Jews in the Israeli War of Independence (1948)

The 1948 war, called the War of Independence by Israelis and the Nakba ("catastrophe") by Palestinians, accompanied the birth of the State of Israel, proclaimed on May 14, 1948 by David Ben Gurion. It began with the adoption of the UN partition plan in November 1947, with a civil war phase between the Jewish and Arab communities of Palestine, then transformed, in the aftermath of the proclamation of the State, into an interstate conflict with the intervention of the armies of several neighboring Arab countries. After bloody fighting, punctuated by several ceasefires, the Israeli forces prevailed and extended the territory beyond the lines envisioned by the partition plan, with armistices signed in 1949. The war caused thousands of deaths on both sides and led to the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees, whose fate remains at the heart of the conflict. A founding event for Israel and a foundational trauma for the Palestinians, it remains the pivot of any understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan
• Jewish Virtual Library ↗