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MANDATE ENDS |
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MANDATE ENDS |
British commitment to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, was weakened over the course of the British Mandate period and ruptured in 1939 by the MacDonald White Paper. The 1939 White Paper had its intended effect, quieting Arab opinion, but its provisions prevented the free settlement of Holocaust refugees, a fact that enraged the Zionists. Still the menace of Hitler as the common enemy, kept British-Jewish differences on the back burner. During World War II, Jewish enlistments in the British armed forces were heavier and their performance better than those from the Arab populations.
With the end of World War II the British elected the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Clement Atlee and his foreign minister, Ernest Bevin. With Jewish Holocaust survivors stuck in European refugee camps, Zionist waited in vain for a change in British policy on immigration to Palestine. As a result, Jewish terrorist attacks against the British escalated. Despite American, Jewish, and international pressure and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the British continued to enforce the policy articulated in the 1939 White Paper.
In 1946, Britain unilaterally granted Transjordan its independence completing the action taken in 1922 when all land within the Mandate east of the Jordan was set aside for the Arabs. (See "Transjordan" page.) With Transjordan's independence, the British had partitioned Palestine and created an independent Palestine-Arab state with 77% of the original territory.
Support for a militant Zionism came from abroad, especially from Americans who contributed both money and pressure on their political leadership to liberalize Jewish immigration to Palestine. The needs of European Jews attracted widespread sympathy after the Holocaust, an experience dramatized in the press during the opening of the death camps in 1945. International conferences were held by supporters of each side during 1946, but the year ended without the adoption of acceptable compromises.
Caught between Arab and Jewish demands and short on funds, the Attlee government of Great Britain in February 1947 declared its Mandate in Palestine "unworkable" and referred the matter to the youthful UN. That body, with a surprising show of agreement between blocs, created a special committee of eleven member states to study the issues and report its recommendations. The UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was the first truly independent tribunal to examine the Palestine question. Committee members were especially moved by the plight of desperate Holocaust survivors denied entry to Palestine. UNSCOP's majority concluded that the League of Nations pledge of a Jewish national home had never been fulfilled, as Jewish immigration and land purchases had been artificially restricted by the British Mandate authorities.
The committee recommended an end to the British Mandate and the partitioning of the area. However, the partition plan was directed only at the 23% of the original Mandate that was left after the British subdivision that gave 77% to create the Arab territory of Transjordan. Of the remaining 23%, 56% was allocated to a Jewish state, 42% to an Arab state, and an international zone for the holy places in and around Jerusalem was allocated 2%. Summarizing this in a table:
| Territory | Arab Portion | Jewish Portion | Shared Portion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original British Mandate | 77% (Transjordan) | 0% | 23% (West of Jordan) |
| UN Partition Plan | 87% (77%+10%) | 13% | < 1% |
On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly by a two-thirds vote (33 to 13 with Britain and nine others abstaining) passed Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish community of Palestine jubilantly accepted partition despite the small size and strategic vulnerability of the proposed state. Not only were Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip not included, but also Jerusalem, most of the Galilee in the North and parts of the Negev desert in the South were excluded. The Arab national movement in Palestine, as well as all the Arab states, angrily rejected partition. They demanded the entire country for themselves and threatened to resist partition by force. Had they accepted the U.N. proposal in 1947, the independent Palestinian Arab state, covering an area much larger than the West Bank and Gaza, would have been created along with Israel. Instead, they launched a war to destroy the nascent Jewish state.
UNSCOP reported to the Security Council on 16 February 1948:
The UN had no army to enforce its decisions, and Britain would not use its forces in place for more than self-defense during the transition to independence scheduled for May 15, 1948. In fact, there is considerable evidence that the British government, and especially the local military and civilian representatives of Britain in the Middle East, did much to support the Arabs and to weaken the Jews.
Small-unit warfare was conducted around the British all winter and spring, with the Jewish forces improving their holdings at the cost of several thousand Jews killed or wounded. As the first streams of Arab refugees were fleeing from towns overrun by Jewish units, a coalition of Arab nations was planning to invade Palestine immediately after the British evacuation on May 14, 1948. The invasion came immediately after the State of Israel was declared on May 15, 1948, precipitating Israel's War of Independence.
On January 29, 1949, Britain recognized the State of Israel, a step that also recognized the end of British efforts to affect the course of the region’s politics.
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