Black-and-white 1948 photo: David Ben-Gurion and council members seated at a long table under a Herzl portrait and Stars of David, press in front.

THE BIRTH OF MODERN ISRAEL, 1939–1950: PARTITION, WAR, TWO DISPLACEMENTS AND THE MYTHS

David Ben-Gurion (centre, beneath the portrait of Theodor Herzl) and members of the People's Council (Moetzet HaAm) at the Tel Aviv Museum on May 14, 1948, at the ceremony proclaiming the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The armies of neighbouring Arab states invaded the next day.

Photo: Zoltan Kluger / Government Press Office (Israel), National Photo Collection D836-086, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Cropped and tonally adjusted.

Between 1939 and 1950 a Jewish state came into being in Palestine, through a United Nations vote, a declaration and a war. That war uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, and its aftermath saw most Jews of the Arab world leave their homes. Few chapters of modern history are argued over so fiercely.

Last updated: October 10, 2026

Key Facts

What happened: The UN General Assembly recommended partition on November 29, 1947. Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, and the armies of five Arab states entered Palestine the next day. Armistice agreements followed in 1949.
Displacement: About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled; a UN committee estimated 711,000 in 1950. Most of the roughly 800,000 Jews of the Arab countries left over the following two decades.
The cost in lives: About 1 percent of the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine was killed in the war, according to the historian Orit Bashkin.
What historians debate: Why the Palestinian refugees left, and how far expulsion was planned. None of the historians cited here disputes that the displacements happened.
Where the line is: Criticising Israel, and arguing about 1948, is not antisemitism. Blaming Jews collectively, or recycling myths of secret Jewish power, is.
The myths: That Jews have no tie to the land, that a Rothschild or "Jewish money" plot created Israel, that the state exists only because of guilt over the Holocaust, and that Ashkenazi Jews are "Khazars."

In 1939, as the Haavara transfers were ending, Britain's White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over five years. Within two years the Nazi mass murder of Europe's Jews was under way. This article follows what happened next in Palestine: the partition plan, the United Nations vote, the 1948 war, and the two great displacements that came with it, Palestinian and Jewish.

The story starts with two earlier pages in this series. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 led to the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, whose Article 6 told Britain to "facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions" while "ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced." Those two duties pulled against each other for a quarter of a century. In the 1930s the Haavara agreement let some German Jews reach Palestine with part of their savings, just as Arab opposition to Jewish immigration hardened into the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. In 1937 a British Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel recommended, for the first time, that Palestine be partitioned.

The years that followed produced a state, a war, two refugee populations and a set of claims that still circulate. This article sets out the record, names the historians on each side of the main debate, and explains which claims are false.

The 1939 White Paper and the War Years

Immigration: Britain's White Paper of May 1939 allowed "some 75,000 immigrants over the next five years." After that, further Jewish immigration would depend on whether "the Arabs are prepared to acquiesce in it."
A single state: It promised "an independent Palestine State" within ten years, in which "the two peoples in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority."
Land: It gave the High Commissioner "powers to prohibit and regulate transfers of land," so that "a considerable landless Arab population is not soon to be created."
The timing: Within months the war began. For Jews trying to leave Europe, the way to Palestine narrowed sharply just as the Nazi regime moved from persecution to mass murder.

The war also drew in Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem and a leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement.

The meeting with Hitler: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) records that when Hitler received al-Husayni on November 28, 1941, he "was sympathetic, but declined to give al-Husayni the public declaration of support that he sought."
Collaboration: Al-Husayni "still collaborated with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in several ways," the museum writes. He "broadcast anti-Allied and anti-Jewish propaganda by radio to the Arab world" and helped recruit Muslim men in Bosnia for a Waffen-SS division in 1943.
The 2015 claim: In October 2015 Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the World Zionist Congress that "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews," and that the Mufti had replied, "Burn them" (The Guardian). Historians rejected the claim. Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, wrote that the Mufti "was an ardent antisemite, but the idea of the 'Final Solution' was Hitler's alone." The German government's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said: "We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own."

Both facts stand: al-Husayni was a willing Nazi collaborator, and he did not originate the Holocaust.

