1948 Palestine war

The 1948 Palestine war refers to the events that happened in Palestine between the vote on the partition plan of Palestine on November 30, 1947, to the end of the first Arab-Israeli war on July 20, 1949

Historians divide this into two phases:

• A 1947–1948 Civil War in Palestine (also named Intercommunal War) in which Palestinian Arabs, supported by the Arab Liberation Army, and Palestinian Jews, fought against each other while the region was still fully under British rule.
• The 1948 Arab–Israeli War after May 15, in which Israel fought Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, for the control of the country.

At the issue of the war, the State of Israel kept most of the area it had been allocated by the partition plan and took control of Jaffa, Lydda and Ramle area, Galilee, Negev, a strip along the Tel-Aviv-Jerusalem road and some territories around Samaria (called today West Bank). No Arab Palestinian state was created: the remainder of the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip was placed under Egyptian military rule. During that war, between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestian Arabs fled or were expelled from the area that became Israel but could not settle in the neighborhood Arab states and became what is known today as the Palestinian refugees.

The Israeli often refer to this period as their War of Independence or War of Liberation, because it saw the birth of the State of Israel while Palestinians, and Arabs refer to this as an-Nakba (the catastrophe), because of the massive population exodus and the death of their nationalist aspirations, due to the takeover of their land.