Who attacked first in the 1948 war?

15 May 1948 · The War of Independence

Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, inside the borders the UN had drawn a year earlier, and within hours the regular armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon crossed into the new state. The Arab League announced the invasion itself, in a formal declaration handed to the UN Secretary-General, so there is no ambiguity to litigate: the Arab governments said, in their own words, that they were sending armies across the line the UN had drawn. The war Palestinians call the Nakba was a war their leadership and five Arab governments started and lost. Israel’s own founding, and the war that tried to strangle it in its cradle, are the same event.

Who fought, and how it started

The fighting had two phases. A civil war between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities ran from December 1947, the day after the UN partition vote, through mid-May 1948: Jerusalem was besieged, the road to it cut, and both sides committed massacres, the Haganah-linked Irgun and Lehi at Deir Yassin on 9 April, Arab irregulars and the Arab Legion at Kfar Etzion on 13 May, the day before the state was declared. The second phase began the moment that civil war ended: at midnight on 14-15 May 1948, five uniformed national armies, not militias, crossed international lines into a state that had existed for hours. Israel fought them with the Haganah, reorganized within days into the IDF, a force built mostly from underground militias and Holocaust survivors, against armies that included Transjordan’s British-trained Arab Legion, the best-equipped force in the field.

Where the fronts ran

Egypt pushed up the coast toward Tel Aviv and into the Negev. Transjordan’s Arab Legion, the most professional of the invading forces, took and held East Jerusalem, expelled its Jewish Quarter’s residents, and fought for the corridor to West Jerusalem. Syria and Lebanon attacked in the Galilee and the north, alongside the volunteer Arab Liberation Army already fighting inside the country. Iraqi forces occupied the central hill country later known as the West Bank. Every front was inside or on the border of the state the UN had just voted into existence: this was not a border dispute, it was five governments moving to erase a state before its first week ended.

The course of the war

Two UN-brokered truces punctuate the fighting. The first ran 11 June to 8 July 1948, mediated by Count Folke Bernadotte, whose progress report to the UN that September is the clearest contemporary record of the war’s toll on civilians. When it collapsed, Israel used the ten days of renewed fighting in July to take Lydda and Ramle, whose Arab residents were expelled in the operation, one of the war’s most contested episodes, and any full account owes the reader that context. A second truce followed; Bernadotte himself was assassinated by the Jewish extremist group Lehi on 17 September 1948, days after proposing a peace plan Israel’s government rejected, a reminder that extremism was not confined to one side. From October, Israeli operations, Yoav in the Negev and Hiram in the Galilee, broke the Egyptian and Syrian-Lebanese lines and drove them back; an Egyptian brigade was encircled and besieged for months at Faluja, among its junior officers a young Gamal Abdel Nasser. By January 1949 the Arab armies were beaten in the field, and armistice talks began on the island of Rhodes.

The cost, honestly counted

Israel lost close to 6,000 people, roughly one percent of the Jewish population of the country at the time, the heaviest proportional toll of any war Israel has fought. Precise Arab military losses were never jointly tallied; historians’ estimates for combined Arab and Palestinian dead run into the thousands, with the Arab Legion and Egyptian forces absorbing the heaviest fighting losses. Roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled over the course of the war, a mix that varied village by village and campaign by campaign, and the honest scholarship on that question does not collapse into a single word; see how much of the exodus was flight and how much was expulsion. Within a decade, a comparable number of Jews were expelled or fled Arab and Muslim countries in the war’s aftermath, a mirror exodus rarely mentioned in the same breath. See the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world.

The aftermath

Israel emerged holding about 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River, more than the roughly 55 percent the UN had allocated it, territory won in a defensive war, not planned conquest. Armistice agreements, not peace treaties, were signed with Egypt in February 1949, Lebanon in March, Jordan in April and Syria in July; the Jordan agreement’s own text calls its line an armistice demarcation, not a border. The UN admitted Israel as its 59th member state on 11 May 1949. No Palestinian state was created on the land the Arab invasion had fought to control: Jordan annexed and later governed the West Bank and East Jerusalem for nineteen years, Egypt administered Gaza, and neither state offered Palestinians independence in that time, a fact the standard telling of “occupation” beginning in 1967 leaves unexplained.

How the war is misrepresented today

The most common inversion treats 1948 as a war Israel launched against Palestinian society, when it was a war five Arab states launched against a state one day old, using the Arab League’s own written declaration as their justification. A second inversion collapses the honest, contested question of flight versus expulsion into a single flattened word, “ethnic cleansing,” treated as settled fact rather than as the genuinely disputed historical question it is; see was the creation of Israel in 1948 ethnic cleansing. A third strips the war of its cause entirely, presenting the Nakba as an unprompted catastrophe with no antecedent Arab rejection of partition and no antecedent invasion, a framing kept alive by outlets and campus material that treat the war’s outcome as its origin. See the distinction laid out at Nakba versus War of Independence.

Who attacked first after the UN partition vote · Plan Dalet · The Deir Yassin massacre · Was the creation of Israel in 1948 ethnic cleansing · The rejection record · Who attacked first, every war

Sources

From Who attacked first on the main site.