The Creation of Israel and the Nakba
Ben-Gurion read the declaration at 4 p.m. Eleven minutes later Washington recognised the state. By the end of the war, 700,000 Palestinians had left villages that no longer had names.
Open
At four in the afternoon on the fourteenth of May, nineteen forty eight, a man read a declaration aloud in a museum in Tel Aviv. Eleven minutes later the United States recognised the state it created.
It is usually told from there. Two peoples, one piece of ground, an ancient claim on each side.
The papers from that year are full of a third thing. An empire that had promised the same territory to two peoples in one sentence and was leaving on a deadline. And a king whose army invaded the next morning, who had already agreed in private, twelve days before the United Nations voted, to divide the country with the people he was about to fight.
Scene 1Fifty six per cent
The twenty ninth of November, nineteen forty seven. The United Nations General Assembly votes to partition Mandatory Palestine.
The arithmetic is the argument, so here it is.
The Jewish state gets fifty six per cent of the land, including the Negev desert, and inside it live four hundred and ninety eight thousand Jews and four hundred and seven thousand Arabs.
The Arab state gets forty three per cent, with seven hundred and twenty five thousand Arabs and ten thousand Jews. Jerusalem and Bethlehem are to be international.
The Jewish Agency accepts. The Arab Higher Committee rejects it. The Arab League says it will resist by force.
Look at the first of those two populations again. Four hundred and ninety eight thousand and four hundred and seven thousand.
A state that is forty five per cent the other people is not a solution on paper. It is a question about what happens next, and both sides understood that in nineteen forty seven.
Scene 2Before any army crossed a border
The war did not begin in May. It began the week after the vote, between communities that had been living in the same towns.
By March the Jewish paramilitaries were running a coordinated plan to hold the territory allotted to them and the roads between their population centres. Arab irregulars were attacking settlements and cutting the convoys to Jerusalem.
On the ninth of April, fighters from two of the smaller Jewish paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin, outside Jerusalem, and killed between a hundred and seven and two hundred and fifty four civilians. The number is still disputed. The effect is not. News of it moved across Palestine faster than any army and people began leaving villages that had not been attacked.
Four days later an Arab force ambushed a medical convoy on the road to Mount Scopus and killed seventy eight doctors, nurses and patients.
This is five months before the invasion, and the violence is already reciprocal and already aimed at civilians.
Scene 3Eleven minutes
The British mandate was due to expire at midnight on the fourteenth of May, and Britain had announced it was going regardless of what it left behind.
That afternoon David Ben-Gurion read the declaration in Tel Aviv.
· Israeli Declaration of Independence · May 14, 1948
“We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”
Washington recognised it eleven minutes later. Moscow followed three days after that.
The next morning the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon crossed the borders.
Scene 4What the fighting settled
The armistice agreements were signed in nineteen forty nine, and the map they froze was not the map the United Nations had drawn.
Israel held seventy eight per cent of Mandatory Palestine, not fifty six. Transjordan held the West Bank and the old city of Jerusalem. Egypt held Gaza.
No Arab state was established in Palestine. The territory allotted to it was taken by Israel and by two Arab governments.
Between seven hundred thousand and seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians had left. Some fled the fighting. Some were expelled at gunpoint, which is documented at Lydda and Ramle and in villages in the Galilee. Some left expecting to come back within weeks.
Four hundred and eighteen villages were emptied. Two hundred and ninety three of them were destroyed afterwards. Buildings demolished, orchards uprooted, cemeteries bulldozed.
None of the refugees were permitted to return.
The United Nations mediator was a Swedish diplomat named Count Folke Bernadotte, who had spent the war negotiating prisoners out of German camps. This is from his report.
· Report to the United Nations · September 16, 1948
“The most tragic aspect of the Palestine refugee problem is that the refugees themselves were the victims of a conflict which was not of their making.”
He was shot dead in Jerusalem the following day by members of one of the Jewish paramilitaries.
Five accounts
Five accounts, and on this subject more than any other in this catalogue, each one is used as a weapon against the others. They are set out here in their own terms first.
victorZionist / Israeli
The Israeli account
The first account begins in Europe, not in Palestine.
