these lives as well as their actual number that
caused such revulsion.
The decision to withdraw from the thankless
task of governing Palestine had broad British
public support. The British government was not
prepared to enforce partition on the Arabs by mil-
itary force. Nor, for all its criticisms of British
policy, was the Truman administration willing to
do so. The Jews were to be left to fight for their
own national survival, a decision that came as no
surprise to Jewish leaders like Begin. In February
1947, the British Cabinet decided to give notice
to hand the Palestine problem to the United
Nations by mid-May 1947. The last vain hope
was that this deadline would bring Arabs and Jews
to the conference table.
The United Nations appointed a Special
Committee on Palestine, though it was boycotted
by the Arab political leadership. In August 1947
the committee reported that Palestine should be
partitioned into an Arab and a Jewish state, but
that the economic unity of Palestine should be
maintained; the committee also suggested that
for another two years Britain should continue
to administer Palestine under the auspices of the
United Nations and that during this transitional
period 150,000 Jews should be admitted. The
possibility that the transitional period might be
extended was also envisaged. Thus the UN com-
mittee had reached much the same conclusions as
the British Peel Commission ten years earlier. Did
it stand any better chance of winning acceptance
in the face of Arab hostility? The US and the
Soviet Union, moreover, would both need to give
the UN plan their backing if sufficient votes were
to be cast to provide the necessary two-thirds
majority in the General Assembly.
In the event, both the US and the USSR,
though the Cold War was at its height, voted in
favour of the UN partition plan. Hitherto the
Soviet Union had always opposed Zionism as an
ideology likely to inflame Jewish Soviet citizens.
One can only conjecture about the reasons for
Russia’s change of front. Possibly the Soviet lead-
ership calculated that the creation of Israel would
undermine Western relations with the Arab states
and thus provide for the Soviet Union a means of
entering the Middle East. The American State
Department and the British Foreign Office were
well aware of these dangers and were doubly
anxious now that Middle Eastern oil was becom-
ing a crucial factor in Western industrial develop-
ment. They wanted to avoid a policy that was
bound to arouse Arab hostility.
At this critical stage President Truman’s atti-
tude was probably decisive. It was credited with
sympathies for Zionism, the electoral advantage
of appealing to the American-Jewish vote was a
bonus in supporting a UN partition plan that
would create a Jewish state. With the US and the
Soviet Union organising support at the UN, the
required two-thirds majority in favour of partition
was achieved when the vote was called in the
General Assembly on 29 November 1947.
The intervening months were among the worst
time for the dying British administration and the
British troops. In a vain attempt to save Irgun ter-
rorists from execution, two British sergeants were
kidnapped by Irgun and found hanged on 31 July- There was an outcry and revulsion in
Britain. The British Cabinet now concluded that
Britain’s total withdrawal had become inevitable.
The months between the end of November 1947
and 14 May 1948, when the last British soldier left
and the State of Israel was proclaimed, were extra-
ordinary. The British would not cooperate with
the UN on the partition plan and when fighting
between Arabs and Jews began in December 1947
they increasingly confined their authority to mili-
tary camps and police stations. The Jewish Agency
emerged as the effective Jewish government and
made desperate preparations to fight for the
Jewish state against the expected Arab assault.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was also mobil-
ising Palestinian Arabs, and sporadic fighting
broke out between Jews and Arabs. Beyond
Palestine the Arab League began planning to raise
‘volunteer’ armies against the day the British
departed. Their mission was to overrun the Jewish
state while it was still in its infancy. By April 1948,
even before the British had left, the Arab threat
to isolate Jerusalem completely, with its large
Jewish population, as well as other Jewish settle-
ments, had become very real indeed. The fight-
ing spread. The Jewish leadership saw its only