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beginning with the fi rst election, in 1949. But Israel's neighbors had not agreed to the exist-
ing borders or to Israel's continued existence. The Arab states accepted only an armistice, not
peace. The Arab-Israeli confl ict had only begun.
Arab rule prevailed in east Jerusalem and the West Bank (Jordan) and the Gaza Strip
(Egypt). During the fi ghting from November 1947 to May 1948, between the partition resolu-
tion and its implementation, about 400,000 Palestinian Arabs had fl ed to neighboring Arab
countries or to territories held by invading Arab armies. The fi ghting continued, and between
May 1948 and January 1949, another 300,000 fl ed.
Because all the Arab states and Palestinian Arab organizations maintained that Israel's cre-
ation was illegitimate and that a state of war continued, national defense remained a high
priority for Israel. The new nation had to be prepared to fi ght a simultaneous attack by Arab
states on all of its borders. From the early 1950s on, Palestinian irregular forces made sporadic
border crossings, encouraged especially by the Egyptian authorities in the Gaza Strip but also
by Syria and Jordan. Israel implemented its basic strategic principles: formation of a relatively
small army, which could be enlarged quickly through a reserve call-up system; maintenance
of qualitative and technological superiority; and, given Israel's small size, establishment of the
ability to take the offensive so that war could be fought on enemy territory.
LARGE-SCALE IMMIGRATION
Besides the hostility that Israel faced on its borders, the small, newly established country faced
equally heavy internal challenges. It had to create a stable, democratic governing apparatus;
build an economy in a country with few natural resources and no heavy industry; and inte-
grate a huge number of immigrants, who had come empty-handed, into the existing popula-
tion. During the fi rst eighteen months after independence, 340,000 Jews arrived, a number
equaling almost half of the existing citizenry. By 1953, fi ve years after the Partition Plan was
proposed, the population had doubled. The newcomers were much needed, but how could
they be housed, fed, educated, taught a new language, kept reasonably satisfi ed, and put to
productive work all at the same time?
The fi rst big group to arrive included 270,000 Holocaust survivors from Europe. The
trauma they had experienced made their integration potentially diffi cult. In the country's fi rst
two years, about 50,000 Yemeni Jewish immigrants arrived — they, too, had to make a tremen-
dous cultural adjustment — and 113,000 Jews from Iraq followed in the early 1950s. Besides
them came large portions of the Jewish communities of Romania, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan,
and Egypt.
By 1957, Israel's Jewish population had risen from 712,000 in November 1948 to 1,667,000.
After a brief respite, another wave of immigration began in 1958. These newcomers were from
North Africa, mainly Morocco: 160,000 immigrated in a very short span of time.
Handling the ensuing housing shortage forced, fi rst, the creation of tent cities, then the
construction of transit camps ( ma'abarot )—127 by the end of 1951—which had better but still
very Spartan facilities. Finally, during the second half of the 1950s, immigrants were moved
directly upon arrival to places referred to as development towns, often located in the north or
south, in order to populate parts of the country close to its borders.
 
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