In Iraq, the Farhud, a pogrom in Baghdad on June 1–2, 1941, showed how exposed the old Jewish communities of the Arab world had become. Rioters "murdered between 150 and 180 Jews" and injured about 600 others, according to the USHMM; an official Iraqi commission gave a lower count of 128 Jewish dead.

After the Holocaust: Survivors and the Displaced Persons Camps

The camps: "From 1945 to 1952, more than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons" lived in camps and cities in Germany, Austria and Italy, the USHMM writes. Many could not or would not return to homes in eastern Europe.
The Harrison report: In August 1945 Earl Harrison reported to President Harry Truman on conditions in the camps. In 1946 an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended admitting 100,000 Jewish displaced persons to Palestine; Britain refused.
Illegal immigration: The Brihah ("escape") moved "more than 100,000 Jews past British patrols and illegally into Palestine" between 1945 and 1948 (USHMM). Britain held intercepted passengers in camps on Cyprus, and its treatment of the refugee ship Exodus 1947 drew attention around the world.

The survivors' plight added urgency to the question of Palestine and won wide sympathy. It did not create the question. The Jewish community in Palestine, its institutions and the partition idea were all older than the Holocaust.

The United Nations Vote, 1947

In 1947 Britain handed the problem to the United Nations.

The committee: On May 15, 1947, the General Assembly created a UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), with eleven members: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia. The Arab Higher Committee, the main Palestinian Arab leadership body, declined to cooperate.
The report: UNSCOP completed its report on August 31, 1947. It made twelve general recommendations, eleven of them unanimously, including an end to the Mandate. A majority proposed partition into Arab and Jewish states with an economic union. A minority, India, Iran and Yugoslavia, proposed a single federal state.
The vote: On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (II), the partition plan, "by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions," according to the UN record of the meeting. It recommended Arab and Jewish states and an international regime for Jerusalem. Residents were to "become citizens of the State in which they are resident and enjoy full civil and political rights."
Who voted how: The yes votes included the United States, the Soviet Union, the Byelorussian and Ukrainian Soviet republics, Poland, Czechoslovakia and France. The no votes included the Arab member states, Afghanistan, Cuba, Greece, India, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. The United Kingdom, the Mandate power, abstained.

The two communities answered in opposite ways. The Jewish community "considered the resolution to be a legal basis for the establishment of the state of Israel," as Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, "but the resolution was rejected by the Arab community." Chaim Weizmann, the veteran Zionist leader, appearing before a UN committee in a private capacity, said that "it was not easy for the Jews to accept such a compromise," but supported the majority plan. A UN sub-committee report that set out the Arab case argued that the UN could not "deprive the majority of the people of Palestine of their territory and transfer it to the exclusive use of a minority in the country."

Civil War, Then Statehood and Invasion

Fighting broke out while Britain was still in charge. Britannica dates the start of the civil war to an ambush of a bus carrying Jewish passengers near Lydda on November 30, 1947. On one side were the Haganah, the main Jewish defence force, and two separate Jewish underground groups, the Irgun and Lehi. On the other were Palestinian Arab irregulars and volunteers from neighbouring countries.

Plan D: In early March 1948 the Haganah adopted Plan D (Plan Dalet), described by the historian Benny Morris as a plan "for securing the Jewish state areas in preparation for the expected declaration of statehood and the prospective Arab invasion."
Deir Yassin: On April 9, 1948, forces of the Irgun and Lehi attacked Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem of about 750 people. "About 100 people were killed, although contemporary accounts reported a higher number" (Britannica). Britannica describes the killings as a massacre.

The Hadassah convoy: On April 13, 1948, Arab forces attacked a medical convoy heading to the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, killing about 80 people (Britannica).
The cities: In April and May, Jewish forces took Tiberias, Haifa, Safed and Jaffa, and most of their Arab residents fled or were driven out. Britannica records that by mid-May some 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinian Arabs had left or been expelled.
Kfar Etzion: On May 12–13, 1948, two Arab Legion companies and hundreds of Palestinian militiamen overran Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem. According to the historian Benny Morris, 151 Jewish defenders, 21 of them women, were killed in the two-day battle for the Etzion Bloc; 127 died on May 13, most of them killed while surrendering or after they had surrendered. Only a handful of those at Kfar Etzion itself survived. Morris also records that some Legion officers protected prisoners. The bloc's other three kibbutzim surrendered, and their defenders spent a year as prisoners in Jordan (Tablet).

