The headline refers to an excerpt from Michael Scott-Baumann’s The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace, published by Scroll.in on December 26, 2023, with permission from Pan MacMillan. It presents the 1947–49 war as a formative struggle over survival and territory—and sets Israel’s account of national liberation alongside the Palestinian experience of the Nakba. The excerpt is a historical account, not evidence of present-day conditions.
What the excerpt says about Israel’s founding
Scott-Baumann’s account begins with Israel’s proclamation on May 14, 1948. The excerpt reproduces the book’s opening sentence: “On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the new State of Israel, ‘a Jewish state established by and for the Jewish people.’” This is the wording as presented in the excerpt, not a separately verified transcript of the proclamation.
The excerpt describes fighting by neighboring Arab forces beginning the following day. It treats the ensuing war as a struggle for survival, territory and control, including a battle for Jerusalem and Israeli military advances. In this framing, the war is central to Israel’s establishment, not a separate episode that can be detached from the state’s creation.
Why the same war is remembered differently
The account places two national frames beside one another. In the Israeli framing it describes, the war is a War of Independence: a fight for national liberation and survival. In the Palestinian framing, the central term is the Nakba—Arabic for “catastrophe”—associated with displacement and the events of 1947–49. These terms express distinct experiences and memories; the excerpt does not present a comprehensive comparison of the historical scholarship behind them.
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On displacement, Scott-Baumann’s excerpt says Palestinian Arabs fled or were forced out. That phrasing matters: it does not reduce the events to a single cause or claim that every person left in the same way. The excerpt also quotes historian Benny Morris as saying Israeli forces carried out “at least nine massacres of Palestinian civilians and prisoners of war” in the Galilee. That quotation reaches the reader through Scott-Baumann’s excerpt; it should not be treated here as independently checked against Morris’s original work.
Territory, displacement and deaths: figures reported in the excerpt
The following figures are those reported in the Scroll.in excerpt in 2023. They are attributed to that account and have not been independently corroborated here.
| Measure | Figure in the excerpt | What it refers to |
|---|---|---|
| Share of Mandatory Palestine under Israeli control | 78 per cent | Territory the excerpt says Israel controlled at the end of the war. |
| Share allocated to the proposed Jewish state | 55 per cent | The share of Mandatory Palestine allocated under the UN partition plan, as reported in the excerpt. |
| Palestinian Arabs who fled | 400,000 | The number the excerpt says fled between May 1948 and January 1949; the passage also describes people being forced out. |
| Israeli lives lost | 6,000 | The excerpt’s reported toll for the war. It also says this was almost one per cent of the Jewish population. |
The territorial comparison shows the scale of the gap between the partition proposal and the outcome described in the excerpt. It does not, by itself, explain how that outcome came about or settle the causes and circumstances of Palestinian displacement. Those are historical questions that require evidence beyond a single excerpt.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What this excerpt can—and cannot—establish
The page identifies the book and gives readers a compact account of its treatment of Israel’s founding, the war and Palestinian displacement. Its figures and interpretations should be read as claims reported by Scott-Baumann in a 2023 excerpt, rather than as independently established findings in this article.
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The title’s phrase “a conflict it has never overcome” makes a claim about the present as well as the past. The excerpt does not document current conditions, so it cannot substantiate that present-tense claim on its own. Its contribution is narrower: it shows how the book connects the unresolved historical legacies of 1947–49—especially competing national memories and the consequences of displacement—to the conflict’s longer history.
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