I guess I should add, it seems that the Free Officer Movement was really bothered by the Egyptian Royal family being puppets of the British. If they were puppets of the British, why would they join the Arab League in invading Palestine?

Seems like the British could of made that a pretty smooth transition.

Hi there!

Let me work through this piece by piece. Feel free to ask questions.

I understand the British controlled Palestine

The British did indeed control the area called Palestine. Before Palestine was defined with borders by the British via the Mandate, it was a geographical area. Palestine referred to much of what makes up Israel and the West Bank and Gaza today, as well as parts of today's Syria and Jordan, before the Mandate was crafted in the early 1920s.

the League of Nations had a charter that Britain could have it for a set amount of years

It wasn't so much that they set it for a number of years. The British were supposed to be the stewards of the land, and eventually to withdraw. I don't believe the League of Nations ever set an expiration date. The Mandate was left open-ended, and it ended because the British announced their intention to leave.

The Mandate was set up with two main goals laid out:

1. The British were to establish a Jewish national home (typically taken to mean a state), it being understood that nothing should be done if it prejudiced the rights of non-Jews living there or Jews in other countries.

2. The British were to steward and control the area until this was completed.

The British struggled with this. They found it very difficult to reconcile between the two sides. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration was taken to be an endorsement of a Jewish state in all of Palestine. Same with the Mandate, in 1920. But in 1922, the British put out the Churchill White Paper, which appeared to say that the vague wording of the Balfour Declaration was misunderstood, and that a national home need be established only in Palestine, not in all of Palestine. The White Paper also said that a national home did not mean a state. But the British continued to support establishing a Jewish state in action, at least, and in 1937 set up a commission to investigate how to reconcile the positions (which was made more urgent by the ongoing 1936-39 Arab revolt). The commission, known as the Peel Commission, proposed a partition, which neither side found acceptable. The British then vacillated between the idea of establishing a single state (which would be Palestinian-run by virtue of demographics) or a partition, but none of their proposals gained traction. So in 1947, amid a campaign of attacks by Jewish and Arab militias on British forces, they decided to leave. This was the end of the Charter.

I'm simplifying a lot here, and jumping some history. I think it's important to give you big picture first. Now the British, when they announced they were leaving, asked the UN to try and come up with a compromise. They formed the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), with committee members from 11 countries (all non-major powers, so no Britain, US, France, China, or Soviet Union for example), who traveled to the area to draft a proposal. One proposal was adopted by only 3 members, if memory serves, which was for a single federal state and provinces that would allow local/provincial autonomy for Jews and Arabs. The proposal that got majority-support in the committee, and was forwarded to the UN General Assembly, was for a partition of the land. The proposal, with some minor alterations, passed the UN General Assembly with the required 2/3rds vote on November 29, 1947. But it was just a recommendation for action, and was never implemented, particularly since a civil war immediately broke out following the passage of the resolution.

The Mandate ended on May 14, 1948, at midnight. On the dot, Israel declared independent, on May 15, 1948 at midnight. There had already been an ongoing civil war between Jews and Arabs in the area, but the declaration of independence led to an Arab invasion, which made it international. The Jewish side had pretty much won the civil war already, so the Arab invasion was meant to stop Israel from being established and turn the tide back against the Jewish side. It failed, as history shows. Palestinian and Arab leaders more generally were opposed to the creation of Israel.

Something I never knew before, was there was actually Jewish settlements there, so they were trying to get their own country.

Yes. There were Jews in the area pretty much continuously for hundreds if not thousands of years. A majority of the ones there in 1947, however, came from or were descended from those who came from other countries in the 1881-1947 period. Jews began immigrating during that time to what became Israel in the hopes of establishing a state there, though other areas were considered and eventually ruled out.

I'm just not fully getting the Arab League's motives, was it really all religious?

I don't believe it was religious at all. You could perhaps make a convincing argument that the Arab League believed that they had a religious right to the land due to Jerusalem, but I don't think that's really right, and I think it's a stretch. It was more concerned with nationalism and land ownership. Jews wanted a state there, Arabs wanted the area to be Arab-owned. Jerusalem holds a special importance for Muslims as well as Jews, but there were other considerations, like land that each country wanted.

When we talk about the main motive, it was clearly to prevent Israel's establishment. But when we talk about why they wanted to, each country had what appeared to be competing motives. And because of this, and because they had barely prepared, the Arab armies were practically doomed to fail if they couldn't win almost immediately. They expected to easily win, at least openly, and they didn't. Within a month, the tide was already turning, in part because of the lack of coordination, lack of war preparations, etc.

What were their aims, then?

Palestinian Arab leaders simply wanted the land for a state of their own. They didn't want an Israel in any part of the British Mandate.

Jordan was fine with Israel existing, at least secretly. There had been attempts to negotiate a partition, where an Israeli state would founded and take control of Jewish areas and partition the land, and the remaining Arab areas would go to Jordan. Jordan had long planned to take as much land as possible for themselves, but no deal was possible because the Arab world was too whipped up towards war: to make such a deal would've led to the king of Jordan likely being toppled, or at least he would've faced a greater threat of being toppled, and called a traitor.

The Egyptians, knowing the Jordanians were planning on this, planned to seize the land themselves. They were rivals with the Jordanians, and so they planned to try and cut off Jordan's routes and take the land on their own.

Syria's motives I'm less familiar with, but it's also likely that they saw a benefit to trying to take land themselves, based on the information I've seen.

Many of the further Arab states wanted Israel gone and didn't care how; their populations had been whipped into a frenzy by the war-like rhetoric and news that came out of the area, and they couldn't back down.

What's clear is that most Arab states didn't really plan to create a Palestinian state. They were in it largely for themselves, and marginalized Palestinians in the areas that they did gain control of (the West Bank and Gaza, for example). Jordan initially tried to integrate them, but they never went towards full integration, and eventually gave up on even half-way integration as well. All the Arab states appeared to be in support of marginalizing Palestinians after they got what they wanted.