In 1948, the state of Israel was born. Yet there was no state for the Arab Palestinians. Why was that? What about Gaza?
What about the West Bank? Let’s discuss. For decades, pro-Palestinian activists have argued that the current conflict did not begin on October 7th. They pointed to an Israeli occupation that has continued since 1948.
And it is true that over 700,000 Arab Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. This event is known as the Nakba, the catastrophe. Many of those displaced ended up in Gaza and the West Bank. Yet those areas did not come under Israeli occupation but under Egyptian and Jordanian rule respectively.
So why didn’t these Arab states grant the Arab Palestinians their own state? What is today known as the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories was, before World War I, part of the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, the British took over the area and were keen on making it a homeland for the Jewish people. As Jewish immigration to Palestine increased during the 1920s and 30s, it caused more and more violence with the Arab communities.
The British had their hands full maintaining order, and the violence spiraled out of control. By 1947, a civil war was going on in mandatory Palestine between Arab and Jewish militants. At the end of April 1948, the British paid off their local staff and prepared to leave themselves. On the 14th of May, as promised, the British high commissioner left Jerusalem by plane.
The mandate had ended, and the Jews proclaimed the state of Israel. Overnight, US President Truman recognized the new state. Jordanian King Abdullah raised his revolver, fired, and shouted forward. And on the 15th, the first Arab-Israeli war formally began.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli war, also known as Israel’s War of Independence, or the Nakba in Arabic, broke out when armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded. Initially the Arab forces made gains, but Israel quickly organized its newly formed Israel Defense Forces, built from groups like the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Lehi. Through superior organization, international support, and waves of Jewish immigration, Israel pushed back the Arab armies. By the war’s end in 1949, Israel controlled about 78 percent of former mandatory Palestine.
Around 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, creating a massive refugee crisis. Many ended up in surrounding countries. Around 200,000 to 230,000 ended up in the Gaza Strip. Another 350,000 ended up in the West Bank.
First, let’s consider what happened to the Arab Palestinians who ended up in Gaza after 1948. Although their suffering was immense, the Palestinians who became refugees in the Gaza Strip did not simply resign themselves to their fate. Women tried to bring some comfort and dignity to their makeshift homes, while children, supported by help organizations, quickly entered a rapidly growing school system. A modest economy emerged, rooted in local services, agriculture, and small-scale industry.
Yet above all, it was the dream of returning to their nearby homeland that sustained this resilient refugee community. Despite minefields and harsh crackdowns, many continued to cross back into Israel. The Arab League created Egypt’s All-Palestine Protectorate during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. When the fighting ended, the Gaza Strip remained the only part of the former British mandate that came under the authority of the All-Palestine Government.
Historians are divided as to whether the All-Palestine Protectorate represented a genuine attempt at an independent Palestinian state or if it was simply a facade for Egyptian occupation. When Egypt and Syria formally merged into the United Arab Republic in 1958, Gaza was incorporated into this new Arab state. Yet in reality, it remained under Egyptian military control. Arab states largely treated the Palestinian cause as part of the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, not as a project for Palestinian sovereignty.
Under Egyptian administration, the Gaza Strip remained a unique and separate political territory in a world dominated by sovereign states. It occupied an uncertain position caught between borders and power struggles, making it a volatile hot spot. The political climate in Gaza encouraged unusual cooperation between communists and Islamists. The evolution of infiltrators into fedayeen, Palestinian militants, happened in two stages.
First came politicization, as a radical minority broke away from the Muslim Brotherhood to embrace armed struggle, eventually giving rise to the future founders of Fatah. The second stage was professionalization, when Nasser’s Egypt took charge of organizing and directing Palestinian raids as part of its conflict with Israel. It was in Gaza that the fedayeen were forged, and Israel would soon exact a heavy price from Gaza for it. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip before 1967, and that was in 1956.
Not long after the 1948 war ended, clashes began again along the armistice line between Gaza and Israel, escalating into frequent border fighting during the early 1950s. To stop this from turning into a new full-scale war between Israel and the Arab states, various attempts were made through political talks, military strategies, and economic plans to resolve Gaza’s precarious situation. However, all these efforts failed, leading to the outbreak of the 1956 war. This conflict is also known as the Suez Crisis and encompassed a British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt.
