ABSTRACT
Violent Arab opposition to the return of the Jews to Palestine long pre-dated the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. As early as the 1920s, conflict between the local Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine had become endemic and later escalated once regional Arab countries refused to accept the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state in the disputed land. By the time the British mandate came to a close, the conflict had escalated into a full-scale war which posed a severe challenge to the newly established state.