On May 14, 1948, the day before the Mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv. It called the land "the birthplace of the Jewish people" and cited "the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe." It promised "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex." It appealed "to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace" and offered neighbouring states "peace and good neighborliness." President Truman recognised the new state the same day, although his State Department had favoured a UN trusteeship instead (US Office of the Historian).

On May 15 the Arab League told the UN Secretary-General that "the Arab Governments find themselves compelled to intervene for the sole purpose of restoring peace and security and establishing law and order in Palestine." Its cable cited Deir Yassin among its grievances. Armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon entered the country.

The 1948 War and the Armistices

Israelis call the conflict the War of Independence. Palestinians call what it brought them the Nakba, Arabic for "catastrophe."

The balance of forces: Morris writes that between May 15 and the first truce on June 11, 1948, "the Arab armies had a major edge in weaponry," and that, as the Haganah's officer in command of operations, Yigael Yadin, told the political leadership, "the chances were about even." Before May 15, and again from July, the Jewish side had more fighters and, increasingly, more arms. In the same weeks the Haganah became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Jerusalem: On May 28, 1948, Transjordan's Arab Legion took the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, which was "left in rubble" (Britannica).
The turn of the war: During the first truce Israel brought in arms and recruits; its forces then took Lydda and Ramle, and later Galilee and the Negev. When a ceasefire took effect on January 7, 1949, Israel controlled about 77 percent of Mandatory Palestine, against the 56 percent allotted to the Jewish state in the UN plan (Britannica).
The cost: About 1 percent of the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine was killed, according to the historian Orit Bashkin. Palestinian Arab losses were heavy; a figure is not given here until a range has been checked against print sources.
The armistices: Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt on February 24, 1949, Lebanon on March 23, Transjordan on April 3 and Syria on July 20. The lines were military, not final borders. Transjordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt held the Gaza Strip.
UN membership: The General Assembly admitted Israel to the United Nations on May 11, 1949 (Resolution 273 (III)).

Two Displacements, Each on Its Own Terms

The war and its aftermath uprooted two populations. Each is a real loss with its own causes and debates, and neither cancels the other.

The Palestinian Displacement: The Nakba

Black-and-white 1948 photo: women and children walk along a dirt road carrying large bundles on their heads, with hills behind.

Palestinian Arab refugees, Galilee, October 30, 1948.

Photo: David Eldan / Government Press Office (Israel), National Photo Collection D275-120, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0. Converted to greyscale and resized.

How many: In 1950 a technical committee of the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated that "the refugees from Israeli-controlled territory amount to approximately 711,000," a figure it considered "as accurate as circumstances permit." Higher totals on the relief rolls, it found, were partly the result of "duplication of ration cards." Britannica's article on Deir Yassin states that the Nakba "displaced at least 600,000–700,000 Palestinians, who were either expelled or fled."
Expulsions: Morris, an Israeli historian, writes that "there were Haganah/IDF expulsions of Arab communities, some of them with Haganah/IDF General Staff and/or Cabinet sanction." The largest was at Lydda and Ramle in July 1948. Morris quotes an order issued on July 12 by Lt. Col. Yitzhak Rabin, operations officer of Operation Dani: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age." The Yiftah and Kiryati brigades then expelled "the fifty to sixty thousand inhabitants of the two towns."
Flight: For the largest wave, the "some 250,000 to 300,000" who left between early April and mid-June 1948, Morris identifies "the major precipitant" as "Jewish (Haganah/IZL/IDF) military attacks or the fear of such attacks."
Massacres: Morris writes that Jewish atrocities were "far more widespread than the Old Historians have indicated," naming massacres at Dawayima, Eilabun, Jish, Safsaf, Hule, Saliha and Sasa, as well as Deir Yassin and Lydda.
Arab leaders' role: Morris writes that "at no point during the war did Arab leaders issue a blanket call" for Palestine's Arabs to leave, and on the supposed radio orders, "I have found no trace of any such broadcasts." Local commanders sometimes ordered women and children out, and in Haifa on April 22, 1948, local Arab leaders advised or told their community to leave. By mid-May only one member of the Arab Higher Committee was still in the country.
Return: UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 11, 1948, resolved in paragraph 11 that "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date," with compensation for those choosing not to return. Israel did not permit a general return. The paragraph remains at the centre of the dispute.
Those who stayed: Palestinian Arabs who remained inside Israel became citizens, but, as Bashkin notes, they "lived under a strict military regime."