Its premise is that the Jewish position as a minority in other peoples' countries had been tested to destruction. Theodor Herzl argued in the eighteen nineties that European antisemitism was not a phase and could not be reformed away. Fifty years later, a third of the Jews in the world had been murdered.
On that reading, sovereignty is not a preference. It is the only arrangement under which the argument stops being about the goodwill of a host.
The practical case is the record between the wars. Land bought, immigration under British permit, and institutions built before there was a state: a governing agency, a labour federation, a university.
And the decisive fact of nineteen forty eight, from inside it, is that partition was accepted and then five armies crossed the border.
Chaim Weizmann had put the harder version of the argument a decade earlier, when Britain was proposing to cap Jewish immigration.
“It would be a crime against humanity to reduce the number of Jews so that the Arabs may enjoy greater ease.”
Read the full account
Narrative
The State of Israel was born from two historical forces: the 2,000-year Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and the catastrophe of the Holocaust, which destroyed one-third of the world's Jewish population and proved that Jewish survival required Jewish sovereignty. Theodore Herzl, who convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, argued that anti-Semitism was ineradicable within European society and that Jews would never be safe as a minority in other peoples' nations. The Holocaust vindicated his diagnosis with six million deaths.
The Zionist movement built its presence in Palestine through legal land purchase and immigration under Ottoman and later British rule. The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which the British government endorsed "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," provided international legitimacy. Jewish immigration accelerated during the 1920s and 1930s. The Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) established governing institutions (the Jewish Agency, the Histadrut labor federation, the Hebrew University) that formed the skeleton of a state. By 1947, the Jewish population of Palestine had grown from 83,000 (11% in 1922) to 630,000 (33%).
The Israeli narrative emphasizes that the Jewish leadership accepted the UN Partition Plan despite its limitations (the proposed Jewish state included the Negev desert, lacked control of Jerusalem, and contained a nearly equal Arab population) while the Arab leadership rejected it. The Arab Higher Committee's rejection and the subsequent invasion by five Arab armies framed the 1948 war as a defensive struggle for survival, not a war of conquest. In Ben-Gurion's formulation, "We accepted the UN plan, they rejected it and attacked us."
The War of Independence killed 6,373 Israelis, approximately 1% of the Jewish population. The sacrifice is central to Israeli national memory. The war produced the "Ein Brera" (no choice) ethos: Israel fights because it must, not because it wants to. The integration of 600,000 Jewish immigrants between 1948 and 1951 (Holocaust survivors from Europe, Jews expelled from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and North Africa) doubled the population and created an existential demographic and economic challenge that defined the state's first decade.
Regarding the Palestinian exodus, the traditional Israeli narrative held that Palestinian leaders and Arab radio broadcasts instructed civilians to leave, promising they could return after Arab armies expelled the Jews. Benny Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988), written by an Israeli historian using newly declassified Israeli military archives, demonstrated that the reality was more complex: some Palestinians fled voluntarily, some were expelled by Israeli forces, some were driven out by psychological warfare, and many fled in the general chaos of war. Morris documented specific expulsions (Lydda, Ramle) alongside cases of voluntary departure and argued that "the creation of the problem was almost inevitable given the Yishuv's ideological disposition to transfer."
The Israeli position on refugees holds that Resolution 194's right of return is impractical: the absorption of millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants would end Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Israeli negotiators have offered compensation and limited family reunification in various peace proposals (Camp David 2000, Olmert Plan 2008) while insisting that the bulk of refugees be resettled in a future Palestinian state or in host countries. The parallel displacement of approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab countries, who lost property, businesses, and communities, is cited as a de facto population exchange that should be recognized alongside the Palestinian displacement.
Arguments
- Jewish sovereignty was necessitated by 2,000 years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust
- The Jewish leadership accepted the UN Partition Plan; the Arab leadership rejected it and initiated war
- The 1948 war was a defensive struggle for survival against five invading armies
- 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries constituted a parallel displacement
Sources
- 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
- O Jerusalem [dt.]
- A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
vanquishedPalestinian
The Palestinians
The second account begins with a sentence written in London in nineteen seventeen.
At the time the Balfour Declaration promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, about nine in ten people living there were Arabs, and none of them were consulted. Balfour said so himself two years later, in a memorandum, writing that in Palestine the British did not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants.
