Hours after British Mandate authority formally lapsed and Israeli leaders proclaimed the new state's independence, five Arab nations sent troops across its borders, rejecting the United Nations partition plan. The resulting war, fought until 1949 armistice agreements, redrew the map of the Middle East, displaced roughly 700,000 Palestinians, and secured Israel's survival as a state.
At midnight on May 14 into May 15, 1948, the British Mandate for Palestine formally expired, ending three decades of British rule. Just hours earlier, David Ben-Gurion had stood in the Tel Aviv Museum and read a declaration of independence establishing the State of Israel, fulfilling a Zionist dream decades in the making.
The international response was immediate and violent. Egypt's air force bombed Tel Aviv within hours. By May 15, regular armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq had crossed into the new state's territory, joining Palestinian militias already fighting since the UN's partition vote the previous November. Arab governments framed the invasion as a rescue mission for Palestinian Arabs and a rejection of what they considered an illegitimate partition imposed by outside powers.
The war that followed lasted roughly nine months. Israel, though outnumbered, gradually gained ground, expanding beyond the UN's proposed partition boundaries. When armistices were signed in 1949, roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled or been expelled from their homes — an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe — while Israel had secured its existence as a sovereign state, setting the stage for decades of continuing conflict.
Key people: David Ben-Gurion