The most conciliatory faction was the General Zionists, representing the original national organizations, who generally remained friendly to Great Britain. .
Following World War I, Great Britain received Palestine as a mandate from the League of Nations. The struggle by Jews for a Jewish state in Palestine had begun in the late 19th century and had become quite active by the 1930s and 40s. The militant opposition of the Arabs to such a state and the inability of the British to solve the problem eventually led to the establishment of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which devised a plan to divide Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a small internationally administered zone including Jerusalem. The General Assembly adopted the recommendations on November 29, 1947. The Jews accepted the plan, and the Arabs rejected it. As the British began to withdraw early in 1948, Arabs and Jews prepared for war. Soon Israel was proclaimed at Tel Aviv. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq invaded Israel, as most Palestinian Arabs were driven from Jewish territory. By the time armistice agreements were reached, Israel had increased its holdings by about one-half.
The next move for Israel was to set up a government in Tel Aviv, with Chaim Weizmann as president and David Ben-Gurion as prime minister. The capital was moved to Jerusalem in December of 1949 to strengthen Israel's ties to that city. Israel them allowed the return of 150,000 Arab refugees, mainly to reunite families. One major aim of the government was to gather all Jews who wished to immigrate to Israel. This led to the 1950 Law of the Return, which provided for free and automatic citizenship for all immigrant Jews. .
On Oct. 29, 1956, Israel attacked the Gaza territory in Egypt and within a few days conquered the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula, while Britain and France invaded the area of the Suez Canal. Israel eventually stop the attack due to strong pressure from the United States, the USSR, and the United Nations and removed its troops from Sinai in November 1956, and from Gaza by March 1957, as UN forces were sent to the Sinai and Gaza to keep peace between Egypt and Israel.