1897 the first Zionist Congress assembled, summoned by the Jewish State’s spiritual father Theodore Herzl. At that assembly the Jewish people’s right to a national resurrection within their own land was proclaimed. This right was recognized in the Balfour declaration the 2nd of November 1917.

At the San Remo conference 1920 it was resolved that the Mandate for Palestine was going to be the Jews’ national homeland. In July 1922 the League of Nations and Great Britain recognized the allocation of Palestine as the Mandate. The historic bond between the Jewish people and the land was recognized. Great Britain was assigned to make easier the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine – Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). The Mandate for Palestine comprised the entire areas which is Israel today as well as the West Bank, the Gaza strip, the Golan Heights and Jordan.

Great Britain was involved in other businesses which effected the size of the Mandate, because two months later, in September of 1922 the League of Nations and Great Britain decided that the Jewish homeland would not comprise the area east of the river Jordan, which constituted 75 % of the Mandate. The area east of the river Jordan later became the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.

In March 7, 1923 Great Britain exchanged the Golan Heights for control over oil assets in Mosul with France, who had the Mandate for Syria. Because the Mandate for Palestine was recognized by the League of Nations the year before, this exchange can be seen as illegal. Historically the Golan Heights is more connected to the Galilee than to Syria.

The Jewish reestablishment and the Jewish society’s efforts to rebuild the land met with strong opposition by the Arab nations. Their resentment resulted in periods of intense violence (1920-21, 1929, 1936-39) where Jewish transports were destroyed, fields and forests were put on fire, and they executed unprovoked riots toward the Jewish population. The early Zionist efforts to form a dialogue with the Arabs failed and the polarized Zionist movement and Arab nationalism escalated; the situation was about to explode. When the British realized the two national movements’ opposite goals, they (1937) recommended a two state solution to the problem; one Jewish State and one Arab State. The Jewish leadership accepted the idea of a two-part state and authorized the Jewish Agency to negotiate with the British government in an attempt to reformulate some of the aspects within the proposal. The Arabs were dead against all kinds of partitioning plans.

Following extensive Arab anti-Jewish revolts, Great Britain (in May 1939) issued White Paper containing drastic restrictions for Jewish immigration, although the consequence would be that European Jews would be denied a place away from the Nazi persecution. The outbreak of the Second World War led to the declaration of David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first Prime Minister of Israel: ”We shall fight the war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and the White Paper as if there were no war."

Great Britain’s inability to accept the conflicting demands from the Jewish and the Arab communities resulted in the British government’s request that “the Palestine issue” be moved to the UN General Assembly instead (April 1947). As a result a special committee was to draw up the lines for the future of the country. November 29, 1947 the Assembly voted to adopt the committee’s recommendation to divide the land into two states (the Partition Plan), one Jewish and one Arabic. The Jewish side accepted this proposal but the Arabs rejected it.

As a result of the vote in the UN, local military Arabs with the help of volunteers from Arab countries began to perform violent attacks against the Jewish community in an attempt to thwart the partition resolution and prevent the founding of a Jewish State. After a number of set-backs the Jewish defense organizations defeated most of the attacking troops and took control over the entire area allotted to the Jewish State.

May 14, 1948 when the British Mandate ended the Jewish population in the country was 650 000 and comprised an organized society with much developed political, social and economic institutions – a nation in every sense of the word and a state with everything - except a name. On the same day, May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared, in agreement with the UN Partition Plan (from 1947.)

Part of this the text is taken from the homepage of the Israeli Embassy.