Remembering May 15, 1948

07 Oct, 2025

By Eli Sachs

It has now been 731 days since 07 Oct, 2023. Today, people in Israel and around the globe are reminded of the lives lost to Hamas and Hamas-led armed militant groups.

On the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, at 6:30 a.m. IST (11:30 p.m. EST the previous day), 5,000 rockets were launched into Israel, followed an hour later by fighters on paragliders and in land vehicles.

At 6:56 a.m., the first militants arrived in Be’eri and initiated what is now referred to as the Be’eri Massacre.

By 7:00, the Supernova Music Festival had been attacked, with 364 of the 3-4,000 attendees killed and 40 abducted.

In total, 1,195 people in 21 communities, including Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Netiv Haasara, and Alumim, were executed, including 79 foreign nationals and 379 members of the Israeli security forces. 250 civilians were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip.

The gravity of the October 7th attacks is not to be understated; however, they were not unprecedented.

In the mid-1800s, Jewish residents made up only about three percent of the population in Palestine. Most inhabitants were Arab Muslims and Christians living under Ottoman rule.

By the late 19th century, the first organized waves of Jewish immigration began. Between 1882 and 1903, roughly 30,000 Jews — mainly from the Russian Empire — arrived in Palestine, seeking refuge from antisemitism and hoping to build a national homeland. This period, known as the First Aliyah, marked the start of a growing Zionist movement. Supported by European backers, settlers began purchasing land and establishing agricultural communities.

In 1896, Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), arguing that the only solution to Jewish persecution in Europe was the creation of a Jewish nation. A year later, the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland. Its founding declaration — known as the Basel Program—stated:

“Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.”

By 1914, on the eve of World War I, the Jewish population of Palestine had risen to about 90,000, out of a total of half a million mostly Arab inhabitants.

The British Mandate period (1917–1947) began after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, despite Jews making up less than ten percent of the population. The document is often cited as a catalyst for what would become the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In 1919, the U.S.-backed King-Crane Commission found widespread Palestinian opposition to Zionism and warned that imposing a Jewish homeland would lead to unrest. The declaration, many historians later argued, set in motion the displacement of Palestinians in 1948, known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”

From 1920 to 1947, the League of Nations granted Britain administrative control over Palestine, enabling Jewish immigration and institutional development. The Jewish National Fund was established to acquire and manage land, and the Jewish Agency — founded in 1929 — became the de facto representative of the Zionist movement. The British allowed Jewish settlers limited self-governance through such institutions while denying Palestinians similar rights, a disparity that would later shape the outcome of 1948.

By the late 1930s, some Zionist leaders began openly considering “transfer,” or the organized removal of Palestinians, as a means to secure a Jewish demographic majority. David Ben-Gurion and others supported what they called “compulsory transfer.”

In 1939, Britain issued the White Paper, attempting to limit Jewish immigration and proposing that further entry beyond a five-year quota would require Arab consent. British officials warned that unchecked migration could foster “fatal enmity” between Jews and Arabs and destabilize the Middle East.

During World War II, the genocide of European Jews intensified. On December 8, 1941, the Chełmno extermination camp began operations — the first stationary facility to use gas for mass murder. Between 1942 and 1944, millions were killed. Nazi Germany’s surrender came on May 8, 1945, a week after Hitler’s suicide.

In the aftermath, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors sought refuge. Britain, still controlling Palestine, restricted immigration, prompting clandestine efforts known as Aliyah Bet. Jewish paramilitary groups escalated attacks on British authorities, pushing London to refer the issue to the United Nations.

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The proposed Jewish state covered about 55 percent of the land, though Jews comprised only one-third of the population and owned far less territory.

As the British withdrew in May 1948, fighting between Jewish and Arab communities turned into a full-scale war. Zionist leaders declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Over the next year, Israeli forces captured 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine — far beyond the UN plan — and expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians. Hundreds of villages were destroyed.

“Plan Dalet,” Israeli archives later revealed, called for systematic expulsions to secure a Jewish demographic majority.

By 1949, only about 13 percent of Palestinians remained within the new state’s borders.

The 1949 armistice agreements left Israel with significantly more land than originally allotted, while the displaced Palestinians became refugees in neighboring countries. Israeli laws prevented their return and enabled the confiscation of abandoned property. In the years that followed, mass immigration of Jews from Europe and the Middle East reshaped the country’s demographics.

In June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, bringing hundreds of thousands more Palestinians under military rule. Over 300,000 fled from the West Bank to Jordan. Israeli policy during this period was often summarized as pursuing “maximum land, minimum Arabs.”

After 1967, Israel consolidated its control through settlements, land expropriation, and annexation—especially in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The 1993–1995 Oslo Accords created limited Palestinian self-rule in urban areas but left Israel in control of most of the land.

In 2005, Israel withdrew its settlers and troops from Gaza but maintained control over borders, airspace, and imports, effectively continuing the blockade. Meanwhile, settlement expansion in the West Bank accelerated.

Today, roughly 90 percent of historic Palestine—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — remains under Israeli authority. Palestinians are largely confined to fragmented enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza.

Since the 19th century, the Palestinian people have been the subject of a genocide and ethnic cleansing, culminating in part in the Nakba. Around 700,000 people in what is now Israel are displaced Palestinians, and thousands of Palestinian refugees abroad are stateless to this day. The entirety of Gaza City has been leveled. People's homes, farmland, hospitals, schools, parks, churches, stores, and families have been destroyed.

So, yes, October 7th was an act of violence. Preventable violence.

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