The war began before Israel existed.
Within days of the United Nations vote to partition Palestine in November 1947, fighting broke out between the Jewish and Arab communities already living there.
By the time the war ended, the State of Israel would exist.
Palestine would not.
Roughly 700,000 Palestinians would be refugees. Thousands of Jewish people and Palestinians would be dead. Hundreds of Palestinian villages would be emptied. Israel would control considerably more territory than the United Nations had allotted it.
And the same year would become the foundation of two radically different national memories.
Ha’atzmaut: Independence.
Al-Nakba: the Catastrophe.
To understand how both came from the same war, we have to begin in the months before Israel declared independence.
First came a civil war
The first phase of the war was not Israel fighting neighboring Arab countries.
There was no Israel yet.
From late November 1947 until May 1948, Palestine descended into civil war between its Jewish and Arab communities.
The two sides were not equally prepared.
The Jewish community had spent decades building institutions that increasingly resembled those of a state, including political leadership and organized military forces.
Palestinian society entered the war much weaker. An earlier revolt against British rule had been brutally suppressed; killing, imprisoning, or exiling much of its leadership.
Meanwhile, the British were preparing to leave, and as their authority disappeared, violence spread. Roads became battlefields. Towns were attacked. Communities were isolated. Civilians fled. And before Israel had even declared independence, the map of Palestine was already beginning to change.
Then Israel declared independence
On May 14, 1948, the British Mandate ended. That day, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel.
For Jewish people, the significance was almost impossible to overstate. Three years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, a people who had spent centuries living as vulnerable minorities in other nations finally had a country of their own.
People danced in the streets of Tel Aviv.
The next day, armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq entered the war. What had been a civil war became an international one. The image that survives in much Israeli memory is of a tiny new country surrounded by enemies and fighting desperately for survival. There is truth in that memory.
But the military reality was more complicated than the familiar image of five Arab nations descending upon a helpless Israel.
The Arab armies were relatively small, divided, poorly coordinated, and pursuing different interests. Transjordan, which had the strongest Arab force, was interested in taking the West Bank for itself. Egypt and Transjordan distrusted each other. There was no unified Arab command.
Israel, meanwhile, mobilized intensely. It unified its armed forces, obtained desperately needed weapons, and eventually fielded more soldiers at the front than the Arab armies combined.
Israel survived. And it won.
About 6,000 Israelis were killed, roughly one percent of the country’s Jewish population. But when the fighting ended, Israel controlled about 78 percent of former Mandatory Palestine, considerably more than the 55 percent proposed for the Jewish state by the United Nations.
For Israelis, the war had secured independence.
For Palestinians, something very different had happened.
The Nakba
During the war, roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes. More than half the Palestinian Arab population became refugees.
Over 400 Palestinian villages were emptied, and most were later destroyed. Cities that had been mixed or heavily Arab, including Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lydda, and Ramle, were transformed.
An entire society was being unmade.
Behind those numbers were ordinary lives.
People left houses, businesses, schools, orchards, cemeteries, family photographs, furniture, account books, and generations of accumulated belongings. Some locked their doors and took the keys with them, believing they would return when the fighting ended. Their grandchildren still have those keys.
Many never saw their homes again.
Israel barred the mass return of the refugees and transferred much of their abandoned property to the new state.
For Palestinians, this is the Nakba.
The catastrophe.
The word does not simply describe losing a war.
It describes losing a world.
Did Palestinians flee, or were they expelled?
This question has been fought over almost as fiercely as the war itself.
For decades, a common Israeli account held that Palestinians largely left voluntarily, sometimes after Arab leaders instructed them to evacuate temporarily until Arab armies defeated the new Jewish state.
The traditional Palestinian account held that they were systematically driven from their homes as part of a planned campaign.
The historical record is more complicated than either simple version.
Some Palestinians fled because civilians flee wars. Especially early in the conflict, families with the means to leave escaped the fighting and expected to return afterward. As Palestinian leadership and civil order collapsed, fear spread and more people followed.
But deliberate expulsions also happened.
Israeli forces drove Arab populations from towns and villages, particularly in areas considered strategically important, and often prevented them from returning.
One of the largest cases occurred in Lydda and Ramle in July 1948. Israeli forces expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians, forcing many to walk through the summer heat toward Arab-held territory.
Fear also mattered.
In April 1948, fighters from the radical Jewish Irgun and Lehi militias attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem and killed around one hundred people, including civilians.
Mainstream Jewish leaders condemned the massacre. But news of it spread quickly through Palestinian communities. People were terrified that their village might be next. And they ran.
Later examination of Israeli military and state archives undermined the old claim that Palestinians generally left because Arab leaders ordered them to do so. No evidence of a systematic Arab order telling the Palestinian population to flee has been found, and in some places Arab authorities urged civilians to remain.
What historians still debate is something narrower but important: how centrally planned the expulsions were.
Some argue that there was no single master order to remove the Palestinian population, but that expulsions became widespread and were understood, permitted, and sometimes encouraged by Israeli leaders.
