Edited sentence: (It remained this way during decades of conflict, until Yasser Arafat claimed to accept recognition of Israel, in a statement in December 1988.At its founding, Israel's main diplomatic defense was that Israel was created by a 1947 United Nations vote, which enacted the 1947 UN Partition Plan of the British Mandate of Palestine, allocating some lands for a Jewish State and some for Arab control, thus giving international legitimacy and recognition to the establishment of a Jewish State in that location.Jews, on the other hand, considered their national movement to be just as legitimate as the nationalist claims of many other ethnic groups and nationalities during that era, whose claims were often adjusted and defined by great powers and international organizations seeking to balance multiple political claims and movements.Local Arab nations did not accept this principle, and refused to recognize Israel.Originally, this conflict began as a dispute over the existence of the State of Israel itself.Some local Arab residents of the region questioned the legitimacy of setting up a nation intended specifically to have a Jewish identity.The central issue of contention began to shift in 1967, when the State of Israel established control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, by defeating surrounding Arab armies in the 1967 Six Day War.The question thus changed to that of how to ultimately settle the political fate of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.They declared war on Israel, thus starting the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel prevailed, and won control over borders which remained in place until the Six Day War