State of Israel founded

On May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion read a declaration proclaiming the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel. It was the last day of the British Mandate for Palestine, which ended at midnight. The next day, armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon entered the territory, and the first Arab-Israeli war began. Armistice agreements in 1949 ended the fighting, with Israel holding more land than the United Nations had proposed. About 6,000 Israelis, roughly one percent of the Jewish population, died, and some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes and were not allowed to return, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.

The Zionist movement, founded at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, sought a Jewish homeland in response to European antisemitism. Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917 supported 'a national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine, whose Arab majority opposed it, and the mandate years saw growing Jewish immigration and violent conflict between the two communities. The Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, intensified the demand for a refuge. In November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international control. Zionist leaders accepted the plan, and Arab leaders rejected it, and civil war began within days.

By the time the state was declared, Jewish forces had already taken several towns and cities, and many Palestinian civilians had left. Historians still debate how much of the flight resulted from fear, from the collapse of Palestinian leadership, and from deliberate expulsions. The United States recognized Israel within minutes of independence taking effect, and the Soviet Union soon followed. Jordan took the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt took Gaza. The war created an unresolved refugee question and a lasting conflict, and Israel took in hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries.