Britain and the Palestine Problem • 287Palestine. The US government began to pressure Britain to end restrictions
on Jewish immigration and to accommodate demands for Jewish state¬
hood. An Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry went to Palestine in 1946
and interviewed both mandate officials and nationalist leaders. It called for
a continuation of the mandate, but its most publicized recommendation
was to admit 100,000 European Jewish refugees at once and to end all re¬
strictions on Jewish land purchases. The new Labour government in
Britain rejected this advice and advocated instead a federated Arab-Jewish
Palestine. This satisfied no one, and the fighting worsened. Finally, Britain
went before the UN General Assembly in February 1947 and admitted that
it could no longer keep the mandate. Its Palestine policy was bankrupt.
The United Nations Partition Plan
It was up to the new world organization to settle the issue. The General As¬
sembly responded to the challenge by creating yet another investigatory
body, the UN Special Committee on Palestine. This group of ten member
states toured Palestine during the summer of 1947 but could not come up
with a policy on which they could all agree. Some favored a binational
Palestinian state, shared by Arabs and Jews. The Arabs still made up two-
thirds of the country's population, though, and they were expected to resist
admitting any Jewish refugees from Europe. The majority of the Special
Committee members recommended partitioning Palestine into seven sec¬
tions, of which three would be controlled by Arabs and three by Jews. The
seventh, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem, would be administered by the
UN. If you look at Map 16.1, you can imagine how hard it would have been
to implement the plan, with borders crisscrossing in a crazy quilt pattern
designed to ensure that nearly all Jewish settlements would be in lands al¬
lotted to the Jews (comprising 54 percent of Palestine). Even so, their area
would contain almost as many Arabs as Jews. Perhaps the Arabs could be
transferred, but understandably neither the Palestinian Arabs nor the gov¬
ernments of neighboring Arab countries welcomed a plan to set up an alien
state in their midst, against the wishes of the land's Arab majority. But the
communist countries, the US, and nearly all the Latin American republics
favored it. On 29 November 1947, the partition plan passed in the General
Assembly by a thirty-three to thirteen vote. All five Arab member states op¬
posed it.
The Zionists did not like all aspects of this plan, but they accepted it as
a step toward forming the Jewish state for which they had waited and
worked so long. The Arabs threatened to go to war to block its implemen¬
tation. But words and deeds were not always the same. Jewish paramilitary