Israel after the War, 1949–55
A State of Eight Hundred Thousand — and Growing Fast
When the 1949 armistices were signed, Israel was a state of about 800,000 people occupying about 78 per cent of former Mandate Palestine. The new government in Tel Aviv faced three immediate problems at once: securing recognition, mass immigration and constant cross-border raids. The first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, treated all three as connected: a flood of new immigrants would only be safe if the army could defend the borders, and only worth absorbing if the state had the money and recognition to feed them. The decisions taken in this five-year window built the institutions that have shaped Israeli politics ever since.
Building the Israeli Defence Forces
On 26 May 1948, twelve days after independence, Ben-Gurion ordered the dissolution of the Yishuv’s separate armed groups and the creation of a single national army — the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The Haganah formed the core; the Irgun and Lehi were forcibly absorbed, sometimes by force of arms (the Altalena affair in June 1948 saw the Irgun’s last separate weapons shipment shelled by Haganah artillery off Tel Aviv beach). From 1949 the IDF introduced compulsory conscription for almost all young men and women, making the army the single most important national institution. By the mid-1950s every Israeli citizen would either serve in the IDF or know somebody who had.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were created on 26 May 1948 from the Haganah, with the Irgun and Lehi forcibly absorbed. Compulsory conscription from 1949 made the IDF the central institution of the Israeli state.
The Law of Return, 1950
In July 1950 the Knesset passed the Law of Return, granting any Jew anywhere in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and acquire citizenship. The law was both a moral statement after the Holocaust and a practical demographic strategy. Between 1948 and 1951 about 700,000 Jewish immigrants arrived — roughly equal to the entire Yishuv before independence. Around half were Holocaust survivors from displaced-persons camps in Europe; the other half were Jews from Arab and Muslim countries (Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt and elsewhere) where their position became dangerous after 1948. By the end of 1951 Israel’s population had roughly doubled.
Absorbing this wave was painful. Immigrants were housed in tent cities and tin-shack ma’abarot; food was rationed for years; Jews from Arab countries faced discrimination from European-born Israelis (the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide that still shapes Israeli politics). But the demographic effect was decisive: Israel could now field a large army from a Jewish majority population and could not realistically be reversed by an Arab military victory short of total war.
A common Israeli argument is that, just as Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the Arab states should have absorbed the Palestinian refugees. The Palestinian counter-argument is that the two cases are not comparable: Jewish immigrants came to a state that defined itself as their national home, while Palestinian refugees were displaced from their own land and want to return to it. Most Arab states refused full citizenship to Palestinian refugees on the grounds that absorption would extinguish the right of return. Jordan was the exception, granting citizenship to Palestinians on the West Bank and east Jerusalem after annexation. The argument has been live since 1949, so a strong answer holds both perspectives at once.
UNRWA and the Refugee Camps
The UN General Assembly created UNRWA in December 1949 to feed, school and shelter the roughly 700,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948–49 war. UNRWA established camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The camps were intended as temporary, but by 1955 they had become semi-permanent towns with schools, clinics and dense populations of stateless people. Israel refused to allow refugees to return; the Arab states (with the partial exception of Jordan) refused to grant them citizenship. The camps therefore became a long-term political reality: a young, educated and stateless population that would supply recruits to fedayeen raiders in the 1950s and to the PLO from 1964.
US Aid and Diplomatic Recognition
President Truman’s recognition of Israel within hours of the 14 May 1948 declaration set a pattern of US support, although early aid was modest. Between 1949 and 1955 Washington provided around $290 million in loans and grants — significant for a small new state but smaller than the aid the US would later give. The US balanced support for Israel with concern for its oil interests and Cold War alliances in the Arab world. The Soviet Union had been the second country to recognise Israel and supplied weapons via Czechoslovakia during the 1948 war, but Stalin turned hostile by 1950 as Israel aligned with the Western camp. By 1955 the US-Soviet pattern that would shape the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 was already setting hard.
The Border War: Fedayeen Raids and Israeli Reprisals
The 1949 armistice borders ran through villages and farmland; thousands of Palestinians lived just yards from the homes they had lost. From 1949 onwards small groups of fedayeen — armed Palestinians, sometimes acting independently, sometimes sponsored by Egyptian or Jordanian intelligence — crossed the lines to attack Israeli farms, settlements and roads. The IDF developed a doctrine of disproportionate reprisal raids: respond to any cross-border attack with force several times greater, against the territory the raiders came from. Two reprisals especially stand out.
The Qibya raid of October 1953, on a Jordanian-controlled West Bank village, was carried out by Unit 101 under a young officer named Ariel Sharon. Around 69 Palestinian villagers, more than half of them women and children, were killed when houses were demolished with their inhabitants inside. The UN Security Council condemned Israel; the raid did not stop fedayeen attacks, but it did establish reprisal as the Israeli norm. The Gaza raid of February 1955, in which an IDF parachute battalion killed 38 Egyptian soldiers in a raid on an Egyptian army base, marked a turning point in Israel’s relations with Egypt. Nasser, only recently in power, treated the raid as a national humiliation and accelerated the Egyptian arms purchase from Czechoslovakia in 1955 that helped trigger the Suez Crisis (covered in Lesson 5).
Two IDF reprisal raids defined the early 1950s: Qibya (October 1953, in Jordanian-controlled West Bank, around 69 villagers killed) and Gaza (February 1955, 38 Egyptian soldiers killed). Together they hardened the Egyptian-Israeli relationship and pushed Nasser towards Soviet weapons.
A narrative account on relations between Israel and Egypt in these years is a natural question. The lesson’s spine of fedayeen raids, the 1955 Gaza reprisal and Nasser’s Czech arms deal answers it directly. Strong narratives connect events causally: armistice without peace treaty creates the border problem; Palestinian refugees in Gaza supply fedayeen recruits; Israeli reprisal in February 1955 gives Nasser a reason to rearm with Soviet weapons; Egyptian rearmament gives Israel a reason to plan a pre-emptive war. By 1956 the components of the Suez Crisis are all in place.