The Catastrophe Al Nakba How Palestine Became Israel

by Guest Mon Jun 08, 2015 10:56 am

In the late 1800s a small, fanatic movement called “political Zionism” began in Europe. Its goal was to create a Jewish state somewhere in the world. Its leaders settled on the ancient and long-inhabited land of Palestine for the location of this state.1

Palestine's population at this time was approximately ninety-six percent non-Jewish (primarily Muslim and Christian).2

Over the coming decades Zionist leaders used various strategies to accomplish their goal of taking over Palestine:

Encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine, partly through the invention of such deceptive slogans as "a land without a people for a people without a land," when, in fact, the land was already inhabited. Since the majority of Jews were not Zionists until after WWII, Zionists used an array of misleading strategies, including secret collaboration with the Nazis, to push immigration.3
Convincing a “Great Power” to back this process. By turn, Zionists approached the Ottomans, the British, and the U.S. to further their cause. While the Ottomans turned them down, the British (being promised that American Zionists would push the U.S. to enter World War I on the side of England) eventually acceded, as did the U.S. (due to concerns of politicians like Harry Truman that they would lose elections otherwise).4
Buying up the land (sometimes through subterfuges), proclaiming it Jewish for all eternity, and refusing to allow non-Jews to live or work on the purchased land. This was called "redeeming" the land and was financed by a variety of means, including by such wealthy banking families as the Rothschilds.

Violence, if such financial dispossession should fail or prove too slow – as it did.6

In the 1930s, Jewish land ownership had increased from approximately 1% to just over 6% of the land, and violence had increased as well. With the emergence of several Zionist terrorist gangs (whose ranks included a number of future Prime Ministers of Israel), there was violent conflict. Numerous people of all ethnicities were killed – then, as now, the large majority of them Christian and Muslim Palestinians.7

The Catastrophe

This growing violence culminated in Israel's ruthless 1947-49 "War of Independence,"in which at least 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were expelled from their homes by numerically superior Israeli forces – half before any Arab armies joined the war. This massive humanitarian disaster is known as ‘The Catastrophe,’ al Nakba in Arabic.8

Zionist forces committed 33 massacres and destroyed 531 Palestinian towns. Author Norman Finkelstein states: “According to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ‘in almost every village occupied by us during the War... acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.’”9

Count Folke Bernadotte, a former official of the Swedish Red Cross who saved thousands of Jews during World War II and was appointed U.N. mediator in Palestine, said of the refugees: "It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes.”10 Bernadotte was assassinated by a Zionist organization led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.11
Injustice Continues

Over the 60 years since Israel’s founding on May 14, 1948, this profound injustice has continued. Palestinian refugees are the largest remaining refugee population in the world.

1.3 million Palestinians live in Israel as “Israeli citizens,” but despite their status as citizens, they are subject to systematic discrimination. Many are prohibited from living in the villages and homes from which they were violently expelled, and their property has been confiscated for Jewish-only uses. In Orwellian terminology, Israeli law designates these internal refugees as “present absentees.”12

In 1967 Israel launched its third war and seized still more Palestinian (and other Arab) land. Israel also attacked a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, killing and injuring over 200 Americans, an event that remains largely covered-up today, despite efforts by an extraordinary array of high-level military officers and civilian officials to expose it.13

Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip – the final 22% of mandatory Palestine – and began building settlements for Jewish Israelis on land confiscated from Palestinian Muslims and Christians. It has demolished more than 24,145 Palestinian homes since 1967. In 2005 Israel returned Gazan land to its owners, but continues to control its borders, ports, and air space, turning Gaza into a large prison, where 1.5 million people are held under what a UN Human Rights Commissioner described as “catastrophic” conditions.

Over 7,000 Palestinian men, women, and children are imprisoned in Israeli jails under physically abusive conditions (many have not even been charged with a crime) and the basic human rights of all Palestinians under Israeli rule are routinely violated. Some prisoners tortured by Israel have been American citizens. In the violence that began in fall, 2000 through Feb. 5, 2009, Israeli forces killed 6,348 Palestinians; Palestinian resistance groups killed 1,072 Israelis. Israel’s military, the fourth most powerful on earth possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons.14
American Involvement

