)

The new state’s 1950 Law of Return granted citizenship to any Jew. Holocaust survivors arrived from the DP camps, and over the following decades most of the Jews of the Arab world and Iran, communities often thousands of years old, left or were driven out amid hostility, many of them for Israel.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1979)

Israel lost about 6,000 people, soldiers and civilians, around one percent of its Jewish population. Palestinian and Arab losses were also in the thousands, though less precisely counted.

  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)

Two memories of one year

The same events are a miracle of survival for one people and the destruction of their world for the other. Israeli schoolchildren learn of the few against the many; Palestinian children are shown their grandparents’ keys. Since the 1980s Israeli historians have confirmed from Israeli archives much of what Palestinians had long said about expulsions, and Palestinian historians have collected the oral history of villages that no longer exist.

  • The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 — Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory — Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Columbia University Press (2007)
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
Understanding both memories is the starting point for understanding everything that followed.

How it's seen
Israeli national narrative

The Jews accepted the UN compromise; the Arabs rejected it and attacked, first Palestinian militias and then five Arab armies. Israel fought for its life. Most Arabs fled the fighting, some urged by their own leaders, and their plight stems from the war the Arab side began. At the same time some 850,000 Jews were driven or pushed out of Arab countries, and Israel absorbed them.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel — Provisional State Council of Israel (1948)
  • The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)

Jewish memory

A rebirth after the Holocaust: a sovereign home after nearly 1,900 years, and a refuge that opened its doors to survivors from the DP camps and to Jews driven from Arab lands, which is why many diaspora Jews still feel 1948 as their own story.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)

Palestinian narrative

The partition plan gave a Jewish minority over half the land against the will of the majority. Zionist forces carried out a planned campaign, Plan Dalet, that emptied hundreds of villages through massacres such as Deir Yassin, terror and direct expulsion, then barred the refugees from returning and took their homes and land. Some historians, notably Ilan Pappé, call it ethnic cleansing.

  • The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — Ilan Pappé, Oneworld (2006)
  • All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 — Walid Khalidi (ed.), Institute for Palestine Studies (1992)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
  • Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory — Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Columbia University Press (2007)

Historians since the opening of the archives

Israeli "new historians" such as Benny Morris showed from Israeli archives that there were many expulsions and massacres and that the idea of "transfer" had circulated among Zionist leaders, while finding no single master plan: the exodus was "born of war, not by design". Calls by Arab leaders to flee were rare. Most historians agree Israel's decision to block the refugees' return was deliberate.

  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press (2004)
  • 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War — Benny Morris, Yale University Press (2008)
  • The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 — Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), Cambridge University Press (2007)

Why it matters today

Israel

Israelis call it the War of Independence: the moment a people who had just lost six million in the Holocaust won a state, at the cost of about 6,000 dead, around one percent of the Jewish population. Independence Day is a national celebration, and 1948 is the founding proof that Israel must rely on itself.

Palestinians

Palestinians call it al-Nakba, the catastrophe. Most of their society was uprooted and their villages erased; refugees and their descendants now number millions. Nakba Day, 15 May, the day after Israel's independence, is the central date of Palestinian memory, and the right of return its core demand.

Jewish people

For the first time in nearly 1,900 years Jews had a sovereign state, and today almost half of the world's Jews live in it. Most Jews outside Israel feel some bond with it, even when they criticise its governments, and Israel's wars and politics deeply affect how Jews everywhere are seen and treated.