Partition and the Nakba
On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending that Palestine be partitioned into an Arab state and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem placed under international administration. The Jewish population, at the time roughly a third of the total, was allocated about 56 percent of the land, including the fertile coastal plain; the Arab population, still roughly two-thirds of the total, was allocated about 43 percent, mostly hill country and the Gaza area. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, publicly if not always enthusiastically. Palestinian and wider Arab leaders rejected it, arguing that the UN had no right to partition a land whose population had never been consulted, and that the proposed division was inequitable to the majority.
Rejection did not mean acceptance of the status quo was possible either. Within days of the vote, violence broke out between Jewish and Arab militias across the country: a civil war that ran from December 1947 until Britain's formal withdrawal on 14 May 1948, and that had already produced tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees before a single regular Arab army crossed into Palestine.
Declaration, invasion, and the war that followed
On 14 May 1948, the Jewish Agency declared the independent State of Israel. The following day, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq entered the territory, and the war that had been simmering since November became a conventional one as well as a civil one. It lasted, with a series of truces, until armistice agreements were signed through 1949. Israel ended the war controlling roughly 78 percent of Mandate Palestine, considerably more than the 56 percent recommended by the UN partition plan. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem; Egypt held the Gaza Strip. No independent Arab Palestinian state was established anywhere.
The Nakba
For Palestinians, what happened during this war is remembered as the Nakba (النكبة), the catastrophe. Between roughly 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinians, out of a total Arab population of around 1.3 million, were driven out of or fled their homes during 1947–49, according to UN estimates made at the time and largely confirmed by later historical research on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. Some fled in fear of advancing fighting, as civilians do in most wars. Others were expelled outright by Jewish and then Israeli forces, particularly from towns and villages along strategic corridors and the coast. Historians, including Israeli scholars working from Israel's own military archives such as Benny Morris, have documented specific expulsion orders, the depopulation of mixed cities such as Jaffa, Haifa, Lydda and Ramla, and a small number of documented massacres of Palestinian civilians, most infamously at Deir Yassin in April 1948, where more than 100 villagers were killed by Irgun and Lehi fighters, an event that itself accelerated the flight of Palestinians from other villages who feared the same fate.
Around 400 to 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated during the war. Most were subsequently destroyed, their sites in many cases planted over with forests or built over with new Israeli towns, so that little visible trace of them remains today. Israel's 1950 Absentees' Property Law formalised the transfer of refugee land and property to the new state, meaning that even those who hoped to return, or whose flight had been intended as temporary, found there was in most cases no home left to return to and no legal path back.
A war remembered two ways
Israelis mark this same period as their War of Independence: the founding, after centuries of statelessness and the near-annihilation of European Jewry in the Holocaust, of a Jewish state, achieved against the invading armies of five neighbouring countries. Both are true at once: 1948 was, for one people, a hard-won national liberation, and for another, a mass displacement from which they have never been permitted to return.
By the war's end, roughly 150,000 Palestinians remained inside the new state of Israel, becoming a minority within it. The rest, the majority of Mandate Palestine's Arab population, were refugees: in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and further afield. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was established in December 1949 specifically to support them, on the assumption their exile would be temporary. Three-quarters of a century later, many of their descendants are still refugees, still governed by the terms of a resolution (UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948) that affirmed their right to return to their homes or receive compensation, a right that has never been implemented.