American taxpayers give Israel more than $8 million per day, even though surveys reveal that 73% of Americans oppose taking sides on Israel-Palestine. Because of Israel’s powerful US lobby, Congress gives far more money to Israel than to all of sub-Saharan Africa put together.15 In its 60 years of existence, Israel, the size of New Jersey, has received more U.S. tax money than any other nation. While most Americans are unaware of these facts (studies have shown that media report on Israeli deaths at rates up to 13 times greater than they report on Palestinian deaths) governmental actions are making Americans responsible for a continuing catastrophe of historic proportions – and which is, in addition, creating extremely damaging enmity to the US itself. Israel partisans have played a significant role in promoting U.S. attacks on Iraq and Iran.16

As more Americans learn the facts, there is a growing bipartisan, multi-ethnic movement to counter Israel’s US lobby, which has long held a vicegrip on American Mideast policies.

Palestinian Loss of Land 1946-2005
four maps of shrinking Palestine

The Catastrophe Al Nakba How Palestine Became Israel 4maps

The Catastrophe Al Nakba How Palestine Became Israel 4maps

“Confusion about the origins of the conflict all too often has obscured Americans’ understanding of its true dimension. It began as a conflict resulting from immigrants struggling to displace the local majority population. All else is derivative from this basic reality.”

– Donald Neff, former Senior Editor, Time Magazine, Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945

“[T]he story of 1948... is the simple but horrific story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine... Retrieving it from oblivion is incumbent upon us, not just as a greatly overdue act of historiographical reconstruction or professional duty; it is... the very first step we must take if we ever want reconciliation to have a chance, and peace to take root, in the torn lands of Palestine and Israel.”

– Ilan Pappe, Israeli Historian, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The Palestinian Holocaust is unsurpassed in history. For a country to be occupied, emptied of its people, its physical and cultural landmarks obliterated, its destruction hailed as a miraculous act of God, all done according to a premeditated plan, meticulously executed, internationally supported, and still maintained today...”

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-nakba.html

by Guest Mon Jun 08, 2015 11:12 am

I see the incorrect map is doing the rounds again with really poor invented history again. Ignores attrocities by the palestinians under British control as well. Support for the Nazis by the Grand Mufti.

A series of maps circulating on the Web propagates a lie. It purports to show "Palestinian" land loss from 1946 to the present day.

The Catastrophe Al Nakba How Palestine Became Israel Palestinian_irredentism

It looks pretty convincing, doesn't it? All that green area that was "Palestinian" in 1948 has shrunk to a few tiny enclaves.

Of course it is a facile lie. The 1946 map does not show sovereignty or land ownership of Palestinian Arabs. It just shows settlements of Jewish Palestinians in the British Palestine Mandate. All the rest is colored green, as though coloring a map establishes the title of the Arabs to the land. A discussion of the difficulty of establishing land ownership in Palestine of 1946 and the origins of this "settlement map" is given in The Land Question in Palestine. The Arabs had no sovereignty over the land at any time, and they owned less than half of it. Despite Arab efforts to prevent Jewish land purchases, Jews owned about 8% (more by some estimates) of the land in the area that became Israel. Nearly 50% of the land was government land. Since the mandate was supposed to create a "national home" for the Jews, it is hard to understand why this land is colored green. Furthermore, despite big stretches of white area shown in the later maps, Arabs still own private property in those white areas - in Israel, as does the Muslim Waqf, as does the Greek Orthodox Church.

It is not clear what the last map shows. It seems to coincide with Areas A and B of the Oslo Interim Agreement. From the date, 2000, it would appear that the map series was created in order to help torpedo the Camp David peace talks, as part of the Palestinian anti-peace effort. But Areas A and B do not represent land remaining after other land was taken away. They are in fact, the only land on which Palestinian Arabs ever had any autonomous recognized government at any time in history. Before the Oslo Agreements, the Palestinian Arabs had nothing. The green areas, if they are intended to show Areas A and B, show Palestinian land gained, not land lost. What the map shows is not related to the final settlement offers made by Israel in 2000, which constituted well over 90% of the land of the West Bank (see here).

Most of the lies behind the maps were exposed ably by Adam Holland in Solomonia. Jeffrey Goldberg debunked the map series again, and Dvar Dea did it most recently.