How Historians Explain 1948

Why the Palestinians left, and whether expulsion was planned, is fiercely argued. This site takes no side; it reports the main positions in their authors' own words.

Benny Morris: Morris finds a long-standing idea but no blueprint. He writes that "from the mid-1930s on most of the Yishuv's leaders, including Ben-Gurion, wanted to establish a Jewish state without an Arab minority, or with as small an Arab minority as possible, and supported a 'transfer solution.'" Yet "the Yishuv did not enter the 1948 war with a master plan for expelling the Arabs, nor did its political and military leaders ever adopt such a plan."

Ilan Pappé: Pappé argues for deliberate design. In "The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" (Journal of Palestine Studies, 2006), he writes that "the plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear case of what is now known as an ethnic cleansing operation." He proposes "a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948." By his count, more than 750,000 people were uprooted and 531 villages destroyed.
Efraim Karsh: Karsh, a historian of the Middle East, places responsibility on Arab leaders. Writing in Commentary in 2008, he argues that "the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth," and that "it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early 1920's onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival." He calls the outcome a "self-inflicted 'catastrophe.'" His book Palestine Betrayed (Yale University Press, 2010) develops the case.
Rashid Khalidi: The Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi places 1948 in a longer story. His book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020) is subtitled A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, and in it he calls Zionism "a colonizing project in search of a great-power patron."

These historians disagree sharply about intent and responsibility. None disputes that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes.

The Jewish Exodus From Arab Countries

Black-and-white 1951 photo: a young woman holding a cup stands with other new arrivals at a hatch where a woman hands out food.

Jewish immigrants from Iraq, Israel, April 1951.

Photo: Benno Rothenberg / Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0. Cropped (film edges), converted to greyscale and resized.

How many: "By 1967 the majority of the 800,000 Jews in Arab countries at mid-twentieth century had left," write Norman Stillman and Harvey Goldberg in the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. "From May 1948 through 1951 more than 650,000 Jews migrated to Israel, half of them from the Middle East."
Violence and restrictions: The same authors record anti-Jewish riots in Egypt and Libya in November 1945, and in Aden, Bahrain and Aleppo in December 1947, after the UN vote. "Restrictive administrative measures were imposed on Jews in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq."
Iraq: Law No. 1 of March 4, 1950, allowed the government to "cancel the Iraq nationality of the Iraqi Jew who willingly desires to leave Iraq for good." According to Bashkin, "during the years 1950–51, 123,000 Iraqi Jews made their way to Israel."
Yemen: Operation Magic Carpet flew about 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee archives).
North Africa: Large departures from Morocco and Tunisia followed in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, and nearly half of North Africa's Jews went to France and elsewhere rather than to Israel (Stillman and Goldberg).

Historians weigh the causes differently. Stillman and Goldberg stress riots and legal pressure. Bashkin, in Impossible Exodus (Stanford University Press, 2017), shows Iraqi Jews caught between Iraqi nationalists who argued for treating Jewish citizens "as Israel had treated the Palestinians" and stepped-up Zionist activity: "The community was trapped, and it left." She also documents the "prejudice and discrimination" that many Iraqi Jews met on arrival in Israel, where many were housed in transit camps.

Where Criticism Ends and Antisemitism Begins

Criticising Israeli policy, debating 1948, or using scholarly frameworks such as settler colonialism is not antisemitism. A claim crosses the line when it blames Jews collectively for what particular people or forces did, recycles conspiracy myths about Jewish power or money, or dehumanises Jews or denies that they are a people.

Two widely cited definitions share that core, though they differ elsewhere.

The IHRA working definition: Adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016 as a "non-legally binding" definition, it says that "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." Its examples of antisemitism include "holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel."
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism: Published in 2021 by a group of scholars, it defines antisemitism as "discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)." It lists "holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel's conduct" as antisemitic on its face, and counts "evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state" among examples that are not, on the face of it, antisemitic.
Where they differ: The Jerusalem Declaration's authors call the IHRA definition "neither clear nor coherent" and offer theirs as an alternative. This site takes no side between them and relies only on the ground they share.

