290 • 16 THE CONTEST FOR PALESTINEthe development of the state, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and
due representation in all its bodies and institutions." They also called on the
neighboring Arab states to cooperate with them for the common good. Re¬
cent studies by Israel's revisionist historians lead us to suspect that this was
propaganda, but even if these statements were sincere, they came too late.
Many Palestinian Arabs, having already fled from their homes during the
early stages of the fighting, distrusted the Zionists and called on their Arab
neighbors for help. The next day five Arab governments sent their armies
into Palestine to fight against the new State of Israel.
CONCLUSIONThe contest for Palestine entered a new phase. Arab nationalists and political
Zionists had for years inflamed each other's worst fears under the bungling
British mandate. Now they could fight each other openly. The Arab-Israeli
conflict, as it must now be called, would become one of the most intractable
problems of modern diplomacy. American journalist I. F. Stone quipped that
if God is dead, he died trying to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Before 1948 a
compromise might have been found between the extremes of Arab national¬
ism and political Zionism. But no attempt at accommodation worked, and
the world continues to pay a high price for that failure.