War breaks out even before the British leave Palestine. The Palestinians take over the transportation routes until the Jewish settlement raises money and arms and launches a counterattack. When the State of Israel is established as the British leave, it already controls most of the territory allotted to it by the partition plan and manages to hold onto it even in the face of invasion by the Arab states. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee and are expelled from the territories that the IDF captures. The Israeli government decides that "they cannot return."