1948 Palestine war

This article is about the entire conflict in Palestine in 1948. For the civil war phase, see 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine. For the international phase, see 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
"Palestine war" redirects here. For the broader conflict, see Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

1948 Palestine war
Part of the intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
From top to bottom, left to right:
Date30 November 1947 – 20 July 1949
(1 year, 7 months, 2 weeks and 6 days)
Location
Mandatory Palestine, Sinai Peninsula, southern Lebanon
Result
Territorial
changes

1949 Armistice Agreements:

Belligerents

Yishuv
(before 14 May 1948)
 Israel
(after 14 May 1948)

Before 26 May 1948:

After 26 May 1948:

Foreign volunteers:

 United Kingdom

Commanders and leaders
Mandatory Palestine Gordon MacMillan
Strength
Israel: c. 10,000 initially, rising to 115,000 by March 1949

Arabs: c. 2,000 initially, rising to 70,000, of which:

  • Egypt: 10,000 initially, rising to 20,000
  • Iraq: 3,000 initially, rising to 15,000–18,000
  • Syria: 2,500–5,000
  • Transjordan: 8,000–12,000
  • Lebanon: 1,000[7]
  • Saudi Arabia: 800–1,200
  • Arab Liberation Army: 3,500–6,000
 British Security Forces: 70,000
Casualties and losses
USSOC historian Stanley Sandler estimates 6,373 killed (about 4,000 troops and 2,373 civilians)[8] Benny Morris writes that 5,700– 5,800 were killed.[9] Between +5,000[8] and 20,000 (including civilians and armed irregulars),[10] among which 4,000 soldiers for Egypt, Jordan and Syria; other estimate: 15,000 Arab dead and 25,000 wounded.[11] Aref al-Aref gives the number of Palestinian deaths as 13,000, with the majority of that number being civilians.[12][13] Ilan Pappé writes that "a few thousand died in massacres."[14] Benny Morris estimates total Palestinian losses at +5,800, and that around 800 civilians and prisoners of war were massacred.[9]

The 1948 Palestine war[a] was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine.[16][17][18][19][20][21] During the war, the British withdrew from Palestine, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel, and over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled. It was the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict.

The war had two main phases, the first being the 1947–1948 civil war, which began on 30 November 1947,[22] a day after the United Nations voted to adopt the Partition Plan for Palestine, which planned for the division of the territory into Jewish and Arab sovereign states. During this period the British still maintained a declining rule over Palestine and occasionally intervened in the violence.[23][24] Initially on the defensive, the Zionist forces switched to the offensive in April 1948.[25][26] In anticipation of an invasion by Arab armies,[27] they enacted Plan Dalet, an operation aimed at securing territory for the establishment of a Jewish state.[28]

The second phase of the war began on 14 May 1948, with the termination of the British Mandate and the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel. The following morning, the surrounding Arab armies invaded Palestine, beginning the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The Egyptians advanced in the south-east while the Jordanian Arab Legion and Iraqi forces captured the central highlands. Syria and Lebanon fought with the Israeli forces in the north. The newly formed Israel Defense Forces managed to halt the Arab forces and in the following months began pushing them back and capturing territory. By the end of the war, the State of Israel had captured about 78% of former territory of the mandate, the Kingdom of Jordan had captured and later annexed the area that became the West Bank, and Egypt had captured the Gaza Strip. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which established the Green Line demarcating these territories.

During the war, massacres and acts of terror were conducted by and against both sides. A campaign of massacres and violence against the Arab population, such as occurred at Lydda and Ramle and the Battle of Haifa, led to the expulsion and flight of over 700,000 Palestinians, with most of their urban areas being depopulated and destroyed. This violence and dispossession of the Palestinians is known today as the Nakba (Arabic for "the disaster")[29] and resulted in the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem.