One government promising a second people the land of a third is where this account starts, and everything after is read through it.
The case put to the United Nations in nineteen forty seven was made by Jamal Husseini.
“The case of the Arabs of Palestine was based on the principles of international justice. It was that of a people which desired to live in undisturbed possession of the country where Providence and history had placed them.”
And the core of the account is not the war. It is what followed the war. Four hundred and eighteen villages emptied, most of them then demolished, and a permanent refusal of return that was a decision taken afterwards, in peacetime, by a government in control of the territory.
Their descendants now number about five point nine million registered refugees.
Read the full account
Narrative
Palestinians were a majority in their own land when their dispossession began. In 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was issued, Arabs constituted approximately 90% of Palestine's population. The declaration, one nation promising another nation the territory of a third, was made without consulting the indigenous population. Lord Balfour himself acknowledged this in a 1919 memorandum: "In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country." The Palestinian narrative begins with this act of erasure: a people's homeland was promised away by an imperial power that had no right to dispose of it.
The Nakba was not a natural disaster or an unintended consequence of war. Walid Khalidi, in All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992), documented 418 Palestinian villages that were depopulated during 1948-1949. Of these, 293 were totally destroyed: buildings demolished, orchards uprooted, cemeteries bulldozed. The destruction was systematic. Moshe Dayan, who would later serve as Israeli Defense Minister, acknowledged in a 1969 speech at the Technion: "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either."
The experience of expulsion varied but followed patterns. In Lydda (Lod) and Ramle on July 12-13, 1948, Israeli forces under Yigal Allon expelled approximately 50,000-70,000 Palestinian residents. The operation, documented by Benny Morris and in detail by Israeli journalist Ari Shavit in My Promised Land (2013), was carried out in extreme heat. Residents were given hours to leave, marched eastward toward the West Bank, and stripped of valuables at checkpoints. Dozens died of heat and dehydration on the march. In the village of al-Dawayima on October 29, 1948, Israeli soldiers massacred civilians including, according to Israeli military reports later declassified, women and children. The number killed ranges from 80 to 200 depending on the source.
The refugee camps became permanent. Palestinians expected the displacement to be temporary (that international pressure, UN resolutions, or Arab military power would enable their return). Resolution 194, adopted by the General Assembly on December 11, 1948, resolved "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." It was never implemented. The camps (Ain el-Hilweh in Lebanon, Balata in the West Bank, Jabalia in Gaza) solidified into permanent communities. Keys to destroyed homes were kept and passed to children. The names of villages were preserved in family identity, in camp sections, in memory.
Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020) frames 1948 not as the beginning of the conflict but as one phase in a century-long struggle between an indigenous people and a settler-colonial project supported by successive imperial powers (Ottoman, British, American). Khalidi argues that the Palestinian experience is defined by repeated denial: denial of nationhood ("A land without a people for a people without a land", the Zionist slogan attributed to Israel Zangwill), denial of displacement (the myth that Palestinians left voluntarily), and denial of political agency (the reduction of Palestinian identity to refugee status).
The Palestinian narrative does not deny Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. It asks why Palestinians should pay the price for a European crime. The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans in Europe; its victims were resettled in a land where the indigenous population had no role in the genocide and no obligation to provide territorial compensation. This argument, that Palestinian dispossession cannot be morally justified by Jewish persecution elsewhere, is the foundation of the Palestinian case, stated by Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and every Palestinian negotiating position since 1948.
Arguments
- Palestinians were a majority in their own land and were not consulted about its disposition
- The Nakba was a systematic displacement (418 villages depopulated, 293 completely destroyed)
- Specific expulsions (Lydda, Ramle) are documented by Israeli as well as Palestinian historians
- Palestinians should not bear the cost of a European crime; the Holocaust was perpetrated in Europe, not Palestine
Sources
- All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
- Historical Landmarks in the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
- The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
bystanderBritish Mandate
The British mandate
The third account is the one that handed the problem over, and its own documents are the evidence against it.
The Balfour Declaration contains two promises in a single sentence. A national home for the Jewish people, and nothing that prejudices the civil and religious rights of the existing non Jewish communities. Britain spent twenty eight years discovering that those cannot both be honoured.
