The 1948 Arab–Israeli War (15 May 1948 – 10 March 1949), also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine (29 November 1947 – 14 May 1948) as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine, and in the context of Zionism and the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, there had been tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British in Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, proposing to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and an internationally administered corpus separatum for the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The land allocated to the Arab State included about 43% of Mandatory Palestine. The land allocated to the Jewish State, who constituted a third of the population, was 56% of Mandatory Palestine. While Jewish leaders in Palestine supported the plan, leaders of the Palestinian Arab community and in the broader Arab world did not. The following day, the conflict escalated into a civil war with attacks by Palestinian militias and mobs on Jewish areas. As the two communities battled, the British withdrew.
In April 1948, Zionist forces launched an offensive codenamed Plan Dalet, during which they conquered and depopulated cities, villages, and territories in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. Just before the expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine, Zionist leaders announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. The following morning, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and expeditionary forces from Iraq launched an invasion into Palestine, taking control of the Arab areas and attacking Israeli forces and settlements.*David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: Israeli and Arab Strategy and Diplomacy, p. 153.
Book: What Happened Where , p. 307, by Chris Cook and Diccon Bewes, published by Routledge, section from book: Arab-Israeli War 1948–9: Israel was invaded by the armies of its Arab neighbours on the day the British Mandate ended, 15 May 1948. After initial Arab gains, Israel counter-attacked successfully, enlarging its national territory...Benny Morris (2008), p. 401.Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, University of Michigan Press, 2009 p. 4: 'A combined invasion of a Jordanian and Egyptian army started ... The Syrian and the Lebanese armies engaged in a token effort but did not stage a major attack on the Jewish state.' The 10 months of fighting took place mostly on the territory of the British Mandate and in the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon, interrupted by several truce periods.Rogan and Shlaim 2007 p. 99.
By the end of the war, the State of Israel controlled about 78% of the former territory of Mandatory Palestine: all of the area that the UN had proposed for a Jewish state, as well as almost 60% of the area proposed for an Arab state,Cragg 1997 pp. 57, 116. including Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla (Ramle) area, Upper Galilee, some parts of the Negev, the west coast as far as Gaza City, and a wide strip along the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. Israel also took control of West Jerusalem, which was meant to be part of an international zone for Jerusalem and its environs. Transjordan took control of East Jerusalem and what became known as the West Bank, annexing it the following year. The territory known today as the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.
Expulsions of Palestinians, which had begun during the civil war, continued during the Arab-Israeli war. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in multiple massacres, such as occurred in the expulsions from Lydda and Ramla. These events are known today as the Nakba (Arabic for "the catastrophe") and were the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem. A similar number of Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Arab states in the three years following the war, 260,000 of whom went to Israel.Morris, 2001, pp. 259–260.Fischbach, Michael R. Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries. Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 27
Background
Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine, and in the context of Zionism and the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, there had been tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British. British policies dissatisfied both Arabs and Jews. In 1920, the Arab leaders were very disappointed with Britain. In 1916, the British commander-in-chief in Cairo had made an agreement with the Emir of Mecca: if the Arabs rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, the British would provide them with arms and money and support the formation of an independent Arab state. Around 30,000 older rifles and a smaller amount of modern weapons were supplied by the British, and a very large area from the Red Sea to Damascus was conquered.T. E. Lawrence: Revolt in the dessert, 1927
Britain backtracked from its promise that an independent Arab state would be formed. In 1920, Britain let French troops attack the Arab Kingdom of Syria, crushing its army and overthrowing its government. Arab opposition developed into the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, while the Jewish opposition developed into the 1944–1947 Jewish insurgency in Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and the City of Jerusalem.United Nations: General Assembly: A/RES/181(II): 29 November 1947: Resolution 181 (II). Future government of Palestine.
