KS3 / KS4 / GCSE History: UN partition plan for Palestine and establishing the State of Israel

The Zionists thought Britain's position was a betrayal of Balfour's promise. Many felt the only way to oppose the white paper was with force. So now it was the turn of the Jews to rebel against British rule. Jewish underground groups defied the British restrictions on immigration by smuggling people into the country. But as Jewish unrest intensified, terrible events in Europe were changing the whole landscape.

As the British restrictions on Jewish immigration held firm, Zionist guerrillas took action.

ARCHIVE NEWS: "After a bomb explosion caused by terrorists on the British headquarters of Jerusalem, one entire corner of the King David Hotel, a building of seven storeys, was razed to the ground." The attack on the King David left more than 80 dead: British, Arab and Jewish civil servants. It was a dramatic escalation of the Zionist revolt. With hostilities growing between Jews and Arabs and between the Zionist militias and the British army, Britain decided it was time to relinquish its mandate and get out of Palestine. It handed the problem over to the newly-formed United Nations.

In 1947, after a special investigation, the UN's General Assembly recommended dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under UN control. This was seen by the Jews as a great victory. They'd been striving for over 50 years for world recognition and for world support for a Zionist state and here at last it was embodied in a formal decision of the world community. The world was supporting the Zionist venture and was not accepting the Arab opposition to a Jewish state. Zionist leaders broadly accepted the UN's Partition Plan. It wasn't everything they wanted but it was better than nothing. But the proposal was rejected by the Palestinian Arabs and by the surrounding Arab states. Arabs were bitterly resentful. They felt Britain's interwar policy of allowing Jewish immigration had strengthened the Zionist hand.

They could never have imposed themselves on the Arabs without the medium of British bayonets. Inconceivable. Without the greatest power of the age forcing the Arabs to accept these things by main force, Zionism could never have established itself successfully in Palestine, in the way it did.

Fighting began between the Palestinians and Jews days after the adoption of the UN Partition Plan.

The country slid into civil war. The fighting became increasingly vicious with claims of atrocities on both sides.

Palestinians have claimed there was a policy to push them off their lands to rid the country of its non-Jewish inhabitants. Palestinians fled because they were expelled by Israeli forces or about to be attacked or had been the subject of a whispering campaign that convinced them, by Israeli agents deliberately planted, that they were about to suffer massacres and atrocities such as they had heard of occurring in other places in Palestine such as Deir Yassin and elsewhere.

MORRIS: There was never any policy of mass expulsion or blanket expulsion. It was never annunciated, it was never carried out. The important thing was the Israeli government's decision not to allow them to return. This was the policy decision. It understood these refugees were part of a people who had fought against Jewish statehood, who were trying to destroy the Jewish state. Were they allowed back, they could act as a fifth column and therefore couldn't be allowed back otherwise they would destabilise the state.

ARCHIVE NEWS: "The scene is near Jericho, one of the camps for Arab refugees. The story is one of destitution, for these people, as the result of the war in Palestine, have either fled or been expelled from their homes and their livelihood." The upheaval left hundreds of thousands of Arabs without a home. For these refugees it was Al-Nakba, 'the catastrophe'. At every level, for the Palestinians there was a material loss that was on a vast scale, that wasn't rectified or compensated for. Their issue was not dealt with as a political issue. There was no recognition that they had a collective identity as Palestinians and they became marginal people, living off the margins of the towns and cities in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere that they took refuge in.