The record is a sequence of commissions and white papers that each tilted one way and were withdrawn when the other side pushed back. A nineteen thirty paper proposed limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase and was abandoned under political pressure within months. A nineteen thirty seven commission proposed partition for the first time and went nowhere.
Then in nineteen forty seven Britain announced a date, handed the file to the United Nations, and left. The mandate's last act was to stop administering a conflict it had built the terms of.
Read the full account
Narrative
Britain governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 to 1948 and left behind a conflict it had done much to create and nothing to resolve. The Mandate's contradictions were built into its founding documents. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised "a national home for the Jewish people" while simultaneously pledging that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." These two commitments were irreconcilable from the start, and Britain spent 28 years trying to balance them before giving up.
British policy oscillated between Zionist and Arab demands according to strategic calculations. The 1922 Churchill White Paper affirmed the Balfour Declaration but distinguished between a Jewish "national home" and a Jewish state. The 1930 Passfield White Paper, responding to the 1929 Arab riots, proposed restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchase, and was quickly withdrawn under Zionist political pressure. The 1937 Peel Commission, investigating the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, first proposed partition: a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a British zone around Jerusalem. The Arab leadership rejected it. The 1939 MacDonald White Paper, responding to the ongoing Arab revolt, restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years and promised independence for a unitary Palestinian state within ten years, effectively repudiating the Balfour Declaration at the worst possible moment for European Jewry.
The White Paper's immigration restrictions came into force just as the Holocaust intensified. Ships carrying Jewish refugees from Europe were turned away from Palestine. The Struma, carrying 769 Romanian Jews, was refused entry and sank in the Black Sea on February 24, 1942; one person survived. The Exodus 1947, carrying 4,515 Holocaust survivors, was intercepted by the Royal Navy and its passengers forcibly returned to displaced persons camps in Germany, an event that generated worldwide sympathy for the Zionist cause and humiliation for Britain.
The Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, a three-year Palestinian uprising against British rule and Jewish immigration, lasted longer than any other armed resistance during the Mandate. Britain suppressed it with 20,000 troops, collective punishment (home demolitions, village curfews), and the arming of Jewish auxiliary police. The revolt killed over 5,000 Palestinians and broke the Palestinian political and military leadership (Hajj Amin al-Husseini fled to Iraq and eventually Nazi Germany), leaving the Palestinian community without effective leadership when the critical decisions of 1947-1948 arrived.
By February 1947, Britain had had enough. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, referred the question to the United Nations, and Britain announced its intention to withdraw by May 15, 1948. The withdrawal was orderly in administrative terms (Britain transferred no authority to either side) and catastrophic in its consequences. British forces left behind a power vacuum that both sides rushed to fill. The parallels with the Partition of India, occurring simultaneously under the same Labour government, are direct: in both cases, Britain withdrew from a mandate it could no longer manage, left behind incompatible communities, and departed before the consequences of its policies were resolved.
Arguments
- The Balfour Declaration's two promises (a Jewish national home and Arab rights) were irreconcilable from the start
- British policy oscillated between Zionist and Arab demands according to strategic calculation
- The 1939 White Paper restricted Jewish immigration during the Holocaust
- Britain withdrew in 1948 without transferring authority to either side, leaving a power vacuum
Sources
- A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate
- Chomsky and the Question of Palestine
revisionistNew Historians / Revisionist
The new historians
The fourth account came out of a filing cabinet.
In the late nineteen eighties, Israeli state and military archives from nineteen forty eight began to be declassified, and a group of Israeli scholars went through them.
What they found did not confirm either national story. Benny Morris's study of the refugee question documented several different causes operating at once: people fleeing an active war, people expelled at gunpoint by Israeli units, deliberate psychological pressure including the use of Deir Yassin's reputation as a warning, and the collapse of Palestinian civil administration.
His conclusion was that the refugee problem was born of war rather than of a plan, which satisfied nobody. Israelis objected to the documented expulsions. Palestinians objected to the absence of a master design.
And the scholarship kept moving after that. Some of the same historians later reached political conclusions their own earlier work is used to argue against, which is itself worth knowing when the findings are quoted.
