Both sides made military preparations and skirmished with the other. With an international regime for Jerusalem, November 1947Īrab political and physical opposition to the creation of a Jewish state was as passionately held as were Zionists committed to see their state established. UN Partition Plan Map for two states, an economic union In keeping with a pro-Arab policy, in early 1948, Britain embargoed the import of weapons for Jewish forces and turned over strategic locations to Arab forces in Palestine. Since the late 1930s, Britain did not wish to provoke her Arab or Muslim friends and jeopardize access to oil interests. Instead, it decidedly sided with Arab interests. In the process of leaving Palestine, Britain did not cooperate closely with the Jewish Agency, the main Jewish political body in Palestine. Israel in the Middle East, 1949-1967Īfter the partition vote, Britain promised to evacuate her troops from Palestine by February 1948, but settled eventually on May 14, 1948. France, The United States, and the Soviet Union voted for partition while Britain abstained, and Muslim and Arab states vigorously opposed the partition plan, wanting instead a federal solution, one state in which the Arabs would be the majority. It also called for an international regime for Jerusalem and an economic union between the proposed Arab and Jewish states. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. In spring 1947, Britain turned the issue of Palestine’s future over to the United Nations. When World War II ended in 1945, the British, who had given Jews and Arabs political autonomy but not independence in Palestine, realized that they could neither contain the Zionist aspirations for a Jewish state nor provide protection for the Arab community’s political rights. From 1917 to 1947, the British government-controlled Palestine, securing it for themselves to protect their adjacent interests in Egypt and the Suez Canal as the strategic link to their presence in India. The war was fought over whether a Jewish state should be established in the geographic areas of its ancient homeland, strategically situated in the middle of the Arab and Muslim world. As Egypt’s President Nassar declared about the June 1967 War, it was aimed at Israel’s destruction. And for the Arab world, eradicating the results of this “disaster”-Israel’s creation-became the focal point of political attention, ideological coherence, and resource expenditure for subsequent decades. Though the United States reluctantly and the Soviet Union supported Israel’s creation, Washington and Moscow parted ways, supporting Israel and the Arab world respectively, adding the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East to their keen global Cold War competition. For the next three decades Israel would devote its resources and energy to preserving its territorial integrity and absorbing Jewish immigrants in peril. After some eighty years of step-by-step building of a Jewish national territory, the State of Israel emerged in the shadows of the holocaust. The war crystallized an already emerging Palestinian Arab national desire to wrest Palestine from Israel’s Zionist founders. This was the first of four major Arab-Israeli wars fought over Israel’s legitimacy or geographic size. Instead a ‘technical’ state of war characterized Arab-Israeli relations until 1979, when the Egypt-Israeli Peace Treaty was signed.įor the remainder of the century, the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 had international, regional, and local implications. Brokered by the United Nations, these agreements did not result in the Arab world’s diplomatic recognition of Israel. Lasting for two years, the war ended with armistice agreements signed in 1949 between Israel and four Arab states. Official beginning of the war is usually given as May 14, 1948, the date Israel declared itself an independent Jewish state, but the war’s first of four phases began in November 1947. Otherwise known as Israel’s War of Independence, or, “the nakbah” or disaster to the Arab world because a Jewish state was established, the war was fought between the newly established Jewish state of Israel opposed by Palestinian irregulars, and armies from five Arab states. Ken Stein – The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 – A Short History
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