[16][17][18][19][20][21] During the war, the British withdrew from Palestine, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel, and over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled.

[25][26] In anticipation of an invasion by Arab armies,[27] they enacted Plan Dalet, an operation aimed at securing territory for the establishment of a Jewish state.

A campaign of massacres and violence against the Arab population, such as occurred at Lydda and Ramle and the Battle of Haifa, led to the expulsion and flight of over 700,000 Palestinians, with most of their urban areas being depopulated and destroyed.

After the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, it was designated as a "national home for the Jewish people", with the stipulation that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

[42] Particularly after the White Paper of 1939, the Zionist paramilitary organizations Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah carried out a campaign of acts of terror and sabotage against British rule.

[49] This was an attempt to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning Palestine into "Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem".

In consideration of its religious significance, the Jerusalem area, including Bethlehem, with 100,000 Jews and an equal number of Palestinian Arabs, was to become a corpus separatum, to be administered by the UN.

The first phase of the war took place from the United Nations General Assembly vote for the Partition Plan for Palestine on 29 November 1947 until the termination of the British Mandate and Israeli proclamation of statehood on 14 May 1948.

During this time, paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi, supported by the Haganah and Palmach,[71][72] perpetrated the Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Arab villagers, including women and children.

The situation pushed the neighbouring Arab states to intervene, but their preparation was not completed, and they could not assemble sufficient forces to turn the tide of the war.

The inconclusive meeting between Golda Meir and Abdullah I, followed by the Kfar Etzion massacre on 13 May by the Arab Legion, led to predictions that the battle for Jerusalem would be merciless.

[79] The Palestinians' Arab Higher Committee rejected the Partition Resolution and any kind of Jewish state and refused to negotiate with "the Zionist Project.

"[80] Over the next few days, contingents of four of the seven countries of the Arab League at that time, Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and Syria, invaded the former British Mandate of Palestine and fought the Israelis.

Bernadotte was voted in by the General Assembly to "assure the safety of the holy places, to safeguard the well being of the population, and to promote 'a peaceful adjustment of the future situation of Palestine'".

The fighting was dominated by large-scale Israeli offensives and a defensive Arab posture and continued for ten days until the UN Security Council issued the Second Truce on 18 July.

With smuggled Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress planes acquired in violation of the international arms embargo, Israel bombed a residential neighborhood in Cairo on July 15.

[93] Before dawn on 22 October, in defiance of the UN Security Council ceasefire order, ALA units stormed the IDF hilltop position of Sheikh Abd, overlooking Kibbutz Manara.

[94] On 24 October, the IDF launched Operation Hiram and captured the entire upper Galilee, originally attributed to the Arab state by the Partition Plan.

Research by Israeli historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar show that during the 1948 war, Israel conducted a biological warfare operation codenamed Cast Thy Bread.

According to Morris and Kedar, the Haganah initially used typhoid bacteria to contaminate water wells in newly cleared Arab villages to prevent the population including militiamen from returning.

The immediate reasons for this exodus were both the popular Arab hostility, including pogroms and anti-Jewish governmental measures,[102] as well as the desire of many Jewish people to join the newly established State of Israel.

During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighboring Arab states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful coexistence was possible.

[15] The standard Zionist narrative of the war remained unchallenged outside the Arab world until the war's fortieth anniversary, when a number of critical books came out, including Simha Flapan's The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), Benny Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987), Ilan Pappé's Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (1988), and Shlaim's Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (1988).

"[119] Evidence of the expulsions, massacres, and war crimes of 1948 brought to light by the New Historians could no longer be ignored, but writers of what Pappé calls a "neo-Zionist" narrative justified these as necessary or unavoidable.

"[118]: 212  They attribute this to, among other reasons, the dispersed and fragmented state of the Palestinian community and the loss, destruction, or appropriation by Israel of relevant documents and libraries.

[122][118]: 214 In the narratives of the wider Arab-Muslim world, 1948 is seen as an "Arab debacle", representative of the region's social and political decline from its "glorious distant past".

[123]: 6 The American journalist Joan Peters' 1984 book From Time Immemorial had a massive impact on how 1948 was understood in popular and political narratives in the United States.

[124][125] Ilan Pappé asserts the neo-Zionist narrative was pushed in the United States most passionately by Michael Walzer, and by Anita Shapira and Derek Penslar with their 2003 Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right.

[119] A 1960 movie Exodus starring Paul Newman as Haganah rebel Ari Ben Canaan, a decorated former captain in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in the Second World War, obtains a cargo ship.

A 1966 movie Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas as US Colonel Mickey Marcus (1901–1948) who commanded units of the fledgling Israel Defense Forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.