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 fighting ended, the State of Israel would exist, roughly 700,000 Palestinians would be refugees, thousands of people would be dead, and Israel would control considerably more territory than the United Nations had allotted to the proposed Jewish state.
The year would become the foundation of two radically different national memories. For Jewish Israelis, 1948 would be remembered as Ha’atzmaut, Independence. For Palestinians, it would become the Nakba, the Catastrophe. To understand how both emerged from the same war, we have to begin several months before Israel declared independence.
First Came a Civil War
The first phase of the war was not Israel fighting the surrounding Arab states. There was no Israel yet. From late November 1947 until May 1948, Palestine descended into civil war between its Jewish and Arab communities as British authority gradually disappeared.
The two populations entered that war in very different positions. The Jewish community had spent decades building political organizations, governing institutions, labor networks, defense organizations, and other structures that increasingly resembled those of a state. Its principal military organization, the Haganah, was relatively organized and capable of mobilizing large numbers of fighters.
Palestinian society was much less prepared. The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 had been brutally suppressed by Britain, leaving Palestinian political and military leadership weakened by death, imprisonment, exile, and internal division. When the conflict began in late 1947, Palestinians did not have anything comparable to the centralized institutions the Jewish community had developed.
As Britain prepared to leave, violence spread. Roads became battlefields, transportation routes were attacked, towns and neighborhoods came under siege, and civilians on both sides were killed. Palestinian and Jewish communities that had existed alongside one another were increasingly separated by war.
Before Israel had even declared independence, the map of Palestine was beginning to change.
Then Israel Declared Independence
On May 14, 1948, as the British Mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed 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 countries now had a sovereign state of their own.
The following day, armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq entered the fighting. What had begun as a civil war inside Mandatory Palestine had become an international war between the new State of Israel and neighboring Arab states.
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 powerful Arab nations descending upon a helpless Israel.
The Arab forces were divided, relatively small, poorly coordinated, and pursuing competing political goals. Transjordan possessed the strongest Arab army, the British-trained Arab Legion, but King Abdullah was also interested in expanding his own kingdom into the Arab areas of Palestine. Egypt and Transjordan distrusted one another, and the invading armies never operated under an effective unified command.
Israel, meanwhile, mobilized intensely and brought the major Jewish military organizations under the newly created Israel Defense Forces. It also obtained desperately needed weapons, including important shipments from Czechoslovakia. As the war progressed, Israel’s military position strengthened significantly, and it eventually fielded more troops than the Arab forces opposing it.
Israel survived the war and won it, but at enormous cost. About 6,000 Israelis were killed, close to one percent of the country’s Jewish population. By the time armistice agreements ended the fighting in 1949, however, Israel controlled approximately 78 percent of former Mandatory Palestine, substantially more territory than the UN partition plan had proposed for the Jewish state.
For Israelis, the war had secured independence. For Palestinians, the same war had transformed their society.
The Nakba
During the fighting, roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, more than half of the Palestinian Arab population. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated, many of which were subsequently destroyed or repopulated, while cities including Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lydda, and Ramle were dramatically transformed.
Those numbers can make the event sound abstract. It was not.
Families left houses, businesses, farms, schools, orchards, cemeteries, photographs, furniture, documents, and possessions accumulated over generations. Many believed the displacement would be temporary and that they would return when the fighting ended. Some families carried the keys to the houses they had locked behind them, and those keys eventually became one of the most enduring symbols of Palestinian displacement.
Most did not return. During the war, Israel adopted a policy against allowing the mass return of Palestinian refugees, and much of the property they left behind eventually came under Israeli control. The decision not to permit a general return became one of the defining consequences of the war.
Palestinians call this experience the Nakba, Arabic for “the Catastrophe.” The term means more than military defeat. It encompasses the loss of homes and land, the destruction or depopulation of communities, the fragmentation of families, and the transformation of much of the Palestinian population into refugees.
It describes the loss not simply of territory, but of a society as people had known it.
Did Palestinians Flee, or Were They Expelled?
Few questions about 1948 have generated more argument.
For decades, a common Israeli narrative held that Palestinians had largely left voluntarily, often after Arab leaders instructed them to evacuate temporarily so invading Arab armies could defeat Israel. The traditional Palestinian narrative emphasized deliberate Zionist and Israeli expulsions and described the exodus as part of a campaign to remove Palestinians from the territory of the new Jewish state.