Read the full account
Narrative
The "New Historians", a group of Israeli scholars who gained access to declassified Israeli, British, and UN archives in the late 1980s, challenged the foundational narratives of both Israeli and Palestinian historiography. Their work did not produce a single revisionist narrative but a body of evidence-based scholarship that complicated the established stories on both sides.
Benny Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1988, revised 2004) was the breakthrough. Using Israeli Defense Forces archives, Morris documented that the Palestinian exodus had multiple causes: voluntary flight from war zones, expulsion by Israeli forces, psychological warfare (loudspeaker broadcasts warning of attacks, Deir Yassin as a deterrent), and general collapse of Palestinian social structures. He identified specific instances of expulsion (Lydda, Ramle, villages in the Galilee) as well as cases where Palestinians left of their own accord. His conclusion: "The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting." Morris's revised edition was more blunt: the evidence showed "an intent to clear the borders and main roads of Arab communities."
Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000) challenged the narrative that the Arab states invaded in a coordinated effort to destroy Israel. Shlaim demonstrated that King Abdullah I of Transjordan had reached a tacit understanding with the Jewish Agency before the war, an arrangement to divide Palestine between them, with Abdullah taking the West Bank. The invasion, in Shlaim's account, was not a unified Arab assault but a series of uncoordinated campaigns driven by each state's own interests. Abdullah wanted the West Bank; Egypt wanted to prevent Abdullah from getting it; Syria had designs on the Galilee. The Palestinians themselves had little agency in these calculations.
Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) went further than Morris, arguing that Plan Dalet constituted a deliberate plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, not an ad hoc response to military circumstances but a premeditated strategy to create a Jewish-majority state by removing the Arab population. Pappe's thesis is contested by Morris and others, who argue that Plan Dalet was a military plan to secure territory, not an ethnic cleansing blueprint, and that the distinction matters. The debate between Morris and Pappe (both using Israeli archives, reaching different conclusions) illustrates the limits of archival evidence in resolving questions of intent.
Simha Flapan's The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987) identified seven myths of the 1948 war: that Zionists accepted the UN partition in good faith, that Arabs rejected all compromise, that Palestinians left voluntarily, that the Arab invasion was coordinated to destroy Israel, that the Arab states refused to negotiate, that Israel was a David against a Goliath, and that Israel has always sought peace. Flapan did not argue that the opposite of each myth was true; he argued that the reality was more complex than either side's narrative allowed.
The New Historians' collective contribution was to demonstrate that 1948 was not a simple morality tale: neither the heroic birth of a nation from the ashes of the Holocaust nor the straightforward ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people. It was a war fought by human beings making strategic, moral, and sometimes criminal decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The evidence does not produce a single narrative. It produces a plurality of documented facts that support different but overlapping interpretations. The conflict over what happened in 1948 continues in the archives as much as it does on the ground.
Arguments
- Israeli archives document both voluntary flight and deliberate expulsion of Palestinians
- The Arab invasion was uncoordinated; King Abdullah had a prior understanding with the Jewish Agency
- Plan Dalet's intent (military security or ethnic cleansing) remains debated among Israeli historians
- The reality of 1948 is more complex than either side's founding narrative allows
Sources
bystanderArab Regional / Pan-Arab Nationalism
The Arab states
The fifth account is the one least often told, and it is documented mostly in private papers.
On the seventeenth of November nineteen forty seven, twelve days before the United Nations vote, the king of Transjordan met a senior figure from the Jewish Agency in secret and reached an understanding. Transjordan would take the Arab areas of Palestine. The Jewish Agency would not contest it.
He did not send his army in May to create a Palestinian state. He sent it to annex one, and it was commanded in the field by a British officer.
Egypt's decision was about Transjordan, not about Palestine. If the Hashemites took Arab Palestine, Cairo's standing in the Arab world shrank, so the Egyptian army went into the Negev and Gaza to stop that happening.
The five armies barely coordinated. Their public statements were a single position. Their instructions were five different ones.
Read the full account
Narrative
On May 15, 1948, five Arab armies crossed into Palestine. The public rhetoric was unified: the Arab League would prevent the partition of Palestine and defend Palestinian Arab rights. The private calculations were not. King Abdullah I of Transjordan had met secretly with Golda Meir of the Jewish Agency on November 17, 1947 (twelve days before the UN vote), and reached an understanding: Transjordan would annex the Arab portions of Palestine, and the Jewish Agency would accept the partition boundaries. Abdullah was not fighting to create a Palestinian state. He was fighting to enlarge his own kingdom.