But lies about the Israeli-Arab conflict are a dime a dozen these days. Two other aspects of the map series may be more interesting. The first is to examine how this bit of intellectual flotsam has drifted upwards from the obscurity of fringe publications to the respectability of national coverage. Like the "Apartheid" slogan and "Zionist Occupied Government," the maps and the ideas they represent are coming to be accepted as "mainstream" and "legitimate." The second aspect is to understand precisely what the makers and distributors of the maps hope to accomplish with them: To establish and legitimize an irredentist claim over the land for the Arabs of Palestine. What part of the land? Not only the area of the West Bank and Gaza, but the entire land, "from the river to the sea" - all the land that was is colored green in the 1946 map - the "lost" land.

The maps were evidently made ten years ago, but they only surfaced in the mainstream now, when alpha blogger Andrew Sullivan used them to illustrate an article he wrote. Sullivan got the series from Juan Cole, Juan Cole got it from another source and so on. The maps, like all lies, propagate like V.D. You get it from friends and friendly strangers. The map series appears, among many other places at Lawrence of Cyberia, where it is credited to Occupation Magazine, but we can suspect that the actual source was a Palestinian agency like Passia or an NGO like BADIL.

The maps are used to establish an irredentist narrative. Narratives, as we know, are the matrix of political positions, which determine how all subsequent events will be viewed and judged (see Handbook of Israel Advocacy). They are part of the effort to build a narrative that erases Jewish presence in the land and establishes a mythical past when the land "belonged" in some sense to the then non-existent "Palestinian nation." The basic assumptions of the narrative are already established. People talk about "returning" East Jerusalem to Palestinian sovereignty. This cannot be correct, as there was never any Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem or anywhere else, but it is accepted somehow.

Presumably, the editors of Occupation Magazine, along with Sullivan and Cole and Lawrence of Cyberia believe that all the area shown in green in the 1946 map is "occupied." "Justice" thus demands that all the "occupied land" that the Arabs "lost" be "returned." "Peace with Justice" therefore must bring about the destruction of Israel according to this logic.

Irredentist claims are the stuff of dangerous national conflicts. They may be based on real or imaginary history. Germany really had a legitimate claim on Alsace, which had been taken by France in the Thirty Years war. Italy really had some legitimate claims on former lands of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Too much legitimacy and "justice" ensure that peace is impossible.

Once the legitimacy of irredentist claims is admitted, there is no end to irredentism and irredentist maps in the Middle East. Syrian maps show Lebanon and Israel as part of Syria. Turkey can claim that all of Central Asia, much of the Middle East and parts of Europe were torn from them by the machinations of Western colonialist imperialism over the last 200 years. The British ideology that supported the liberation of Greece and the Balkan countries was identical to the ideology that called, at the same time, for the restoration of the Jews, and it was advanced by some of the same people. The Arabs have maps of their receding empire, recalling past days of glory when they ruled Sicily and Al Andalus, now known as Spain. Christians can claim sovereignty over Jerusalem. That was, in fact, one of the factors that decided the fate of Jerusalem in the post-World War I negotiations over the future of the Middle East.

We Zionists can claim all of the land promised as a Jewish national home in the San Remo Treaty that was the basis of the League of Nations Mandate. That land is, in justice, part of the "land of Israel." It is land that the Jewish people "lost." Unlike the green areas drawn in the Palestinian maps according to the whims of the artist, this is not a myth. The borders were political reality, supposedly guaranteed in international law. That land included not only the entire West Bank and the Golan Heights, but also all of Jordan, which was torn from the mandate and given to the Hashemite dynasty by the British. This claim used to be made by the Israeli right. It is considered to be "extremist" and not "politically correct" of course. Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole would never support that claim, but they are quite content to propagate Palestinian Irredentism.

Irredentism is suffused into national culture by those who wish to make peace impossible. The first stanza of the Deutschland lied ("Deutschland Uber Alles") stated the German claim to borders from the Adige to the Belt, from the Meuse to the Memel. All these locations are outside the borders of modern Germany. The Adige river, for example, is in Italy. The "Belt" is in Denmark. The Germans had their view of "justice," while the Danes, Italians and others have a different view. Whatever the claims of "justice," the anthem is now forbidden. The need for peace is given precedence over "justice." The anthem is still sung, however, by certain Germans who insist on "justice."

