Tensions between the Jews and Arabs started to emerge after the 1880s, when European Jews began to immigrate and augment Palestinian Jewish communities by buying up land from Ottoman and individual Arab landholders, and establishing agricultural settlements in the historic lands of Judea and Israel, which were then part of the Ottoman empire [1]. By the 1920s, tension had given way to violence, such as the Riots in Palestine of 1920, Jaffa riots of 1921. To assuage the Arabs, and due to British inability to control Arab violence in the British Mandate any other way, the semi-autonomous Arab Emirate of Transjordan was created in all Palestinian territory east of the Jordan river (roughly 80% of the mandate). The violence continued to mount, however, throughout the 1930s and 40s, resulting in loss of life on all sides, including the Riots in Palestine of 1929, a series of Zionist attacks, the Great Arab Uprising of 1936-1939, the Assassination of British Mandate Officials, and the 1946 King David Hotel bombing.
War of 1948
May 15 - June 10The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, known as the "Israeli War of Independence" or "al-Nakba" (The Disaster), 1948-1949, began after the British withdrawal and the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. The Arabs had rejected the November 1947 UN Partition Plan, which proposed the establishment of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. Arab militias had begun campaigns to control territory inside and outside the designated borders. Joint Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese and Iraqi troops invaded Palestine, which Israel, the US, the Soviet Union, and UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie called illegal aggression, while China broadly backed the Arab claims. The Arab states proclaimed their aim of a "United State of Palestine"[2] in place of Israel and an Arab state. They considered the UN Plan to be invalid because it was opposed by Palestine's Arab majority, and claimed that the British withdrawal led to an absence of legal authority, making it necessary for them to protect Arab lives and property.[3] About two thirds of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territories which came under Jewish control (see Palestinian exodus); practically all of the much smaller number of Jews in the territories captured by the Arabs, for example the Old City of Jerusalem, also fled or were expelled. About 700,000 Arabs (estimates vary from 520,000 to 957,000 [4]) became refugees during the fighting.
The fighting ended with signing of the Rhodes Armistice, which formalized Israeli control of the area allotted to the Jewish state plus just over half of the area allotted to the Arab state. The Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan until June 1967 when they were seized by Israel during the Six-Day War.