Who attacked first after the UN partition vote?

30 November 1947 to 14 May 1948 · The civil war

The war that produced Israel’s independence did not start on 15 May 1948, it started six and a half months earlier, and it started with the side that refused to share the land. On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, to divide Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state under the partition plan. The Jewish Agency accepted it that night, publicly, despite borders far smaller than the Zionist movement had hoped for. The Arab Higher Committee, led by allies of the exiled Grand Mufti, rejected it outright, and Arab League secretary-general Azzam Pasha had already promised, weeks before the vote, “a war of extermination and momentous massacre” if partition passed. On the morning of 30 November, Arab gunmen ambushed two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva and killed seven people. That ambush, not any later battle, was the first shot of the war that created Israel.

Who fought it, and where

The war that followed was not yet a war between states, since none existed on the Arab side and the British still nominally governed the country. It was fought between the Jewish community’s defense forces, chiefly the Haganah and the smaller Irgun and Lehi undergrounds, and a patchwork of local Palestinian Arab militias reinforced from outside. Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, the Mufti’s nephew, commanded the irregulars around Jerusalem. From January 1948, the Arab League funneled in the Arab Liberation Army, several thousand volunteers under Fawzi al-Qawuqji who crossed from Syria and Lebanon with Arab government backing, months before the formal invasion that opened the wider 1948 war. The fighting concentrated on the roads and the mixed cities: the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the streets of Jaffa where irregulars fired into neighboring Tel Aviv, and the Galilee towns of Haifa, Tiberias and Safed.

How the war was fought

The pattern set on 30 November held for months. Arab strikes and riots followed almost immediately: on 2 December a mob burned Jewish shops in Jerusalem’s commercial center, and on 30 December Arab refinery workers killed 39 Jewish colleagues at Haifa, answered the next night by a Haganah and Irgun raid on the nearby village of Balad al-Shaykh. From January, al-Husseini’s forces besieged the road to Jerusalem, cutting off roughly 100,000 Jewish residents and ambushing relief convoys; the Nebi Daniel convoy in late March cost some 48 lives, and on 13 April 1948 Arab irregulars ambushed a convoy of doctors, nurses and academics bound for Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, killing 78 of them while a British force stood by nearby. Facing that siege and a British withdrawal already scheduled for mid-May, the Haganah adopted Plan Dalet on 10 March, shifting from static defense to securing the roads and the territory allotted to the Jewish state. Al-Husseini was killed in the battle for the Qastel village on 8 April; the next day, 9 April, Irgun and Lehi fighters attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem. Initial claims of 254 dead were later revised by researchers, Israeli and Palestinian alike, to closer to 100 to 120, but the atrocity was real, and the Jewish Agency condemned it the same week. By late April the momentum had turned: Haifa fell on 21 to 22 April, Tiberias on 18 April, the Arab Liberation Army was routed at Mishmar HaEmek, Safed fell between 6 and 10 May, and Jaffa surrendered on 13 May, a day before the Mandate ended.

The human cost

The Jewish side counted its dead precisely: roughly 1,256 killed in this six-month phase alone, part of the 6,373 Jewish dead across the whole 1948 war, close to one percent of the entire Yishuv. No equivalent Arab registry exists for the period, an honest gap the record has never closed; historians estimate Arab combatant and civilian losses in the low thousands, concentrated in the battles for Haifa, Jaffa and the Galilee towns. Displacement began in this same window, well before the later, larger exodus of the summer: tens of thousands of Arab residents of Haifa and Jaffa left by sea and road as the fighting turned against them, some fleeing combat, some ordered out by their own leadership, some pushed out by Jewish forces securing the roads Plan Dalet required. How much of that movement was flight and how much was expulsion is a genuinely contested question addressed at length on its own page.

How it ended

By 14 May 1948, when Britain completed its withdrawal and David Ben-Gurion declared independence, the Jewish side already held the coastal plain, the roads to Jerusalem, and every major mixed city but the Old City itself. The civil war was, militarily, already decided. What changed the next morning was scale: Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon sent their armies across the border, converting a war between communities into a war between states, the subject of the invasion this civil war set the stage for.

How it’s misrepresented today

The most common distortion simply moves the starting line. Accounts built around the Nakba often open the story at Deir Yassin, or at Plan Dalet’s adoption in March, as if the Jewish side struck first out of an unprovoked design to clear the land. The chronology runs the other way: the war had already been underway for over three months, under a siege that was starving Jerusalem’s Jewish population, when the Haganah shifted from defense to securing the roads the partition plan had promised it. Conceding Deir Yassin as a real and condemned atrocity does not require accepting that it started the war; it happened in month five. The clearer the dates, the harder that inversion is to sustain.

Who attacked first in the 1948 war · Plan Dalet · Nakba vs. War of Independence · Flight or expulsion? · The History They Skip · Statehood

Sources

From Who attacked first on the main site.