The Claims, and the Record

"Jews are foreign settlers with no tie to the land": The scholarly debate is real. Khalidi and others analyse Zionism as a settler-colonial movement; the writer Adam Kirsch argues against it in On Settler Colonialism (Norton, 2024), which his publisher says shows the framework to be "a new political ideology." This site does not call the framework antisemitic. What is false is the claim that Jews have no tie to the land. The Mandate itself recognised "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine." Ottoman records for 1878 counted 15,011 Jewish subjects in the districts of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre, plus perhaps 10,000 Jews of foreign citizenship (University of Michigan Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies). Khalidi himself writes that Palestine's pre-Zionist Jews "were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers." It is also true that Zionist settlement grew under British imperial sponsorship, and that early Zionists used the language of colonisation themselves.
"The guests kicked out their hosts": Before 1948, land passed to Jewish owners by purchase, not seizure. On April 1, 1945, Jewish holdings were 5.67 percent of Palestine's land area, according to the Mandate government's Village Statistics 1945. Purchases could still displace tenant farmers, as the 1939 White Paper's warning about a "landless Arab population" shows. In 1947–49 the displacement came through war, flight and expulsion, as described above. The "guests and hosts" framing is false: it treats every Jew in the land, including the old communities and refugees from Nazi Europe, as a permanent outsider, and blames a whole people for acts carried out by named forces.

"A Rothschild plot or Jewish money created Israel": This claim is false. The Rothschild family's philanthropy in Palestine was real and public. In 1957, for example, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, founded by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, gave six million pounds (then about $3.3 million) toward a new home for the Knesset, under a decision of the late Baron James de Rothschild (Jewish Telegraphic Agency). Funding farms and buildings is not owning a state. The 1947 vote is not explained by money either: its yes votes included the Soviet Union and its allies, while Britain, the Mandate power, abstained. Diplomatic campaigning around a UN vote is ordinary politics, and the US State Department itself recommended a UN trusteeship rather than separate states (US Office of the Historian). The myth turns ordinary politics into secret Jewish control, a theme of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of claims of Jewish media control. A page on Rothschild myths is planned.
"Israel exists only because of Holocaust guilt": This claim is false. The Holocaust gave the question urgency, and the Declaration of Independence names it. But the Zionist movement, the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate, the Jewish community's institutions and the first partition proposal of 1937 all came before it. Britain wrote in 1922 that the Jewish people were in Palestine "as of right and not on sufferance." In its extreme form the guilt claim slides into the antisemitic idea that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated to create Israel, an example of antisemitism in the IHRA definition. A page on Holocaust denial is planned.
"Ashkenazi Jews are really Khazars": The claim that Jews of European descent descend from a medieval Turkic kingdom, and so have no tie to the land, is false. A 2013 genetic study by Doron Behar and colleagues in Human Biology found that "Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East," and that "no particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident." The study answered a 2013 paper by Elhaik that had argued the opposite. A page on the Khazar myth is planned.
"1948 was a planned genocide" and "there was no Nakba": Genocide, under the 1948 Genocide Convention, means acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Pappé, who argues for deliberate design, calls 1948 "ethnic cleansing," not a plan of extermination; Morris finds no master plan at all. The opposite slogan, that there was no Nakba or that all the refugees left on their leaders' orders, is contradicted by the documented expulsions and massacres and by Morris's finding of "no trace" of the supposed broadcasts. Both slogans replace evidence with a verdict.

The honest bottom line is uncomfortable on every side. Jews have a deep and continuous historical tie to the land, and a Jewish community lived there long before Zionism. Israel was founded through a UN recommendation, a declaration and a war that began as a civil war and widened when Arab armies invaded. In that war Jewish forces expelled Palestinians from Lydda, Ramle and other places and committed massacres, Deir Yassin among them, and Israel then barred a general return. Palestinian and Arab leaders rejected partition; Arab forces also killed civilians and prisoners, on the Hadassah convoy and at Kfar Etzion, and took and wrecked the Jewish Quarter of the Old City; and in the years that followed most Jews of the Arab world were pressed out of countries their families had lived in for centuries. Britain sharply limited Jewish immigration in 1939, as the murder of Europe's Jews approached. None of this makes Jews collectively guilty, and none of it makes Palestinians a people without a history. Understanding 1948 means holding all of it at once, and recognizing that responsibility lies with the people and forces who acted, never with a whole people.

