Britain and the Palestine Problem • 289groups in Palestine soon seized lands not allotted to their side, and Arab
commandos often struck back at Jewish targets. Although Arab League
members met to try to coordinate their strategy, their public threats
masked private quarrels and a lack of military preparedness. Amir Abdal¬
lah of Transjordan negotiated with the Zionists, hoping to annex Arab
Palestine. Most other Arab countries opposed him, calling for volunteers to
fight in Palestine. At the end of 1947, it was not yet clear if they would com¬
mit their regular armies to action.
The Creation of Israel
The 1947 partition plan was certainly not a peaceful resolution to the con¬
test for Palestine. Both Jewish and Arab armies lined up volunteers and
equipped themselves as well as they could. Both sides committed terrorist
acts against innocent civilians. For example, the Irgun raided Dayr Yasin, an
Arab village near Jerusalem, and massacred 254 men, women, and children.
A few days later, an Arab group ambushed a bus going to the Hadassah
Medical Center on Mount Scopus, killing 75 Jewish professors, doctors, and
nurses. The British folded their arms and ignored the escalating violence, as
they were preparing to withdraw totally from Palestine. Some hoped that
they would be invited back by whichever side was losing the contest.
Mindful of the mounting violence in Palestine, the US representative in
the United Nations suggested in March 1948 that the partition plan be
postponed for a ten-year cooling-off period under a UN trusteeship. This
compromise might have satisfied the Arabs but certainly not the Zionists,
with the Jewish state now almost in their grasp. They pressured President
Truman, who finally reaffirmed his support for a Jewish state, over the ob¬
jections of the State Department and his own secretary of defense. That
spring, while diplomats argued at the UN, Arab nationalists and Muslim
Brothers infiltrated into Palestine from neighboring countries, while local
Jewish and Arab groups planted bombs and sniped at each other. As the
Zionists began to implement their Plan Dalet to drive the Arab population
from Jewish designated areas, many Palestinian Arabs panicked and fled
for safety to nearby countries, creating a refugee problem that persists to¬
day. Despite the growing chaos, the British troops pulled out of Jerusalem.
On 14 May 1948, the Jewish Agency Executive Committee, meeting in Tel
Aviv, formally declared that those parts of Palestine under Jewish control
were now the independent State of Israel. It also announced that the pro¬
visions of the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration and land pur¬
chases were null and void. The Zionists urged the Arab inhabitants of the
new State of Israel "to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in