The map series is basically a "translation" of the slogans "Kulu al ard Arabi" (all of the land is Arab) and "Palestine is free, from the river to the sea - a translation that succeeds in turning racist and irredentist slogans into pleas for "justice." Ironically, Andrew Sullivan used the maps to illustrate a polemic he wrote about the supposed "intransigence" of Benjamin Netanyahu who is obstructing "peace" efforts according to Sullivan.

by Guest Mon Jun 08, 2015 11:21 am

The Qatar-based satellite TV channel's 'Nakba' film, a skillful production, which originally ran in 2008 on al-Jazeera Arabic, recycles in English a one-sided view of events surrounding Israel's struggle for independence. Elements from the multi-part broadcast in May-June 2013 are available online.

Al-Jazeera

Al-Jazeera, financed by the oil-rich Arab state of Qatar (pictured above is chief of state Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani), broadcasts to a large Arabic-speaking audience and also to a much smaller English-speaking audience in the United States. But this is likely to change. Al-Jazeera English channel's limited availability in the United States – notably via Time Warner Cable in New York City area and exposure via twice-daily (at least) half-hour newscasts on a DirecTV fringe politics channel – will increase dramatically later this summer with the takeover of the Current TV network (purchased for $500 million from former Vice-President Al Gore and other investors), now carried by nearly all cable and satellite providers.
In the film, al-Jazeera unsurprisingly propagates the nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe") myth, which falsely claims that Palestinian Arabs in 1948 suffered a forced exodus at the hands of Israeli Jews comparable to the Holocaust suffered by European Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers. Nakba Day on May 15 is marked by Arab protests (including in recent years confrontations along Israel's frontiers) while Israel's birthday is celebrated on May 14, the modern Jewish state of Israel having declared its independence on May 14, 1948, in keeping with the U.N.'s 1947 partition plan.
A basic weakness of al-Jazeera's 'Nakba' is that it is a gross exaggeration. According to authoritative sources, in the wake of Israel's War of Independence in 1948, the overwhelming majority of Arab refugees from what became the Jewish state were not expelled by Israelis. But, ironically, a much larger number of refugees, Jews who had resided in Arab countries for many generations, were forced to flee their native lands. Thus the Jewish "nakba" dwarfed the Arab "Nakba."
Moreover, the "Nakba" false narrative, including the claim that the Palestinian Arabs are a distinct ethnic and national group, which has spawned numerous conferences and publications, has distorted the historical record. Not surprisingly, Iran's Press TV, an English-language anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda arm of the country's Islamic fundamentalist government, has nothing but high praise for this film.

The film consists mainly of a mix of narration with a steady stream of short, mostly black/white, video clip human-interest interviews of Arabic speakers. English translations are superimposed on the clips. The interviews contain much hyperbole and emotion meant to convey suffering of ordinary Arabs while the narration contains falsehoods and distortions.

Excerpts

Rawan Damen (the film's producer/director): “For Palestinians, 1948 marks the 'Nakba' or the 'catastrophe', when hundreds of thousands were forced out of their homes. For Israelis, that year marks the creation of the state of Israel.”
Narrator: “From early 1948, Jewish paramilitary forces began to seize more land in Palestine. By the end of July, more than 400,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee their homes. Their plight as refugees had just started.”
Arab refugees: "We tasted starvation like nobody before… Politics is all empty talk… They say they will do this and that… But it is all hollow rhetoric… We are lost and we lost Palestine."
[…]
Narrator: “In 1949, Israel seized more land allocated to the Arabs by the U.N. Partition Plan. By April 1949 the gravity of what Palestinians called the ‘Nakba' (or catastrophe) was becoming clear. More than 400 villages and 11 cities were destroyed. Over 700,000 Palestinians had become refugees in the land that had become the new state of Israel. Over 13,000 Palestinians had been killed, more than 30,000 injured.”
[…]
Narrator: “In May 1948, the state of Israel was established – a homeland for the Jews – but some 150,000 Palestinians – Muslims and Christians – still remained within Israel's borders.” [Not surprisingly, two key facts are omitted here: These “Palestinians” were granted full citizenship (long before this film was made) as Israeli Arabs. And before the new Jewish state chose to call itself Israel, the term "Palestinian" for residents of British Mandatory Palestine typically referred to Jews; Arabs tended to shun the description as "Zionist" or "colonialist"].
These excerpts (from episode 4) typify the film's repetitious propagandistic message debunked by eminent scholars (such as Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians; Shabtai Teveth, The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem and its Origins, Middle Eastern Studies, April 1990). They have debunked the claims of mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948-49 Arab war of aggression against Israel (at least five Arab countries invaded).
The historical record shows that in most cases, the hundreds of villages often claimed by Arabs and others as “destroyed” either were abandoned in 1947 and 1948 by Arabs who fled – often at the instigation of Arab leaders (who vowed that the refugees would be returned to their homes as soon as the Arab armies eliminated the Israeli Jews), often to escape the fighting caused by attacks against Jewish villages and towns by Arab "irregulars" and the invading Arab armies, or destroyed in fighting during the war. In many cases, Israelis purchased land from Arabs and set up Jewish villages where there had once been Arab villages. Not surprisingly, mention is not made that the invading Arab armies overran Israeli villages, expelling or killing the Jewish inhabitants. Thus, Israelis were fighting for their survival. A few Arab notables have acknowledged the Arab leadership's major responsibility for the mass exodus.
Reality Versus Myth

