The modern State of Israel was officially proclaimed on May 14, 1948, by David Ben-Gurion, who was then the president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the leader of the Zionist movement in Mandatory Palestine. This declaration of independence took place in Tel Aviv, just before the end of the British Mandate over Palestine at midnight.
Ben-Gurion, often considered the “founding father” of Israel, read the text of the declaration during a ceremony at the Tel Aviv Museum (today known as Independence Hall), in the presence of members of the Jewish National Council.
The document invoked the historical right of the Jews to a national homeland, referring to the Bible, the Holocaust, and UN Resolution 181 of 1947, which proposed the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
The Zionist movement, initiated at the end of the 19th century by Theodor Herzl (who organized the first Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel), played a central role in mobilizing for a Jewish state.
Herzl, an Austrian journalist, was reacting to the growing antisemitism in Europe and promoted the idea of a state as a political solution for the Jews. International supports were crucial: the Balfour Declaration of 1917, issued by the British government, expressed support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, while promising to protect the rights of non-Jewish communities.
After the First World War, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with a mandate over Palestine (1920-1948), a period marked by increased Jewish immigration and growing tensions with the local Arab population.
The partition of Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under an international regime, in 1947, accepted by Jewish leaders but rejected by the Arabs, accelerated the process.
Immediately after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel de facto (followed by the USSR and other countries), and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 broke out, pitting Israel against an Arab coalition (Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria).
At the end of the conflict, Israel controlled about 78% of Mandatory Palestine, well beyond the borders proposed by the UN.
From the Israeli point of view, this creation represents the realization of a millennial dream of return to the ancestral land, after centuries of diaspora and persecutions, culminating with the Holocaust. Ben-Gurion and the Zionist pioneers are seen as the direct architects, supported by the international Jewish community and powers like Great Britain and the United States.
Palestinian and Arab perspective: the Nakba
For Palestinians and many Arabs, the creation of Israel is synonymous with “Nakba” (catastrophe), a process of massive expulsion, destruction of villages, and dispossession considered as a form of ethnic cleansing imposed by colonial and Zionist forces.
About 750,000 Palestinians (out of a population of about 1.9 million) were displaced or expelled between 1947 and 1949, becoming refugees in neighboring countries, while more than 500 Arab villages were destroyed or depopulated.
Massacres like that of Deir Yassin (April 1948, more than 100 deaths) and Zionist military operations (like Plan Dalet) sowed panic and accelerated the flights.
Palestinians reject the UN partition plan as unjust, because it granted 56% of the territory to the Jewish state, while Jews represented one-third of the population and owned about 6-7% of the land, compared to 90% for the Arabs (two-thirds of the population).
The Nakba is seen not as an isolated event, but as a continuous process of colonization, with persistent land confiscations and a denial of the right of return (affirmed by UN Resolution 194 in 1948). In this view, the “creators” of Israel are perceived as imperialist powers (Great Britain, United States, UN) and Zionist militias (like the Haganah), who imposed a state at the expense of the indigenous Arabs.
