What This Land Was Before
Before modern conflict, the territory comprising today's Israel and the Palestinian territories was part of the Ottoman Empire.
1517–1917 – Ruled from Istanbul, not by a local sovereign state.
No independent entity called Palestine; the area was divided into Ottoman districts (e.g., Sanjak of Jerusalem, Vilayet of Beirut).
A diverse population: Muslim Arabs (majority), Christian Arabs, Jews, Druze, and others.
A small but growing Jewish immigration began in the late 1800s, fleeing European persecution.
Both Arabs and Jews had longstanding ties to the land, but sovereignty was an imperial matter, not a national one.
In 1918, the Ottoman Empire—having fought on the German side in WWI—collapsed. What remained became modern Turkey; its Arab provinces were placed under European mandates (British in Palestine, Jordan, Iraq; French in Syria, Lebanon). As with the Roman Empire's long-ago breakup, an imperial collapse left newly contested lands—Palestine among them—whose future would now be shaped by global powers and rival nationalist movements.
The Rise of Competing Nationalisms
Late 19th–Early 20th century
Zionism sought a Jewish homeland in the ancestral Land of Israel.
Arab nationalism sought independence from Ottoman—and later European—rule.
1882–1914 aliyot (waves of Jewish immigration) brought tens of thousands of Jews, who bought land, built farms, and revived Hebrew.
Tensions grew not from religion alone but from competing nationalist movements. Arabs feared displacement—fears heightened by some Zionist writings about eventual Jewish political control. Jews feared that without a homeland they would remain vulnerable to persecution.
The British Mandate & the Balfour Declaration (1917–1947)
1917 Balfour Declaration – Britain supported "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," while pledging to protect the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities.
The wording was intentionally vague: it did not promise all of Palestine to a Jewish state, nor did it define clear borders.
Britain's simultaneous Hussein–McMahon correspondence suggested support for Arab independence—creating durable mistrust.
Mandate-era flashpoints
Rapid Jewish immigration and land purchases
Arab riots (1920, 1921, 1929), often targeting Jewish communities
Arab Revolt (1936–39) against British rule and Jewish immigration
By the 1940s Britain, exhausted and beset by violence from both communities, referred the question of Palestine to the newly created United Nations.
The UN's Plan for Two States (1947)
UN Resolution 181 proposed:
Jewish state: ~55% of Mandate territory
Discontinuous borders, large Arab minority
Arab state: ~45% of territory
Most fertile areas, few Jews
Jerusalem: International zone
Corpus separatum (separate body)
The Response
Jewish leadership accepted, despite the plan's strategic disadvantages—discontinuous borders, a slim demographic majority, and much territory in the inhospitable Negev. After centuries of statelessness and recent genocide, they prioritized achieving any sovereign homeland over territorial maximalism.
Arab leadership—local Palestinians and every neighboring Arab state—rejected.
At the time of the UN proposal, Jews made up about one-third of the total population of Mandatory Palestine—around 630,000 Jews to 1.3 million Arabs. In the proposed Jewish state, Jews would be a slim majority, with over 400,000 Arabs remaining inside its borders. The Arab state, by contrast, would contain almost no Jews.
These demographic realities added to Arab concerns. They saw the partition not just as a territorial loss, but as an endorsement of minority rule in a land where Arabs were still the majority overall.
While the Jewish state was allocated more total land by area, much of it — particularly in the Negev Desert — was arid, sparsely populated, and agriculturally poor. The Arab state was assigned much of the more fertile and developed land. This fed Arab claims of geographic imbalance, even beyond population or principle.
In later years, Israeli scientists would pioneer drip irrigation and desert agriculture, dramatically improving the Negev's productivity — but at the time, the land was widely seen as inhospitable and of limited value.
Many Arabs saw the plan as the product of Western guilt and power politics. Europe, after centuries of Christian antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust, now seemed to ask Arab Muslims and Christians to absorb the consequences of a European catastrophe. Why not found a Jewish state in post-war Germany or Austria?
They also recalled that European powers had carved the Arab world into mandates after WWI; those same powers were again drawing borders. In cultural memory, this evoked earlier Christian incursions—the Crusades—reinforcing suspicion of outside designs.
Yet those same European powers (notably Britain and France) had also defeated the Ottomans, making any new borders possible. And the partition was not solely "Western": the Soviet Union and China voted in favor, giving the plan broad international legitimacy.
These perceptions—mixed with local politics—help explain widespread Arab rejection of the partition, despite global support.
Independence & Invasion (May 1948)
14 May 1948 – Israel proclaimed independence under the UN plan.
15 May 1948 – Armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.