  1. ^ Nisan, Mordechai (2015). Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression, 2d ed. McFarland. p. 284. ISBN 978-0-7864-5133-3. This Jewish-Druze partnership was often referred to as a "covenant of blood," in recognition of the common military yoke carried by the two peoples for the security of the country.
  2. ^ "The Druze in Israel: Questions of Identity, Citizenship, and Patriotism" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 24 February 2022.
  3. ^ Palestine Post, "Israel's Bedouin Warriors", Gene Dison, August 12, 1948
  4. ^ AFP (24 April 2013). "Bedouin army trackers scale Israel social ladder". Al Arabiya. Archived from the original on 31 March 2022. Retrieved 7 May 2015.
  5. ^ Anita Shapira, L'imaginaire d'Israël : histoire d'une culture politique (2005), Latroun : la mémoire de la bataille, Chap. III. 1 l'événement p. 91–96
  6. ^ Benny Morris (2008), p.419.
  7. ^ Pollack, 2004; Sadeh, 1997
  8. ^ a b Sandler, Stanley (2002). Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 160. ISBN 978-1-57607-344-5. Archived from the original on 20 March 2023. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  9. ^ a b Morris (2008), p. 406.
  10. ^ Esber, Rosemarie (2009). Under the Cover of War. Arabicus Books & Media. p. 28.
  11. ^ Clodfelter, Micheal (2017). Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1492–2015 (4th ed.). McFarland. p. 572. ISBN 978-0-7864-7470-7.
  12. ^ R. Khalidi 1997: Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/khal15074. "[...] al-Arif, in al-Nakba, vol. 6, is able to list the names, dates, and places of death of 1,953 Palestinians (out of a total he puts at 13,000) who died as “martyrs” in the war of 1947-49."
  13. ^ Henry Laurens, La question de Palestine, Vol. 3. 1947-1967, l'accomplissement des prophéties (2007), citing al-Nakba, vol. 6
  14. ^ 1. Pappe I. A History of Modern Palestine. 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press; 2022.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Middle East Institute. The Palestinian Nakba: What Happened in 1948 and Why It Still Matters. Archived from the original on 17 October 2022. Retrieved 17 October 2022 – via YouTube.[unreliable source?]
  17. ^ Michael R. Fischbach, an American scholar of the archives of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, estimates that, in all, Palestinians lost some 6 to 8 million dunams (1.5 to 2 million acres) of land, not including communal land farmed by villages or state land. Mattar, Philip (2005). "Al-Nakba". In Mattar, Philip (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Palestinians. Infobase. ISBN 9780816069866. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022.
  18. ^ Firestone, Reuven (2012). Holy War in Judaism: The Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea. Oxford University Press. pp. 10, 296. ISBN 978-0-19-986030-2. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022. To Jews, the Jewish-Arab war of 1947–1948 is the War of Independence (milchemet ha'atzma'ut). To Arabs, and especially Palestinians, it is the nakba or calamity. I therefore refrain from assigning names to wars. I refer to the wars between the State of Israel and its Arab and Palestinian neighbors according to their dates: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982.
  19. ^ Caplan, Neil (2011). The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories. John Wiley & Sons. p. 17. ISBN 978-1-4443-5786-8. Perhaps the most famous case of differences over the naming of events is the 1948 war (more accurately, the fighting from December 1947 through January 1949). For Israel it is their 'War of Liberation' or 'War of Independence' (in Hebrew, milhemet ha-atzama'ut) full of the joys and overtones of deliverance and redemption. For Palestinians, it is Al-Nakba, translated as 'The Catastrophe' and including in its scope the destruction of their society and the expulsion and flight of some 700,000 refugees.
  20. ^ Caplan, Neil (1997). Futile Diplomacy: The United Nations, the Great Powers, and Middle East Peacemaking 1948–1954. Vol. 3. Frank Cass & Co. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-7146-4756-2. Although some historians would cite 14 May 1948 as the start of the war known variously as the Israeli War of Independence, an-Nakba (the (Palestinian) Catastrophe), or the first Palestine war, it would be more accurate to consider that war as beginning on 30 November 1947.
  21. ^ "nakba" نكبة. Almaany. p. 1. Retrieved 21 August 2021.
  22. ^ Benny Morris (2008), p.77
  23. ^ Benny Morris (2008), pp. 77–79
  24. ^ Tal (2003), p.41
  25. ^ Morris (2004), p.13: "The Haganah stayed on the defensive, wishing not to annoy the British while it re-organised and armed for war; it knew that the real challenge would be posed not by the Palestinians but by the armies of the surrounding states. Until the end of January 1948, neither side had the upper hand. But in February and March, Arab ambushers inflicted major defeats on Haganah convoys along the roads, especially between Tel Aviv and (Jewish West) Jerusalem. It appeared to the Yishuv’s leaders that, besieged, Jewish Jerusalem – with a population of 100,000 – might fall; there were similar fears regarding several clusters of Jewish rural settlements around Jerusalem and in western Galilee. The defeats and significant casualties suffered caused the Yishuv to rethink its strategy. At the beginning of April, the Haganah switched to the offensive, at last unleashing a series of major counter-attacks."
  26. ^ Benny Morris (2008), p.77–78
  27. ^ Morris (2004), p.163: "The British evacuation, which would remove the last vestige of law and order in the cities and on the roads, was only weeks away, and the neighbouring Arab states were mobilising to intervene. The Yishuv was struggling for its life; an invasion by the Arab states could deliver the coup de grâce. It was with this situation and prospect in mind that the Haganah chiefs, in early March, produced ‘Tochnit Dalet’ (Plan D), a blueprint for securing the emergent Jewish state and the blocs of settlements outside the state’s territory against the expected invasion on or after 15 May."
  28. ^ Khalidi, Walid (1 October 1988). "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine". Journal of Palestine Studies. 18 (1): 4–19. doi:10.2307/2537591. ISSN 0377-919X. JSTOR 2537591. 'Plan Dalet' or 'Plan D' was the name given by the Zionist High Command to the general plan for military operations within the framework of which the Zionists launched successive offensives in April and early May 1948 in various parts of Palestine. These offensives, which entailed the destruction of the Palestinian Arab community and the expulsion and pauperization of the bulk of the Palestine Arabs, were calculated to achieve the military fait accompli upon which the state of Israel was to be based.
  29. ^


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