pressure the British government, in August 1945, to allow 100,000 displaced Euro-
pean Jews to emigrate to Palestine. London rebuffed Truman, asserting that it intended
to adhere to its White Paper policy of giving Arabs an effective veto power over large-
scale Jewish immigration. Truman repeated his request in May 1946, after a joint U.S.-
British committee recommended approval of it. The British again demurred, though
it could not afford to maintain the status quo much longer. Exhausted and nearly bank-
rupt after the war, Britain found itself with more than 100,000 soldiers and policemen
stationed in Palestine. Its costly security force increasingly battled the Jews, who once
had been the beneficiaries of British policy toward Palestine.
Truman intervened again on October 4, 1946. In a statement addressed to the
American Jewish community on the eve of Yom Kippur, Truman endorsed the parti-
tion of Palestine and called for a substantial increase in Jewish immigration there. His
statement put additional pressure on the British, who were trying once more to nego-
tiate a compromise acceptable to the Arabs as well as the Jews of Palestine. When that
effort failed early in 1947, Britain conceded defeat and began to retreat from its impe-
rial responsibilities. On February 14, 1947, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced
that Britain had decided to hand the problem of Palestine to the newly established
United Nations. On February 20, the government announced its intention to with-
draw from India by mid-1948, and a day later it made known that Britain could no
longer afford to support the governments of Greece and Turkey, which were under
intense pressure from Russian-backed communists.
Significantly, Britain turned to the UN’s General Assembly for help, rather than
to the Security Council, where the Soviet Union’s veto power could block any deci-
sion agreed to by the other members. It established the United Nations Special Com-
mittee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to assess the situation, and in summer 1947, com-
mittee members set out for Palestine on a study tour. Zionist officials cooperated with
the inquiry, while local Arab leaders refused to meet with committee members or pro-
vide them proposals, apparently fearing that the United Nations was destined to sup-
port partition.
While the UN committee deliberated, another drama played out on the high seas
when British authorities blocked a U.S. ferryboat renamed the Exodus-1947.Loaded
with 4,500 European Jewish refugees, the ferry was headed from France to Palestine.
After intercepting the ship, the British put the refugees aboard transport ships and sent
them back to France and then to Germany, where most ended up in camps for dis-
placed persons. The plight of the refugees captured worldwide attention and put
British policy in its harshest possible light at a crucial moment.
UNSCOP’s report to the General Assembly on August 31 was illustrative of the
fundamental divisions over Palestine: A majority of seven committee members favored
the partition of Palestine into an Arab state and a much smaller Jewish state along
with a UN-controlled zone around Jerusalem. A three-member minority favored trans-
forming Palestine into a federation composed of Arab and Jewish cantons with
Jerusalem as a unified capital. The minority proposal, which restricted Jewish immi-
gration, envisioned a united Palestine dominated indefinitely by the Arab majority.
Although numerous features of the majority position disappointed Zionist visions
for a Jewish state, most Zionist groups backed it as the superior option. Arab leaders,
both in Palestine and in surrounding countries, emphatically rejected both the major-
ity and the minority positions as giving too much to the Jews in Palestine. The Arab
58 ARABS AND ISRAELIS