This series began with the 1917 promise of a "national home" and continued with the 1933 transfer arrangement. It ends here, with partition, war and two displacements. The arguments about 1917, 1933 and 1948 did not end in 1949. Some are honest disagreements among historians. Others recycle the oldest myths explained on this site: secret Jewish power, Jewish guilt, Jewish money. Knowing which is which is the point of this series. For what happened on October 7, 2023, see October 7. For the myths themselves, start with the Tropes pages.

Dates and figures are given as reported by the sources below. Where sources differ, as on the number of Palestinian refugees, the range or the UN's contemporary estimate is given. Palestinian Arab deaths in the 1948 war are not given until a range has been checked against print sources.

Sources

Primary documents

League of Nations, "The Palestine Mandate," July 24, 1922, preamble and Art. 6, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda.asp
United Kingdom, "British White Paper of 1939," May 1939, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1939.asp
UN General Assembly, Resolution 106 (S-1), May 15, 1947 (creation of UNSCOP), UNISPAL, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-183472/
UN Special Committee on Palestine, report to the General Assembly (A/364), September 3, 1947, UNISPAL, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-184992/
UN General Assembly, 128th plenary meeting, November 29, 1947 (A/PV.128), UNISPAL, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-189596/
US Delegation at the United Nations, telegram on the partition vote, November 29, 1947, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, vol. V, doc. 896, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1947v05/d896
UN General Assembly, Resolution 181 (II), November 29, 1947, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/res181.asp
Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp
League of Arab States, cablegram to the UN Secretary-General (S/745), May 15, 1948, UNISPAL (archived copy), https://web.archive.org/web/20240421072339/https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-214183/
UN General Assembly, Resolution 194 (III), December 11, 1948, https://unsco.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/ga_res_1941948.pdf
UN General Assembly, Resolution 273 (III), May 11, 1949 (admission of Israel), UNISPAL, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-187677/
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9, 1948, Art. II, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/genocide.asp
Iraq, Law No. 1 of 1950 (March 4, 1950), in UN Legislative Series, https://legal.un.org/legislativeseries/pdfs/chapters/book4/book4_iraq.pdf

UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, report of the Technical Committee on Refugees, 1950, UNISPAL, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-210536/
UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, working paper W/4, March 22, 1949, reproducing Mandate population estimates, UNISPAL, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-210930/
Government of Palestine, Village Statistics 1945, as published by Sami Hadawi (1970), Internet Archive, https://ia800807.us.archive.org/25/items/palestine-village-statistics-1945/Village%20Statistics%201945_text.pdf
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, working definition of antisemitism (2016), as reproduced by the US Department of State, "Defining Antisemitism," https://www.state.gov/defining-antisemitism
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/

Historians, reference works and reporting

Benny Morris, "The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past," in Making Israel, ed. Benny Morris (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), ch. 1, https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472115419-ch1.pdf
Ilan Pappé, "The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 6–20, https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/jps/vol36-141/vol36-141_b.pdf
Efraim Karsh, "1948, Israel, and the Palestinians: The True Story," Commentary, May 2008, https://www.commentary.org/articles/efraim-karsh/1948-israel-and-the-palestinians-the-true-story/
Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) (print; cited for title only)
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), publisher's page and excerpt, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250787651/thehundredyearswaronpalestine/
Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (New York: W. W. Norton, 2024), publisher's pages, https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324105343 and https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9781324105343-on-settler-colonialism
Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), introduction, https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/impossible-exodus/excerpt/introduction
Norman Stillman, updated by Harvey E. Goldberg, "Jews in the Middle East," Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/jews-middle-east
Doron M. Behar et al., "No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews," Human Biology 85, no. 6 (December 2013): 859–900, https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~ehalperin/cozygene/papers/85.6.behar.pdf
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Wartime Propagandist," Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-wartime-propagandist
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "The Farhud," Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud
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