When Israel captured Gaza during that conflict, it planned to annex the territory. But in March 1957, Israel was forced to withdraw, and Egyptian military control was reestablished. From that point onward, Gaza was cemented as a separate geopolitical entity, one that would become closely tied to the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Now let’s look at the West Bank under Jordanian occupation.
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Jordan’s Arab Legion moved into the West Bank and, under the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel, took formal control of the territory. This marked the beginning of the West Bank’s existence as a separate geographic and political unit. At that time about 450,000 Palestinians lived there, but they were soon joined by roughly 350,000 refugees who had fled from the coastal plains, Galilee, and the Negev. By 1952, the Jordanian authorities recorded a population of more than 740,000 in the West Bank, nearly half of them refugees.
In April 1950, Jordan’s parliament formally annexed the West Bank, calling it unification with the East Bank. King Abdullah had already laid the groundwork during and after the 1948 war, appointing military governors, granting Jordanian nationality to Palestinians, and organizing parliamentary elections across both banks. The process was swift, deliberate, and relatively smooth, lasting under two years. Though most of the world did not recognize the annexation, it was widely accepted on the ground until Israel captured the territory in 1967.
Jordan granted West Bank Palestinians citizenship and representation in government, and integrated the region into the Hashemite Kingdom. In 1950, the Jordanian Parliament formally voted for unity between the East and West Banks, despite objections from the Arab League. This decision transformed Transjordan into the Kingdom of Jordan, with Palestinians now forming a majority of its population. Yet tensions remained, as most West Bankers maintained a Palestinian identity and many resented their economic and political dependence on Amman.
The 1948 war and annexation disrupted long-standing social and economic networks. Before 1948, West Bank towns and villages had strong ties to Arab centers like Haifa, Jaffa, and coastal Palestine. With Israel now controlling these areas, trade routes and family connections were severed. Some villages were even split by the new armistice line, cutting farmers off from their fields.
Local economies weakened, and many lost much of their agricultural land. Refugees often squatted on village land or competed for scarce resources, creating friction with host communities. Meanwhile, frequent cross-border infiltrations by Palestinian refugees into Israel provoked Israeli reprisals, which devastated border villages and deepened discontent with Jordan’s inability to provide security. Jordan sought to administer the West Bank as part of its state apparatus.
Palestinians became citizens and could vote in elections, and many were appointed to government posts. But resentment grew, especially as Palestinian political life was overshadowed by events in the wider Arab world. The 1950s and 1960s saw Arab nationalism rise, fueled by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. His pan-Arab message of liberation, revenge, and unity deeply resonated with the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank and refugee camps, where his portrait often hung beside that of King Hussein.
Political radicalism spread, and West Bank politics increasingly challenged Jordan’s monarchy. Palestinian support grew for parties like the Ba’athists, Communists, and Muslim Brotherhood, and later for guerrilla movements like Fatah. Jordan tried to balance suppressing radical opposition and allowing Palestinians some participation in government, but tensions persisted. The creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, in 1964 intensified these tensions, as it symbolized an independent Palestinian identity separate from Jordanian rule.
By 1967, Arab nationalism and Palestinian activism had reached a fever pitch. Nasser’s call for war against Israel galvanized mass demonstrations across the West Bank, pressuring King Hussein to join the Arab military alliance. When Israel launched its preemptive strike in June 1967, Jordan entered the conflict but suffered a swift defeat. Within three days, Israel occupied the entire West Bank, ending Jordanian control.
This defeat dramatically reshaped the region. Hundreds of thousands of additional Palestinians became refugees. The West Bank was placed under Israeli rule, and Palestinian nationalism began to crystallize around independent organizations like the PLO. The 1967 war marked the end of Jordan’s West Bank era and set the stage for the next phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
So the question remains: why was there never a Palestinian state? In Gaza, Egypt never granted the Palestinians true sovereignty. The All-Palestine Government was weak and ultimately subordinate to Egyptian military interests. In the West Bank, Jordan annexed the territory outright, offering citizenship but not independence.
Both Arab powers treated the Palestinian cause as a weapon in their own struggles against Israel, not as a genuine path to Palestinian statehood. The dream of a Palestinian state was repeatedly deferred, first by the war itself, then by the competing ambitions of neighboring Arab states, and finally by the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War era. It was a tragedy shaped not by a single decision but by a cascade of choices made in Cairo, Amman, and beyond, choices that left the Palestinian people caught between the hopes of nationhood and the realities of occupation.