The historical record does not support either explanation as a complete account of what happened.
Some Palestinians fled because civilians flee wars. Particularly during the early months of fighting, members of the wealthier and middle classes left cities and conflict zones expecting to return after the violence subsided. As Palestinian institutions weakened and military defeat spread, fear and social collapse contributed to further flight.
There were also cases in which local Palestinian or Arab military authorities instructed civilians, particularly women and children, to evacuate specific areas. What historians have not found is evidence of a general order from Arab governments or the Palestinian national leadership directing the Palestinian population as a whole to abandon the country. In fact, there are documented cases of Arab leaders telling Palestinians not to leave. The old explanation that the refugee crisis occurred primarily because Arab leaders simply told everyone to flee does not survive the historical record.
At the same time, deliberate expulsions by Zionist and later Israeli forces were real. Israeli forces removed Arab populations from a number of towns and villages, particularly in areas considered militarily or strategically important, and the scale of direct expulsion increased during parts of the war.
One of the clearest examples occurred in Lydda and Ramle in July 1948. Israeli forces expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians from the two towns, forcing many to walk toward Arab-held territory during the summer heat.
Fear was another powerful force. In April 1948, fighters from the Irgun and Lehi, two Jewish paramilitary organizations outside the mainstream Haganah, attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. More than one hundred people were killed, including civilians. Mainstream Jewish authorities condemned the attack, but news of the massacre spread rapidly through Palestinian communities and contributed to fears that other villages could meet the same fate.
Later access to Israeli military and state archives transformed historians’ understanding of the refugee crisis. The work of Israeli historians including Benny Morris demonstrated that there was no general Arab order explaining the mass exodus and documented numerous expulsions by Jewish and Israeli forces. Morris argues that the Zionist leadership did not enter the war with a single comprehensive order to expel the entire Arab population, but that expulsions occurred, an atmosphere favoring population transfer developed during the fighting, and Israeli authorities ultimately decided not to permit a mass refugee return. Other historians, including Ilan Pappé, interpret the evidence as demonstrating a more centrally planned campaign of ethnic cleansing.
That historiographical argument remains important, but it should not obscure what is well established. Palestinians became refugees for multiple reasons, including direct expulsion, military attacks, fear of fighting or atrocities, the collapse of Palestinian society, and ordinary wartime flight. Local evacuation orders played a role in some places, but there was no general Arab command responsible for the exodus.
Whatever argument we have about terminology or planning, roughly 700,000 people were no longer living in their homes when the war was over.
Independence and Catastrophe Happened Together
This is the part of 1948 that can be hardest to hold together. While Palestinian families were losing homes and communities, Jewish families were celebrating the creation of a refuge they believed might finally make them safe.
For Jewish people, Israeli independence was not an abstract political victory. The Holocaust had ended only three years earlier, after governments around the world had repeatedly demonstrated that Jewish survival could depend on whether another country was willing to protect Jews, admit refugees, or offer somewhere to escape. Israel meant that Jewish people would possess political sovereignty and the ability to defend themselves.
For Palestinians, that refuge came with a devastating reality. Families were scattered, villages disappeared, homes and land were lost, and hundreds of thousands of people found themselves outside the new state and unable to return.
One population experienced the creation of Israel as national liberation and refuge. Another experienced the same historical transformation as dispossession and exile.
Both experiences belong to the history of 1948.
Another Population Was Also Uprooted
The upheaval surrounding Israel’s creation was not confined to Palestine. Across the Middle East and North Africa, centuries-old Jewish communities would also shrink dramatically or disappear during the years and decades surrounding Israel’s establishment.
The circumstances varied considerably from country to country. Jews in places including Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Morocco, and Tunisia experienced different combinations of antisemitic violence, political persecution, arrests, discriminatory laws, confiscation, expulsion, insecurity following the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Zionist encouragement to immigrate to Israel. Some left under direct coercion, some fled deteriorating conditions, and others emigrated voluntarily. Treating all of these experiences as a single identical expulsion would be as misleading as pretending the upheaval did not occur.
Over time, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population of Arab and Muslim-majority countries left, with many settling in Israel. Their displacement and migration are sometimes invoked as though they somehow cancel the Palestinian Nakba. They do not. Nor does acknowledging the Nakba justify erasing what happened to Jewish communities elsewhere in the region.