Egypt's intervention was driven by King Farouk's rivalry with Abdullah. If Transjordan annexed Arab Palestine, Egypt's position as the leading Arab state would be diminished. Farouk sent his army into the Negev and Gaza not to liberate Palestinians but to prevent Hashemite expansion. The Egyptian army in Gaza operated independently of the other Arab forces; coordination between the five armies was minimal. Glubb Pasha (Sir John Bagot Glubb), the British officer commanding Transjordan's Arab Legion, the most effective Arab fighting force in the war, later wrote that the Arab armies "ichly operated independently, with no unified command, no agreed strategy, and no shared war aims." The Arab League's Military Committee, chaired by Iraqi general Ismail Safwat, had warned in March 1948 that the Arab states were unprepared for war. The warning was ignored.
Syria's Shukri al-Quwatli sent troops into the Galilee with territorial ambitions of his own: Greater Syria, a project that would unite Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan under Damascus. Iraq sent an expeditionary force that fought in the northern West Bank but had no clear political objective beyond pan-Arab solidarity and domestic political pressure. Lebanon's contribution was token: a few hundred soldiers who crossed into the Galilee and withdrew. The Arab intervention was not a coordinated military campaign for Palestinian self-determination. It was five states pursuing five different objectives, united only by the rhetoric of opposition to Zionism.
The Palestinians themselves were treated as objects, not agents, by the Arab states. The Arab Higher Committee under Hajj Amin al-Husseini had been weakened by the British suppression of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt; al-Husseini himself was discredited by his wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany. The Arab League established the All-Palestine Government in Gaza in September 1948, headed by al-Husseini, but it controlled no territory, had no army, and was immediately marginalized by Egypt, which administered Gaza without consulting it. Jordan formally annexed the West Bank in 1950, granted Jordanian citizenship to its Palestinian residents, and suppressed Palestinian national organizations. Egypt administered Gaza as a military zone. Palestinians there were not offered Egyptian citizenship. UNRWA was established in 1949 to administer refugee camps that the Arab host states declined to absorb.
The 1948 war exposed the gap between pan-Arab rhetoric and Arab state interests. The Palestinian refugee problem was created in part by the war that the Arab states launched, then sustained by the Arab states' refusal to resettle refugees, a refusal that served the political purpose of maintaining the Palestinian cause as a lever against Israel and the West. Fawaz Gerges and Rashid Khalidi have documented how Palestinian national aspirations were systematically subordinated to the interests of the surrounding states. Jordan's King Hussein crushed the PLO in Black September (1970). Syria intervened in Lebanon partly to control, not support, Palestinian factions. The Arab states that declared war in 1948 in the name of Palestine produced no Palestinian state. They produced larger Jordan, occupied Gaza, and 700,000 refugees whose descendants remain stateless.
Arguments
- The five Arab armies pursued five different territorial objectives; there was no coordinated plan for Palestinian statehood
- Abdullah of Transjordan had pre-arranged with the Jewish Agency to annex Arab Palestine. The war enlarged his kingdom, not Palestinian rights
- Egypt and Jordan administered Gaza and the West Bank respectively without offering Palestinians political representation or sovereignty
- Arab states maintained the refugee problem as a political instrument, refusing resettlement while invoking Palestinian suffering
- Palestinian national aspirations were subordinated to inter-Arab rivalries from 1948 through Black September (1970) and beyond
Sources
- Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine
- The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
- A Soldier with the Arabs: A British Officer's Memoir of the Arab Legion
The turn
And here is what each of them needs to leave out.
The Israeli account is a true description of why a state was necessary and it stops at the border of what the state then did. Five armies invaded, and four hundred and eighteen villages were emptied, and the refusal to let anyone return was a policy made after the shooting stopped.
From the record
Expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda, Ramle, and other communities documented by Israeli historiansPlan Dalet's territorial aims beyond the UN partition boundariesDeir Yassin massacre and its role in Palestinian flightPalestinian life and society before 1948The Palestinian account is a true description of a dispossession and it is quietest about the choice its own leadership made in nineteen forty seven, and about the Arab governments whose armies arrived with their own maps in their pockets.
