Arms and Armour

1948 Arab–Israeli War

The 1948 Arab–Israeli War (15 May 1948 – 10 March 1949), also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine (29 November 1947 – 14 May 1948) as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line. Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine, and in the context of Zionism and the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, there had been tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British in Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, proposing to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and an internationally administered corpus separatum for the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The land allocated to the Arab State included about 43% of Mandatory Palestine. The land allocated to the Jewish State, who constituted a third of the population, was 56% of Mandatory Palestine. While Jewish leaders in Palestine supported the plan, leaders of the Palestinian Arab community and in the broader Arab world did not. The following day, the conflict escalated into a civil war with attacks by Palestinian militias and mobs on Jewish areas. As the two communities battled, the British withdrew. In April 1948, Zionist forces launched an offensive codenamed Plan Dalet, during which they conquered and depopulated cities, villages, and territories in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. Just before the expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine, Zionist leaders announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. The following morning, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and expeditionary forces from Iraq launched an invasion into Palestine, taking control of the Arab areas and attacking Israeli forces and settlements.

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See also

• ▸Fort Worden
• ▸Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
• ▸Helmet

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