The Birth of Israel and the First Arab-Israeli War: A History of Palestine

To understand the roots of the tragic events unfolding in Palestine today, events that have reached the scale of a genocide, we need to turn the pages of history back almost one hundred years. This is a vast and heavy subject. To make sense of the modern face of the Middle East and its deepest breaking points, we will examine it in three main sections:

Part 1: The Establishment of Israel and the 1948–1949 Arab-Israeli War

Part 2: The Britain-Iran Oil Dispute and the Suez Crisis

Part 3: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Lebanon Crisis

I pray for all those who have lost their lives in this ongoing tragedy. My only wish is for the wars to stop. Peace at home, peace in the world.

Herzl (seated in the middle) with members of the Zionist Organization in Vienna, 1896

The movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, known ideologically as Zionism, took shape in the 1880s, largely as a response to the violent persecution of Jewish communities in Russia, known as pogroms. Facing extreme pressure and violence, large numbers of Russian Jews were forced to migrate to Palestine, marking the first practical steps of this movement. Zionism gained significant political momentum in 1896, when a Budapest-born Jewish journalist, Dr. Theodor Herzl, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), a work that effectively became the manifesto of the Zionist movement.

Before turning to the international stage, Herzl made a direct approach to Sultan Abdülhamid II of the Ottoman Empire. He visited Istanbul and requested land in Palestine for the establishment of a Jewish state, offering to help manage Ottoman debts in return. The Sultan firmly rejected this proposal. However, the Ottoman side indicated that if Herzl could successfully negotiate with European powers to, reduce the interest on Ottoman debts, they might permit Jewish settlement, but only in what is today northern Iraq, and exclusively for Jewish communities. Herzl was unable to fulfil this condition and left Istanbul without an agreement.

Turning his efforts elsewhere, Herzl founded the World Zionist Organization in 1897, shifting the movement’s strategy toward seeking direct diplomatic recognition for a Jewish state in Palestine. A key turning point came when US President Woodrow Wilson was brought on side with the Zionist cause, a development that pushed Britain to adopt an increasingly sympathetic and supportive stance toward the movement as well.

 

The Balfour Declaration

The most important diplomatic step on the road to the establishment of Israel was taken on 2 November 1917, with the Balfour Declaration. British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour sent an official letter to Lord Rothschild, one of the leaders of the international Zionist movement, formally committing the British Government to supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

But why did Britain agree to this? In the darkest days of the First World War, Britain had two clear goals. First, it wanted to bring the support of the global Jewish diaspora, particularly powerful figures in the United States and Russia, into the war effort. Second, it aimed to create a loyal and strategically placed buffer zone in the heart of the Middle East, one that would help secure the Suez Canal.

Conflicts Under the British Mandate and the UN Process

After the Second World War, British forces in Palestine struggled to stop the large waves of illegal Jewish immigration organised by the underground network known as Haganah. This situation led to violent clashes between British forces and Irgun, a radical Zionist armed group. Having completely lost control of the region, Britain handed the matter over to the United Nations on 2 April 1947.

The UN General Assembly established the UN Palestine Commission to find a solution. After examining the situation on the ground, the commission unanimously agreed on the principle of independence, but was divided on what form it should take:

UN Majority Plan (supported by Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, and others): Palestine should be partitioned into two separate independent states for Arabs and Jews, with Jerusalem placed under full international status.

UN Minority Plan (supported by India, Yugoslavia, and Iran): Palestine should become a single federal state, made up of both Jewish and Arab entities.

On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Majority Plan, the Partition Plan. However, since the plan proposed giving a disproportionate share of the land to the Jewish minority, it was met with widespread outrage across the Arab world. At a meeting in Cairo on 17 December 1947, Arab states made the decision to go to war to prevent the partition from taking place.

Egyptian forces crossing the Suez Canal on 7 October 1973

The Declaration of the State and the First Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949)

Exactly one day before the British withdrawal was finalized, the establishment of the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. The very next day, Arab states (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq), rejecting the partition plan and Israel's creation, declared war on Israel.

The war rapidly evolved into a multi-front struggle for survival: Egypt in the south, Jordan and Iraq in the east, and Syria and Lebanon in the north. Although Arab armies (particularly Jordan's Arab Legion) made initial advances around Jerusalem in the early weeks, deep mistrust, command crises, and a lack of coordination among the Arab states crippled their progress. Conversely, Israel utilized the UN-brokered ceasefires much more strategically; during these pauses, Israel rapidly modernized and expanded its military with massive Western arms shipments (notably smuggled via Czechoslovakia). Launching fierce, synchronized counter-offensives after the truces, Israel routed the Arab armies, concluding the war with a decisive military victory and expanding its borders through UN armistice agreements (Rhodes, Rasen Nakura, Manahayim).

The Nakba (The Catastrophe)

During and after the war, driven by the violence, systematic terror, and massacres (such as the Deir Yassin massacre) perpetrated by Israeli paramilitary groups, over 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, villages, and homeland, becoming refugees. This massive ethnic cleansing, during which hundreds of Palestinian villages were wiped off the map and people were uprooted at gunpoint, is seared into Palestinian memory as the “Nakba” (The Catastrophe). While Israel expanded its territory to 75%, this very Nakba remains the crucible of the endless refugee crisis and the genocidal massacres witnessed in Gaza and the West Bank today.

The Consequences of the 1948–1949 Arab-Israeli War

The war left deep and lasting marks on the entire Middle East. Its consequences shaped the political landscape of the region for decades to come. Egypt, widely believed to have the strongest army among the Arab states, suffered one of the heaviest defeats in the war. This humiliation weakened the monarchy of King Farouk and created the conditions for its eventual collapse.

The defeat of five Arab armies at the hands of a small Israeli force had a powerful effect across the Arab world. It strengthened feelings of nationalism and gave significant momentum to a growing Arab Nationalist movement. The absence of a formal peace treaty at the end of the war left the conflict unresolved and laid the groundwork for future Arab-Israeli wars.

The weakening of King Farouk's regime following the war eventually led to the fall of the Egyptian monarchy and the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Once in office, Nasser sought to position himself as the leader of Arab nationalism across the region.

Finally, on 25 May 1950, the United States, Britain, and France issued a joint declaration stating that they would sell weapons to Arab states and Israel only in quantities necessary for internal security, and only on the condition that those weapons would not be used against another state.

Without slowing down, we move straight into Part 2, and into the subject that lies at the heart of so much of what we see in the Middle East today: oil.

Part 2: The Britain-Iran Oil Dispute