The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, set in motion by the 1947 United Nations recommendation to partition British-ruled Palestine and sealed by the war that followed. David Ben-Gurion declared independence on 14 May 1948; neighbouring Arab states invaded; the war ended with an Israeli state larger than the partition lines. The same event is remembered by Israelis as the War of Independence and by Palestinians as the Nakba, the catastrophe in which around 700,000 people fled or were expelled, a double meaning that has shaped the region ever since.
On 14 May 1948 a sixty-one-year-old man read a declaration aloud beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl in a Tel Aviv museum hall. The British were leaving that midnight. The radio carried his words to a country that did not yet have agreed borders, a constitution, or peace. Within hours the United States recognized the new state and the armies of its neighbours crossed the frontier. For many Jews this was a homecoming, the first Jewish state since the ancient world. For another it was the year their world came apart. Both have been living with that day ever since.