But the film never comes close to grasping the essential reality of the situation. Had the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab countries accepted the U.N. partition [resolution], had they not waged a war of aggression against Israel in violation of the U.N. Charter, and had they not invaded Israel, there would not have been a single Palestinian Arab refugee. Instead, there would have been a [second] Palestinian Arab state (side-by-side with Israel, in addition to Jordan, which occupies 77 percent of the original Palestine Mandate territory and includes a majority Palestinian Arab population) that would also be celebrating its anniversary in May. In addition, the 6000 Israelis who were killed in the war – one percent of the population – would instead have lived; likewise the Arabs fallen in a war imposed by Arab leadership. But because the Arabs were more interested in destroying Jewish Israel than creating another Arab state, millions of people – both Arabs and Jews, suffered unnecessarily.

Few Instances of Media Scrutiny of Al-Jazeera
• “More influential than al-Libi or al-Awlaki has been Sheik Yusuf al-Qawadari, whose al-Jazeera [Arabic] TV programs reach tens of millions. Al-Qawadari was a ‘spiritual guide' to the Brotherhood, the anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish movement ascendant in Egypt and strengthening elsewhere. He hopes for the conversion of Europe to Islam and a Muslim-led genocide of the Jews.” (Wash. Jewish Week, Sept. 27, 2012).
• “Al-Jazeera demonstrated its commitment ... in July 2008, when it held a birthday celebration for Samir Kuntar, a released Lebanese terrorist who killed a 28-year-old Israeli father in front of his 4-year-old daughter and then crushed the daughter's skull with his rifle butt.” (Front Page Magazine). The Jerusalem Post describes Israeli reaction to the Kuntar birthday party: “The Government Press Office has decided to impose sanctions on Al-Jazeera after the station's Beirut office threw a party for released Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar. Daniel Seaman, director of GPO, announced the sanctions during a meeting with Al-Jazeera's bureau chief in Israel, Walid al-Omari, who claimed that this was a ‘mishap' that is being checked by his station.”

• Former al-Jazeera English anchor Dave Marash gave his reason for resigning: "… the channel had changed radically from when I was hired… By the time I left … [functions of the Washington bureau] had been taken over in Doha, the capital of Qatar… I, as the leading anchor in Washington, felt that I could not put my name on those kind of stories [reflecting Doha's ‘attitude' i.e. the need to be aligned with Qatar's foreign policy objectives]."

There is little doubt that this "Nakba" production is a preview of the type of slick propaganda that can be expected from al-Jazeera when it replaces the programming on Current TV network later this year. At that time, the number of potential viewers will be greatly multiplied since Current TV, unlike al-Jazeera English, is carried by major providers such as Comcast, Verizon, and DirecTV. It's doubtful from a business model viewpoint that providers will chose to cancel Current since al-Jazeera network, in all likelihood, will provide the channel either free or at minimal cost to the providers. The Arab network states that “Al Jazeera English is available free-to-air through satellite and cable providers around the world.”

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=3&x_outlet=126&x_article=2483

by Guest Mon Jun 08, 2015 1:30 pm

My OP is the facts regarding the Nakba, nothing to do with Al Jaz, and the map is correct. From the area that Isreal were given in 1947 they have seen fit to steal the rest.

The right of resistance of the Palestinian people is grounded in law, custom and conscience. Occupied people have that right.

by Guest Mon Jun 08, 2015 1:42 pm

risingsun wrote:My OP is the facts regarding the Nakba, nothing to do with Al Jaz, and the map is correct. From the area that Isreal were given in 1947 they have seen fit to steal the rest.

The right of resistance of the Palestinian people is grounded in law, custom and conscience. Occupied people have that right.

