Wikipedia:

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommended the adoption and implementation of the Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine. The end of the British Mandate for Palestine was set for midnight on 14 May 1948. That day, David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel,” which would start to function from the termination of the mandate.[11][12][13] The borders of the new state were not specified. Neighboring Arab armies invaded the former Palestinian mandate on the next day and fought the Israeli forces.

Elie Wiesel:

For the Jewish child in me, Israel represents an irresistible call to hope, and Jerusalem a powerful love song. In my small Romanian town, nestled in the Carpathians, I often walked the streets imagining myself sitting on a bench somewhere in Judea, listening to a master explain the mystery of words, the strength of memories and the human thirst for miracles. With my grandfather, a fervent Chassid, I spoke Yiddish. He loved teaching me Chassidic tunes and, most of all, watching me pore over a Talmudic tractate. His dream was to live long enough for all of us to go together to the Holy Land and there welcome the Messiah. Indeed, I dreamed about the Messiah more than about a political Jewish state. Then what happened happened.

Where was I on May 14, 1944? Still in the ghetto. I was 15. The first transport toward the unknown, organised in haste, was getting ready to leave or had just left. For us, destiny wore the mask of death of which the enemy had made its own saviour.

May 14, 1948. Paris. Israel is about to be born. Stateless, I had already lived three years in France. Liberated from Buchenwald by the American Army in 1945, I was asked by an officer where I wanted to be repatriated.

Like most of my friends, I answered that I wanted to go to Palestine, but the British mandate on immigration at the time had in effect closed those doors to us. In the end, OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants), an outstanding French Jewish humanitarian organisation, brought about 400 of us to France. I remember.

It is a Friday. David Ben-Gurion reads the new Jewish state’s Declaration of Independence; radio stations all over the world broadcast it. In the evening, I go to synagogue. Jubilation. Strangers share their feelings. What? A Jewish state? Three years after the worst catastrophe in Jewish history? It is difficult for me to concentrate.

…

At that time, I was not yet keenly conscious of the fact that, in the lives of men as well as nations, the dream of one can — in an instant — turn into a nightmare for the other. The big question: What would have happened if the Palestinian leaders of that period had followed Israel’s example by declaring the establishment of an independent Palestinian state? Why did the Palestinian rulers, to quote the late Abba Eban, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”?