Was Israel created by the United Nations?

The claim being checked: that the State of Israel was brought into existence by the United Nations in 1948.

The record. On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, a non-binding recommendation to partition Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state with an international regime for Jerusalem. It was accepted by the Jewish Agency and rejected by the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League states. The state itself was declared on 14 May 1948 by David Ben-Gurion and the Provisional State Council as the British Mandate expired, and it was defended in the war that followed the invasion by neighbouring Arab armies. The United Nations did not execute the partition, police it or create the state: it admitted Israel as a member state on 11 May 1949, after the fact. So the UN supplied international recognition of the principle of a Jewish state; independence was declared and secured by the Jewish community in Palestine.

Voices on this site put the sequence in their own terms: the Jewish Policy Center writes that "From 1948, Arab states tried to murder Israel" [6], and Christians United for Israel has circulated Pastor John Hagee's statement that Israel is "the only nation on earth created by a sovereign act of God" [2]. Jewish claims to sovereignty in the land long predate 1947, as does the Zionist movement from the 1880s onward and the 1917 Balfour Declaration and 1922 League of Nations Mandate.

Assessment: Missing context. The UN recommended partition in 1947 and admitted Israel in 1949, but Israel declared and secured its own independence in May 1948.