Others argue that the evidence shows a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing.
That debate continues.
What is much harder to dispute is what happened on the ground.
There was wartime flight.
There was panic.
There was social collapse.
There was fear created by massacres and reports of massacres.
And there were deliberate expulsions.
Together, they turned roughly 700,000 Palestinians into refugees.
Independence and catastrophe happened together
This is the part of 1948 that is hardest to hold in your head at the same time.
While Palestinian families were losing their homes, Jewish families were celebrating the existence of a refuge they believed might finally make them safe.
For Jewish people, this was not an abstract political victory. The Holocaust had ended only three years earlier. Israel meant that Jewish people would no longer have to depend entirely on another government deciding whether to protect them, admit them, expel them, turn them away, or kill them.
For Palestinians, that refuge came at an unbearable cost. Their villages were disappearing. Their families were scattered or dead. Their homes were being occupied or destroyed. And they were being told they could not return.
One people experienced 1948 as salvation.
The other experienced it as destruction.
Both happened.
Another population was also uprooted
The upheaval surrounding Israel’s creation did not stop at Palestine’s borders.
Across the Middle East and North Africa, ancient Jewish communities also began disappearing.
In countries including Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Morocco, and Tunisia, Jewish populations faced different combinations of violence, hostility, arrests, confiscation, government pressure, and expulsion. Over the following years and decades, most would leave.
Many went to Israel.
This history is sometimes presented as though it cancels the Palestinian Nakba, as if one refugee population can somehow balance another.
It cannot.
But leaving these Jewish communities out would also distort what happened.
Two populations experienced enormous displacement during the creation and consolidation of Israel. Their experiences were not identical, and their departures happened under different circumstances and over different periods.
There was also one enormous difference in what happened afterward.
Most Jewish refugees who reached Israel were eventually absorbed as citizens of a state that considered them part of its people.
Palestinian refugees had no Palestinian state waiting to receive them.
Many remained stateless.
The Palestinian state never appeared
When the war finally ended in 1949, there was no peace agreement. There were only armistices. The lines where the armies stopped became known as the Green Line. Israel controlled about 78 percent of former Mandatory Palestine. Transjordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem was divided between Israeli and Jordanian control.
And the Arab Palestinian state envisioned in the UN partition plan??
It never came into existence.
Its proposed territory had been divided among Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Palestinians were now scattered. Some remained inside the new State of Israel. Others lived under Jordanian control in the West Bank. Others were under Egyptian rule in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands lived as refugees across the region.
There was now a Jewish state.
There was still no Palestinian state.
The question that never went away
Almost immediately, the refugees became one of the central unresolved issues of the conflict. Palestinians insisted that people who had fled or been expelled had the right to return to their homes.
In December 1948, the United Nations passed Resolution 194, which said refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so as soon as practicable, while those who did not return should receive compensation.
Israel rejected a mass return. And the reason went to the heart of why Israel had been created. If hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees returned, the new Jewish state could lose its Jewish majority.
The same question therefore became existential in two completely different ways.
For Palestinians:
We have a right to go home.
For Israelis:
If everyone returns, can a Jewish refuge survive?
More than seven decades later, that issue has never been resolved.
Two memories of the same year
This is why 1948 still sits underneath almost every argument about Israel and Palestine.
If you see the year primarily through Jewish history, it can look miraculous. A people persecuted for centuries and nearly annihilated in Europe established a sovereign state in its ancestral homeland and successfully defended it.
If you see the same year through Palestinian history, it looks catastrophic. A people lost most of its homeland, hundreds of its communities disappeared, and the majority of the Arab population of what became Israel was displaced.
Neither memory is imaginary.
Neither requires erasing the other.
Jewish independence happened.
Palestinian dispossession happened.
Arab armies invaded the new State of Israel.
Israeli forces expelled Palestinian civilians.
Jewish people desperately needed refuge.
Palestinians did not deserve to lose their homes.
History does not require us to choose which of those facts we are willing to acknowledge.
It requires us to acknowledge them together.
What 1948 left behind
When the guns fell silent, the basic shape of the conflict had changed completely. Israel existed. Palestine did not. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were refugees. Jerusalem was divided. The borders were unsettled. The refugee question was unresolved. And two peoples carried away radically different lessons from the same war.
For Jewish Israelis, 1948 demonstrated why Jewish sovereignty and the ability to defend themselves were necessary.
For Palestinians, 1948 demonstrated how easily their land, homes, and rights could disappear when other powers controlled their fate.
Those memories did not fade when the fighting stopped. They became part of each people’s national identity. And they would shape nearly everything that came next.
The wars.
The borders.
The refugees.
The occupation.
The resistance.
The arguments over security and return.
Even the argument over where the story itself should begin.
Independence and catastrophe were not two separate histories.
They happened together.
And neither Israel nor Palestine can be understood without understanding both.
Next: Part 2: The Long Fuse, 1949–1967
