Special pages commemorating 50 years of Arab dispossession since the creation of the State of Israel
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

1948-1998

Fifty years of struggle

50 years today the Zionist provisional council, forerunner of the Knesset, met inside the Tel Aviv Museum at 4pm to hear David Ben-Gurion read the proclamation announcing the establishment of the state of Israel. The following day the whole region was at war. Ben-Gurion encapsulated Israeli aims in 1948 thus: "A Christian state should be established, with its southern border on the Litani River. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the Arab Legions and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo... And in this fashion, we will end the war and settle our forefathers' account with Egypt, Assyria, and Aram."

This supplement attempts to capture, in word and pictures, the mood of the Arab world on the eve of the first Arab Israeli War, document events leading to the war and highlight the main stations of a struggle that will not end so long as Israel continues to pursue its dreams of conquest and destruction

On the eve of war In the first of a series of interviews with senior politicians and political analysts who lived through the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, who covered the war from the battlefield, talks to Amira Howeidy and Omayma Abdel-Latif about the genesis and development of a struggle that still rages 50 years later

The Arabs divided When the League of Arab States came into existence on 22 March, 1945, there were only seven independent nations to join: Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. All the Arab League state members, however, had for decades been languishing under British and French colonialism, accorded a degree of autonomy inadequate to allow them to function as modern states. --read on--

Chronology Main events leading to the first Arab-Israeli War January 1947 - 15 May, 1948

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