The modern Zionist movement had taken political form with Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) in 1896; the Basel Congress of 1897 set as its goal a Jewish home in Palestine. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917 Britain endorsed that goal; in 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the Palestine mandate. Over the next quarter-century Jewish immigration grew, Arab-Jewish tension grew with it; the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 was suppressed by Britain. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany's genocide of Europe's Jews — the Holocaust / Shoah — left six million dead; the displacement of most of the survivors gave the Zionist demand a new and overwhelming moral weight.

After the war Britain could no longer sustain the mandate. On 29 November 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181 proposed the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem placed under international administration. Under the plan some 56% of the land would go to the Jewish state and 43% to the Arab state — but Jews made up only about a third of the population. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan; the Arab leadership and neighbouring Arab states rejected it — the result was a civil war that began before the mandate ended (November 1947 – May 1948). In this phase events such as Deir Yassin (9 April 1948) triggered the mass flight of Arab inhabitants.

At 16:00 on Friday 14 May 1948, in the hall of the Tel Aviv Museum, David Ben-Gurion read out the Israeli Declaration of Independence — Herzl's portrait hung on the wall behind him. The British mandate ended at midnight; within hours the United States and the Soviet Union recognised the new state. The next morning the armies of Egypt, Jordan (Transjordan), Syria, Lebanon and Iraq entered Palestine; the First Arab-Israeli War began. The war ended in armistice agreements in early 1949: Israel occupied a larger area than the UN partition plan had drawn — about 78% of Palestine; the West Bank fell under Jordanian control, Gaza under Egyptian. During the war more than 700,000 Palestinians — roughly half of the Arab population — fled or were expelled, and more than 500 villages were emptied or destroyed. Palestinian collective memory remembers this as the Nakba ("catastrophe"); for Israel the same event is independence and liberation. The work of historians such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, drawing on British and Israeli archives opened from the 1980s on, has documented that much of the displacement was the result of Israeli military operations (Plan Dalet and others); debate nonetheless continues about intent, scope and responsibility.

The founding of the State of Israel is one of the most heavily loaded events of the 20th century. On one side it is the re-establishment of a state after two thousand years of Jewish exile — a concrete refuge especially for Holocaust survivors; on the other it coincides with the dispossession of the Arab-Palestinian people who lived on that same land. The two narratives may look irreconcilable, yet each is a true part of the same event — the liberation of one existing people and the loss of homeland by another. After 1948 the Suez crisis (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), Yom Kippur (1973), Lebanon (1982-2006), the Intifadas (1987, 2000), the Oslo process (1993-2000) and the Gaza wars (2008, 2014, 2023-) magnified the unresolved question this founding had left open. On the Eon timeline 14 May 1948 is the starting point of the modern map of the Near East and of a conflict that continues to this day.