The moment
On 14 May 1948, hours before the British Mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion read a declaration in Tel Aviv establishing a Jewish state in the land the UN had voted to partition six months earlier. Fighting between Jews and Arabs had begun after the partition vote, and the armies of the neighbouring Arab states entered the next day. By the end of the war more than half of Palestine's Arab population, about 700,000 people, had fled or been expelled from their homes and were not allowed to return, an event Palestinians call the Nakba. Two years later the Law of Return gave every Jew the right to settle in the new state.
People: David Ben-Gurion