From the record
Internal Palestinian political divisions and leadership failuresRejection of the partition plan and the consequences of that decisionJewish historical connection to the land predating modern ZionismAtrocities against Jewish civilians during the 1947-1948 warThe British account presents twenty eight years of failure as an impossible balancing act, which lets an administration describe as tragedy a contradiction it wrote itself and enforced with troops.
From the record
British suppression of the Arab Revolt and its destruction of Palestinian leadershipBritish arming and training of Jewish paramilitary forcesThe depth of Palestinian society and governance before the MandateThe new historians have the strongest evidence and the weakest protection against being used. A finding about intent is not a finding about outcome, and both sides quote the half of the archive they need.
From the record
Emotional and experiential dimensions of both Israeli and Palestinian memoryThe Holocaust's role in shaping the moral urgency of Jewish statehoodPost-1948 developments that have transformed the conflictArab Regional / Pan-Arab Nationalism
And the account of the Arab governments is the most cynical and among the best sourced, and it explains the armies rather than the people. Pointed the wrong way it becomes an argument that Palestinians were only ever betrayed by other Arabs, which is a way of saying nothing was done to them at all.
From the record
Genuine popular Arab solidarity with Palestinians that existed alongside state cynicismThe military courage of individual Arab soldiers who fought and died believing they were defending PalestineIsrael's own responsibility for creating the refugee crisis through expulsion and preventing returnThe Palestinian resistance movements that eventually asserted independence from Arab state control
Close
There have been five major wars since, and the thing the nineteen forty nine armistice lines were supposed to be temporary about is now older than almost everyone living inside them.
Between seven hundred thousand and seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians were displaced and not allowed back.
Over the following quarter century, around eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews left or were driven out of Arab countries, most of them to Israel. Both of those numbers belong to this history, and neither one cancels the other.
The mediator who wrote that the refugees were victims of a conflict not of their making had that report on the record for one day.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1947November 1947
- Killed
- ~13KArab and ~6,000 Jewish combatants and civilians killed in…
- Displaced
- ~700-750KPalestinians displaced; ~600,000 Jewish immigrants…
- Place
- Israel/Palestine
Key figures
- David Ben-GurionChairman of the Jewish Agency, first Prime Minister of Israel, read the Declaration of Independence1886 to 1973
- Hajj Amin al-HusseiniGrand Mufti of Jerusalem, Chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, opposed partition1895 to 1974
- Count Folke BernadotteUN Mediator for Palestine, proposed refugee return and territorial adjustments; assassinated by Lehi on September 17, 1948
- Chaim WeizmannPresident of the World Zionist Organization, first President of Israel1874 to 1952
- King Abdullah I of JordanKing of Transjordan, commanded the Arab Legion, annexed the West Bank in 1950
- Ralph BuncheUN mediator who succeeded Bernadotte, negotiated the 1949 armistice agreements, Nobel Peace Prize 19501904 to 1971
- Golda MeirSignatory of the Declaration of Independence, later Prime Minister of Israel1898 to 1978
Primary sources
· Israeli Declaration of Independence · May 14, 1948
“We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”
· Statement to the UN Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, on behalf of the Arab Higher Committee · September 1947
“The case of the Arabs of Palestine was based on the principles of international justice; it was that of a people which desired to live in undisturbed possession of the country where Providence and history had placed them.”
· Progress Report to the UN General Assembly · September 16, 1948 (one day before his assassination)
“The most tragic aspect of the Palestine refugee problem is that the refugees themselves were the victims of a conflict which was not of their making.”
· Testimony to the Peel Commission · 1937
“It would be a crime against humanity to reduce the number of Jews so that the Arabs may enjoy greater ease.”
Threads
- The Sykes-Picot AgreementThe Balfour Declaration of 1917, issued in the same imperial moment as Sykes-Picot, promised a Jewish national home in a land that was 90 percent Arab. The collision it set up became the 1948 war and the conflict that endures
- The HolocaustIBM sold the machines that sorted people by ancestry. The trains ran on time.
- The Cyrus CylinderHe freed the Babylonians, the Jews, and the Egyptians, and put it in writing. 2,500 years before human rights became a legal concept.