Creation of Israel and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War
- Date
- 14 May 1948 (war May 1948 – July 1949)
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Middle East (Palestine / Israel)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
On 14 May 1948, as the British Mandate over Palestine expired, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv. The declaration followed the United Nations partition plan of 29 November 1947, which Jewish leaders accepted and Arab states rejected.
The next day, 15 May 1948, armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon entered the former mandate, beginning the first interstate Arab–Israeli war, which continued until armistice agreements concluded in 1949. Israel survived and expanded its territory beyond the UN partition boundaries, controlling roughly 78 percent of mandatory Palestine. For Palestinian Arabs the war is remembered as the Nakba ('catastrophe'): an estimated 700,000 people fled or were expelled and became refugees, and hundreds of villages were depopulated. The war left the West Bank under Jordanian control and Gaza under Egyptian administration, with no Palestinian state established. The conflict reshaped the Middle East, created an enduring refugee question, and inaugurated a series of Arab–Israeli wars that defined regional politics for the rest of the century.
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Empires active in 14 May 1948 (war May 1948 – July 1949)
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Korean War25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953
- Cuban Missile Crisis16–28 October 1962
- Fall of Saigon and reunification of Vietnam30 April 1975 (reunified 1976)
- Khmer Rouge Seize Cambodia and Declare Year Zero1975
- The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi7 April – 19 July 1994
- The September 11 attacks11 September 2001
Further reading
The wider story
A History of the Modern Middle East
The go-to survey of the region from the late Ottoman era to the present.
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