On the 15th May 1948, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi-Arabia and Syria attacked the newly founded state of Israel. They were outnumbered 80 to 1, with no air force or heavy artillery. Therefore, the Jews used weapons from the British mandate which had been left, captured Arab equipment and smuggled in Czechoslovakian arms. Furthmore, the Israelis had 60,000 Haganah forces, which were well trained, by the head of the army Yigael Yadin. This enabled the Israelis to fight back, in which they began capturing vast quantities of the land. In October, the Israelis managed to take all of Galilee, and had pushed the Egyptians into the Sinai desert and the Palestinian Arabs into the Gaza Strip. The United Nations called for a cease-fire which was signed in the summer of 1949. However this was after the UN’s negotiator Count Bernadotte was assassinated by the Stern Gang in September of 1948, this highlighted the desperate nature of the Jewish resistance.
Al Nakba or the ‘catastrophe’ united Israel as a country, it revealed to the World their intentions of being a state, in which many countries including Russia and America accepted the idea of a state with in Palestine. The war revealed the strength of the Israeli army, in which they had gained more land than they had been allocated in the UN Partition Plan. However, this war did reveal a pattern of future conflicts due to there being no fixed borders, in which Israel would have to be ready for. Therefore Israel made it compulsory for all Israeli civilians to be trained for the Army, spending twenty percent of the budget on weapons.
The ‘catastrophe’ killed 6,000 Jews, forcing 800,000 Arabs to leave Israel. This caused huge refugee problems, for neighbouring Arab countries, in which the Fedayeen were formed or ‘freedom fighters.’ In 1950, the law of return gave every Jew the right to return to Israel. Tension between the two states was building once more.
