After a variety of partition plans, even proposals for the transfer of the Palestinian Arab population (which came from the British Labour Party in 1944 and American President Roosevelt), on 29 November, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved a partition plan - Resolution 181. Although Jews owned in private or collective property holdings only 6.5% of the lands in Palestine, the Jewish state was awarded 56.5% of the territory of Palestine, and the Arab state, 42.9% in November 29, 1947 UN partition plan. The Zionist policies were victorious.

The second stage of their strategy - a policy of terror and military conquest - would lead to the creation of the State of Israel. In December 1947, the Zionist movement launched a policy of terror, known by the code name “Plan C” (in Hebrew “Tochnit Gimmel,” gimmel being the Hebrew alphabet’s third letter. Attacks against the Palestinian civil population became frequent but were also mounted against British troops; on January 4, 1948, the Lehi (which included the notorious Stern Gang) killed 26 Palestinians in a car bomb attack on the Old Government House in Jaffa. On January 5, 1948, an assault by the Hagana on the Semiramis Hotel in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Qatamon killed 20 people, mostly Palestinian. The most notorious and murderous attack was committed by the Irgun, with Menachem Begin in command, on July 22, 1946, when it blew up the headquarters of the British army, which had been established at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem: ninety-three British, Arabs and Jews died in the blast. Shortly before cessation of the British Mandate and the effective departure of British troops, a large-scale offensive was launched in April 1948 throughout Palestine under Plan D (in Hebrew: “Tochnit Dalet,” dalet being the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet).

The Zionist “War of Independence” was accompanied by the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and villages. This first war for Palestine (April 4, 1948 - May 15, 1948) was fought against some 2,500 Palestinian combatants, reinforced by 4,000 Arab volunteers, by 50,000 Hagana soldiers. Massacres of Palestinian civilians increased. On April 9, 1948, between 100 to 254 Palestinians (depending on conflicting reports) in Deir Yassin, a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, were massacred and the survivors deported to the other side of the Demarcation Line [see Deir Yassin,p. 146]. The shock was immense, especially since Abd al-Qader al-Husseini, commander of the Palestinian resistance in the Jerusalem region, had been killed the day before at Qastal, a strategic point on the Jerusalem-Jaffa road.

By the time of the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel (May 14, 1948), some 350,000 Palestinians had become refugees, followed by 500,000 additional refugees in the following months. For Palestinians, 1948 was the year of the Catastrophe (en-Nakba), the year of the destruction of the land and the year of exile.

The Arab coalition states held back from any military commitment until the day after the declaration of the State of Israel. Only then did they intervene and only in the regions not yet under Zionist control, and so the first Israeli-Arab war broke out (May 15, 1948 - January 1949). However, the power balance remained fundamentally unequal in terms of men mobilized (less than 14,000 on the Arab side), equipment and strategy.

The Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir (leader of the Likud Party in the 1980s and Prime Minister several times between 1983 to 1992), - intending to overcome all obstacles in the path of the Zionist project - claimed responsibility for the assassination of the UN Mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, on September 17, 1948: Bernadotte having voiced strenuous objections to the Zionist policy of ethnocide.

At the time of the Armistice Agreement with Egypt in February 1949, the State of Israel was in control of 78% of historical Palestine, much more than had ever been projected by the 1947 UN partition plan. The remaining part was annexed by King Abdullah of Transjordan and known as the West Bank, while a strip of land south of Gaza (the Gaza Strip) was placed under Egyptian military administration.