Israel and Jews worldwide celebrate the independence of the state of Israel on the secular date of May 14, 1948, when the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, read the Declaration of Independence of the state of Israel upon the expiry of the British Mandate for Palestine. Palestinians and their supporters have long labelled May 15 as the date of the Nakba (the catastrophe) which, they claim, includes the expulsion from Israel of some 700,000 Palestine Arabs, the permanent exile of those Arabs, the defeat of the five national armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon by Israel and, the emergence of Israel and as a new independent country. The very word was introduced by the Syrian Arab intellectual Constantine Zureiq.