The 1948 Israeli-Arab War is described in most research as a military conflict that began between two national entities in Palestine, and developed into a regular war between armies. This general description of the war presents a periodization with two main stages of fighting. 1 The first stage is described as an inter-communal confrontation, or as a civil war that took place between the Jewish community (Yishuv) and Palestinian society that began at the end of November 1947 and lasted until the close of the British Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948. The second stage of the war relates to the period beginning with the invasion of regular Arab armies on 15 May 1948 and the military confrontation that continued, with various cease-fires, until the signing of the last armistice agreement in July 1949. This description of the primary stages of the war is based first and foremost on a military and political viewpoint of the war. In this article, I have chosen to focus on mobilization of the Jewish populace on behalf of the war effort and the social and civil aspects of the war. This discussion is also based on the conventional paradigm of two primary stages of fighting. At the same time, examination of the mobilization of society for the war effort enables one to present a more extended process that began in October 1947 — some two months prior to the outbreak of the war — and ended, from the standpoint of mobilization of personnel, at the beginning of 1949, when demobilization of the first draftees from the wartime army took place, and from an economic stand-point in April 1949, when an Austerity system was declared in the State of Israel.
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