The histories were different, but there was an important difference in what followed. Most Jewish immigrants and refugees who reached Israel were eventually incorporated as citizens of a state that regarded their arrival as part of its national purpose. Palestinian refugees had no Palestinian state waiting to receive them, and many remained stateless or lived for generations under varying legal restrictions in neighboring countries.
One tragedy does not settle the moral account of another.
Both belong in the history.
The Palestinian State Never Appeared
When the fighting ended in 1949, it ended with armistice agreements rather than a comprehensive peace treaty. The ceasefire boundaries became known collectively as the Green Line. They were never originally intended to serve as permanent international borders, but they became one of the most important geographic reference points in the conflict.
Israel controlled approximately 78 percent of former Mandatory Palestine. Transjordan controlled the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and later annexed the territory. Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip but did not annex it. Jerusalem itself was divided between Israeli control in the west and Jordanian control in the east.
The Arab Palestinian state envisioned by the 1947 UN partition plan never came into existence. Its proposed territory had instead been divided among Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.
Palestinians were now geographically and politically fragmented. Roughly 150,000 Palestinian Arabs remained within Israel and would eventually become Israeli citizens, although they lived under military administration until 1966. Others lived under Jordanian control in the West Bank or Egyptian administration in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands more lived as refugees across the region.
There was now a sovereign Jewish state.
There was still no sovereign Palestinian one.
The Question That Never Went Away
Almost immediately, the Palestinian refugees became one of the central unresolved issues of the conflict. Palestinians argued that people who had fled or been expelled should be allowed to return to their homes. Israel resisted a large-scale return, both for security reasons and because allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians back into the country threatened the Jewish majority upon which the new state’s identity depended.
In December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 194. Among its provisions, the resolution stated that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, while compensation should be paid for property belonging to those choosing not to return and for certain losses or damage. Palestinians would subsequently cite the resolution as an important basis for the right of return. Israel and its supporters have disputed that interpretation and the extent to which the resolution creates an individual or inherited legal right.
Underneath the legal argument is a political conflict that has never disappeared. For Palestinians, return is tied to homes, property, family history, and the injustice of being displaced. For Israel, a mass return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants could eliminate the Jewish demographic majority and fundamentally alter the state created in 1948.
The refugee issue therefore became more than a disagreement about where people could live. It touched the fundamental national aspirations of both populations, which is one reason it has remained so extraordinarily difficult to resolve.
Two Memories of the Same Year
This is why 1948 still sits underneath so many arguments about Israel and Palestine.
Seen primarily through Jewish history, the year can appear almost miraculous. A people subjected to centuries of persecution and nearly annihilated in Europe established a sovereign state in its ancestral homeland and successfully defended that state in war.
Seen through Palestinian history, the same period looks catastrophic. A people who had constituted the majority population of Palestine lost much of the land in which they had lived, hundreds of their communities were depopulated, and roughly 700,000 people became refugees.
Neither national memory is imaginary, but neither memory by itself is sufficient.
Jewish independence happened, and Palestinian dispossession happened. Arab armies invaded the newly declared State of Israel, and Israeli forces expelled Palestinian civilians. Jewish people had compelling historical reasons to seek sovereignty and refuge, and Palestinians did not therefore lose their claim to their homes or their own right to self-determination.
Acknowledging these facts together does not mean pretending every action was equivalent or responsibility was evenly distributed. It means refusing to make one people’s history disappear in order to tell the other’s.
What 1948 Left Behind
When the guns fell silent, the political landscape had been transformed. Israel existed as a sovereign state controlling more territory than the UN partition plan had assigned it. The Palestinian state envisioned by that plan did not exist. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were refugees, Jerusalem was divided, and the armistice boundaries left fundamental questions about territory, refugees, security, sovereignty, and recognition unresolved.
Just as importantly, Israelis and Palestinians carried radically different lessons from the war into the decades that followed. For many Jewish Israelis, 1948 demonstrated exactly why Jewish sovereignty and the ability to defend themselves were necessary. For Palestinians, it demonstrated how quickly homes, land, community, and political rights could be lost when they lacked a state capable of protecting them.
Those memories became part of each people’s national identity, and they would shape almost everything that followed: subsequent wars, the Palestinian national movement, debates over borders and refugees, Israeli security policy, occupation, resistance, peace negotiations, and even the continuing argument over how this history should be told.
Independence and catastrophe were not separate histories that happened to occur in the same place.
They were intertwined consequences of the same war.
Understanding what came next requires understanding both.
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