Events immediately before and during Israel's War of Independence and during the first years of statehood remain, as far as those events involve the Arab residents of Palestine, matters of bitter and emotional dispute.

Palestinian Arab refugees, who number in the hundreds of thousands, insist that they have been driven out of their homeland by Jewish terrorists and regular Jewish military forces; the government of Israel asserts that the invading Arab forces had urged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their houses temporarily to avoid the perils of the war that would end the Jewish intrusion into Arab lands.

Immediately after the armistice agreements of 1949, Israel had begun encroachments into the demilitarized zones along with military attacks with many civilian casualties and the expulsion of thousands of Arabs, some of whom subsequently form terrorist bands that carry out what they presumably regard as reprisals and what Israel and its supporters refer to as unprovoked terrorism.

These actions set the stage for further conflicts with Egypt and Syria.

Israeli encroachments in the demilitarized zones in the north for water diversion projects and agricultural development, including armed encroachments into areas farmed by Palestinians, lead ultimately to the shelling of Israel from the Golan Heights.

Israeli attacks into the Gaza Strip lead to fedayeen attacks that serve as the pretext for the 1956 Israeli-French-British invasion of Egypt, though Egypt had been attempting to calm the border region in fear of such an attack.