The General Assembly resolution on Partition was greeted with overwhelming joy in Jewish communities and widespread outrage in the Arab world. In Palestine, violence erupted almost immediately, feeding into a spiral of reprisals and counter-reprisals. The British refrained from intervening as tensions boiled over into a low-level conflict that quickly escalated into a full-scale civil war.Greg Cashman, Leonard C. Robinson, An Introduction to the Causes of War: Patterns of Interstate Conflict from World War 1 to Iraq, Rowman & Littlefield 2007 p. 165. Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon,Imperial Endgame: Britain's Dirty Wars and the End of Empire, Palgrave/Macmillan 2011 p. 57 Ilan Pappé (2000), p. 111
Efraïm Karsh (2002), p. 30 Benny Morris (2003), p. 101
From January onwards, operations became increasingly militarised, with the intervention of a number of Arab Liberation Army regiments inside Palestine, each active in a variety of distinct sectors around the different coastal towns. They consolidated their presence in Galilee and Samaria.Yoav Gelber (2006), pp. 51–56 Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni came from Egypt with several hundred men of the Army of the Holy War. Having recruited a few thousand volunteers, al-Husayni organised the blockade of the 100,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem.Dominique Lapierre et Larry Collins (1971), chap. 7, pp. 131–153
To counter this, the Yishuv authorities tried to supply the city with convoys of up to 100 armoured vehicles, but the operation became more and more impractical as the number of casualties in the relief convoys surged. By March, Al-Hussayni's tactic had paid off. Almost all of Haganah's armoured vehicles had been destroyed, the blockade was in full operation, and hundreds of Haganah members who had tried to bring supplies into the city were killed.Benny Morris (2003), p. 163 The situation for those who dwelt in the Jewish settlements in the highly isolated Negev and north of Galilee was even more critical.
While the Jewish population had received strict orders requiring them to hold their ground everywhere at all costs,Dominique Lapierre et Larry Collins (1971), p. 163 the Arab population was more affected by the general conditions of insecurity to which the country was exposed. Up to 100,000 Arabs, from the urban upper and middle classes in Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, or Jewish-dominated areas, evacuated abroad or to Arab centres eastwards.Benny Morris (2003), p. 67
This situation caused the United States to withdraw its support for the Partition Plan, encouraging the Arab League to believe that the Palestinian Arabs, reinforced by the Arab Liberation Army, could put an end to the plan. However, the British decided on 7 February 1948 to support the annexation of the Arab part of Palestine by Transjordan.Henry Laurens (2005), p. 83
Although doubt took hold among Yishuv supporters, their apparent defeats were due more to their wait-and-see policy than to weakness. David Ben-Gurion reorganised Haganah and made conscription obligatory. Every Jewish man and woman in the country had to receive military training. Thanks to funds raised by Golda Meir from sympathisers in the United States, and Stalin's decision to support the Zionist cause, the Jewish representatives of Palestine were able to sign very important armament contracts in the East. Other Haganah agents recovered stockpiles from the Second World War, which helped improve the army's equipment and logistics. Operation Balak allowed arms and other equipment to be transported for the first time by the end of March.Arnold Krammer (1974), p. 89
Ben-Gurion invested Yigael Yadin with the responsibility to come up with a plan of offence whose timing was related to the foreseeable evacuation of British forces. This strategy, called Plan Dalet, was readied by March and implemented towards the end of April.David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: Israeli and Arab Strategy and Diplomacy, Routledge 2004 p. 89. A separate plan, Operation Nachshon, was devised to lift the siege of Jerusalem. 1500 men from Haganah's Givati brigade and Palmach's Harel brigade conducted sorties to free up the route to the city between 5 and 20 April. Both sides acted offensively in defiance of the Partition Plan, which foresaw Jerusalem as a corpus separatum, under neither Jewish nor Arab jurisdiction. The Arabs did not accept the Plan, while the Jews were determined to oppose the internationalisation of the city, and secure it as part of the Jewish state.David Tal, pp. 89–90. The operation was successful, and enough foodstuffs to last two months were trucked into Jerusalem for distribution to the Jewish population.Dominique Lapierre et Larry Collins (1971), pp. 369–381 The success of the operation was assisted by the death of al-Husayni in combat.
During this time, fighters from Irgun and Lehi massacred a substantial number of Palestinians at Deir Yassin. The attack was widely publicized and had a deep impact on the morale of the Palestinian population and contributed to generate the exodus of the Arab population.
At the same time, the Arab Liberation Army was roundly defeated at Mishmar HaEmek in its first large-scale operation,Benny Morris (2003), pp. 242–243 coinciding with the loss of their Druze allies through defection.Benny Morris (2003), p. 242
With the implementation of Plan Dalet, the Haganah, Palmach and Irgun forces began conquering mixed zones. The Palestinian Arab society was shaken as Tiberias, Haifa, Safed, Beisan, Jaffa and Acre were all captured and more than 250,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled.Henry Laurens (2005), pp. 85–86