What facts?
There was no nation called Palestine. The map is an invention and much of what is written is skewed.
The fact is under Jordanian occupation of the West Bank no call was made to free the land from the Jordanians, which is like many of the points omitted. This the problem with such articles they invent history.

by Guest Mon Jun 08, 2015 1:48 pm

Countering the 'shrinking Palestine Maps' scam

One of the most pernicious and common scams propagated by anti-Israeli activists is the so-called 'shrinking maps' of Palestine (see bottom of this article). As with most anti-Israel propaganda (like "Israelis are baby-killers" whereas in fact Israel does everything to avoid any civilian casualties while Palestinians specifically target young children; and "Israel is an apartheid state" whereas Israel is the only country in the Middle East to provide full rights for all religious groups while the Palestinian Authority allows no Jews at all) the claims are a perfect inversion of reality.

In 2010 I decided that the best way to counter these maps was to show the following alternative (I could not find anything like this on the web so I developed it myself - there have been copies since). The map demonstrates the extent to which it is Israel that has been shrinking since 1973, in its desperate but increasingly futile hope to trade 'land for peace':

The Catastrophe Al Nakba How Palestine Became Israel Expanding_israel

Now compare that factual reality with the propaganda maps that lie (see also Elder of Ziyon on this):

The Catastrophe Al Nakba How Palestine Became Israel Map2

First of all note that the first map distinguishes "Jewish settlements" and "Palestinian Land" whereas all the others simple compare "Israeli Land" and "Palestinian Land". Since there was no 'State of Palestine' in 1947 there was no "Palestinian Land". Instead they should have highlighted (for consistency) "Arab settlements" which would actually have been much fewer and smaller than the "Jewish settlements". And of course most of the land would be neither "Jewish settlements" nor "Arab settlements" because it was still barren (although much of it was actually legally owned by Jews who had bought it). If you used the logic of this propaganda map and applied to to the USA today you could show that there are just tiny pockets of "American colonialist settlements" sprinkled amid the vast land which could be said to be "Native American" (UPDATE: see exactly such a map here and at bottom of page)
These maps are based on the completely false premise that, prior to 1947 there was an Arab state of Palestine. In fact the Palestine that was promised to the Jews as part of the Balfour declaration was the British mandate territory that includes what later become the state of Jordan (my map above top left). There was not - and never has been - an Arab state of Palestine even though, between 1948 and 1967 there was no 'occupied territories' of the West Bank or Gaza since these areas were then under the full control of Jordan and Egypt respectively. The Palestinian Arabs living there during that period never called for an independent state of their own.
Only the Jews of Palestine considered themselves Palestinian before 1948. The Arabs - most of whom had come to Palestine from Egypt and Syria because of the economic opportunities opened up by the Jews - considered themselves to be Syrian.
Despite the fact that 80% of mandate Palestine (not shown on the maps that lie) had already been granted to the Arabs exclusively to become the new state of Jordan, the Jews of Palestine accepted the UN partition plan of 1947. The surrounding Arab states did not accept it and launched a war of annihilation against the Jews (during and after which some 1 million Jews from Arab countries were forced to leave - most of them came to Israel).
The result of the war that was intended to murder every single Jew in Palestine was that the invading Arab armies were defeated and the Jews controlled slightly more territory overall than was part of the 1947 plan; however, they also lost some territory such as the Jewish quarter of East Jerusalem (including Judaism's holiest sites such as the Wailing Wall) and Gush Etzion that even the 1947 plan had not considered to be under Arab control.
The UN accepted the 1949 armistice line as defining the borders of Israel, while calling for East Jerusalem (now under Jordanian occupation) to be 'internationalised'.
The Arab states refused to recognise the State of Israel and have continued to this day to try to destroy it. The Jordanians who occupied East Jerusalem in 1948 expelled every Jew and destroyed every synagogue in the old city. Not a single Jew was allowed to enter Judaism's holiest sites until 1967 when, after the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians launched another attempted war of annihilation, Israel regained control over the old city and other areas.
Israel offered to withdraw from all the newly gained territories in return for peace but the offer was rejected by the Arab countries. With the exception of Jewish East Jerusalem Israel has essentially made the same offer over and again ever since but it has always been rejected. Despite this, Israel has returned the whole of Gaza and most of the West Bank to Palestinian control. But the Arabs continue to demand the destruction of all of Israel.