1948: The State of Israel is founded

ISRAEL TIMELINE

Overview

1948: The State of Israel is founded

1956: The Sinai campaign

1967: The Six-Day War

1973: October War

1977-1979: Egyptian-Israeli peace

1982: Lebanon invasion

1987: First Intifada

1993: Oslo agreement

2000: Second intifada

2005: Gaza withdrawal

2006: Lebanon war

2008: Israel now

The State of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948, the culmination of nearly 2,000 years of hopes by Jewish people that they would one day return to the land from which the Romans expelled them. The Holocaust of European Jewry in the Second World War strengthened their determination.

The Balfour Declaration by the British government in 1917, enshrined in a League of Nations mandate in 1920, had said that a "national home for the Jewish people" would be founded in Palestine, while preserving the "civil and religious" rights of non-Jewish communities there. The British could not reconcile the conflicting principles.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted (resolution 181) to partition Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under an international regime. The Jews agreed but the Arabs did not. They called the declaration of the State of Israel "al-Nakba", the catastrophe.

Inter-communal fighting had preceded the declaration and after it, five Arab armies invaded. By the time of an armistice in 1949, the Israelis had extended their territory, leaving Jordan with the West Bank, Egypt with Gaza and Jerusalem divided. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had fled or had been driven out.