How did Israel take over Palestine so easily when it was formed?

As far as I understand, Palestine existed first then Israel kind of took it. Did Palestine have a military?

Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, the day that the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine was terminated by the Mandatory Power in Palestine, the British government. The Mandate for Palestine came into effect formally in 1922. Palestine was defined during World War I by the Allied Powers, as part of their plan to defeat the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire and decolonize Ottoman Asia. The Allied forces seized control of the area that became Mandatory Palestine in 1918.

According to the legal document entitled “The Mandate for Palestine”, issued by the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, all of Palestine west of the Jordan River was mandated as the Jewish national home. There was no mention of division, partition, or separate, non-Jewish, political institutions in the mandate. What was clear and explicit in the mandate was the recognition of the grounds for the reconstitution of the Jewish national home in Palestine, the obligation of the Mandatory Power to facilitate Jewish immigration and settlement, and the obligation to place “the country under such political, administrative, and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home”.

Over the 25 years from 1922 to 1947 the Jewish population increased by 520,000, however the Arab population increased by 530,000. In other words the British did not comply with their obligation to place the country under conditions that would have secured the establishment of the Jewish national home.

The UN, which was founded in 1946 and replaced the League of Nations, set up a commission called UNSCOP to devise a plan to ensure the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The solution of partition was chosen, proposed, voted upon, and passed by the GA. The proposal was however rejected by the Arabs, who opted instead to seize all of Palestine by force once the mandate ended and the Jewish State was proclaimed.

On May 14, 1948 the British withdrew, Palestine ceased to exist, and the State of Israel was proclaimed. No corresponding Arab State was proclaimed, but after midnight the full military force of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded what had been mandatory Palestine and initiated the war which lasted until armistice agreements suspended hostilities in 1949. The armistice with Egypt, signed in January, permitted Egypt to temporarily occupy the Gaza Strip, pending treaty negotiations. The armistice with Jordan, signed in April, permitted Jordan to temporarily occupy the territory upon which it had military control pending treaty negotiations. Neither country engaged in treaty negotiations. Jordan illegally proclaimed its annexation of the territory it held, referring to it as the Jordanian “West Bank”.

To summarize the historical reality of the territory that was Mandatory Palestine. As per the Mandate for Palestine, all of Palestine west of the Jordan River was to constitute the Jewish national home. The UN proposed the division of Palestine into Jewish and Arab States, however that proposal was never implemented due to the refusal of the Arabs to share any of Palestine with the Jewish people. The Arabs’ efforts to seize exclusive possession of Palestine by force resulted in the temporary occupation of parts of what had been Palestine by invading foreign powers, Egypt and Jordan. Their occupation lasted until 1967 at which point they resumed the hostilities suspended 18 years earlier, and were once again defeated, and forced to cross back over their recognized international borders.

If you believe that Israel took over Palestine, you have been misinformed. Palestine was pre-destined, by the same international powers that defined it, to become the Jewish national home, ie. Israel. The Arabs in Palestine were offered by the UN to share the land with the Jews, but they felt entitled to exclusive possession of Palestine. Instead of peacefully accepting the UN proposal and receiving a better “two-State solution” than would ever be offered to them again, they influenced their Arab neighbors to sacrifice their own soldiers’ lives in an effort to procure Palestine for them by military force.

The Arabs didn’t need their own military because they had the military support of all of the countries of the region. Despite their overwhelming military advantage, the Jews succeeded in repelling the invading forces and survive. That was no small accomplishment. The British authorities hunted for any weapons stashes hidden by the Jews. They barely had rifles and ammunition. When the war began there was an embargo preventing anyone from selling arms to either side. But the Arab armies were fully armed, with tanks and heavy artillery. Egypt even had an air force. Israel had no heavy arms. They scrambled to find countries willing to sell them surplus leftover arms from world war II.

Israel survived because the Israeli people had no choice. It took all available ingenuity and the heroism of nearly every able bodied citizen. And Israel has had to continue to utilize heroism and ingenuity to survive and to protect its citizens ever since.

Culled from Quora