Myths & Facts
Partition and the War of 1948
By Mitchell Bard
The United Nations unjustly partitioned Palestine.
Israel was created to compensate the Jews for the Holocaust.
The partition plan gave the Jews most of the land, including all the fertile areas.
Israel usurped all of Palestine in 1948.
Before 1948, the Palestinian Arabs were never offered a state.
The UN should have created a unitary Palestinian state.
Arab leaders were prepared to compromise to avoid bloodshed.
The Jews started the war with the Arabs in 1948.
The United States was the only nation that criticized the Arab attack on Israel.
The West’s support of Israel allowed the Jews to conquer Palestine.
The Arab economic boycott was a response to the creation of Israel.
The United Nations unjustly partitioned Palestine.
FACT
As World War II ended, the magnitude of the Holocaust became known. This accelerated demands for a resolution to the question of Palestine so the Displaced Persons, survivors of Hitler’s Final Solution, might find sanctuary in their own homeland. The existing Jewish community, the yishuv, was also thriving and ready for independence.
The British tried to work out an agreement acceptable to Arabs and Jews, but their insistence on the former’s approval guaranteed failure because the Arabs would not make any concessions. The British subsequently turned the issue over to the UN in February 1947.
The UN established a Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) to devise a solution. Delegates from eleven nations went to the area and found what had long been apparent: the conflicting national aspirations of Jews and Arabs could not be reconciled.1
When they returned, the delegates of seven nations—Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, The Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, and Uruguay—recommended the establishment of two separate states, Jewish and Arab, to be joined by economic union, with Jerusalem an internationalized enclave. Three nations—India, Iran, and Yugoslavia—recommended a unitary state with Arab and Jewish provinces. Australia abstained.
The Jews of Palestine were not satisfied with the small territory allotted to them by the Commission, nor were they happy that Jerusalem was severed from the Jewish State; nevertheless, they welcomed the compromise. The Arabs rejected UNSCOP’s recommendations.
The ad hoc committee of the UN General Assembly rejected the Arab demand for a unitary Arab state. The majority recommendation for partition was viewed as a more just solution and subsequently adopted by a vote of 33 to 13 with ten abstentions on November 29, 1947.2
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It is hard to see how the Arab world, still less the Arabs of Palestine, will suffer from what is mere recognition of accomplished fact—the presence in Palestine of a compact, well organized, and virtually autonomous Jewish community. —London Times editorial3 |
Israel was created to compensate the Jews for the Holocaust.
FACT
The Holocaust demonstrated the need for a haven where Jews would control their fate and not be dependent on the goodwill of others. It also gave the quest for statehood greater urgency and generated sympathy for the survivors in the American Jewish community and the general public.
This created a certain amount of pressure on the Truman administration to support partition. Truman explained his position in his memoirs, “My purpose was then and later to help bring about the redemption of the pledge of the Balfour Declaration and the rescue of at least some of the victims of Nazism.” He said his policy was neither pro-Arab nor pro-Zionist; it was American because “it aimed at the peaceful solution of a world trouble spot” and “was based on the desire to see promises kept and human misery relieved.”4
In May 1947, Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko said:
This statement was disingenuous; the Soviet Union’s support for creating a Jewish state had nothing to do with the Holocaust or compassion for the Jews. The Soviets were primarily interested in seeing the British leave Palestine.
Meanwhile, the British were unmoved by the Holocaust; they prevented Jews from going to Palestine to escape the Nazis and opposed Jewish statehood.
“It is not the case that if there had been no Holocaust there would not have been a State of Israel,” former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Irwin Cotler observed. “It is the other way around, and we should never forget it: that if there had been a State of Israel – the indigenous homeland for an indigenous Jewish people, there would not have been a Holocaust or the many horrors of Jewish and human history.”6
Furthermore, as Professor Dov Waxman noted:
The partition plan gave the Jews most of the land, including all the fertile areas.
FACT
The partition plan took on a checkerboard appearance largely because Jewish towns and villages were spread throughout Palestine. This did not complicate the plan as much as the high living standards in Jewish cities and villages that attracted large Arab populations, which ensured that any partition would result in a Jewish state that included a substantial Arab population. Recognizing the need to allow for additional Jewish settlement, the majority proposal allotted the Jews land in the northern part of the country, the Galilee, and the large, arid Negev Desert in the south. The remainder was to form the Arab state.
These boundaries were based solely on demographics. The borders of the Jewish State were arranged with no consideration of security; hence, the new state’s frontiers were virtually indefensible.
Overall, the proposed Jewish State comprised roughly 5,500 square miles (about 55% of Palestine), and the population was to be 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs. Approximately 92,000 Arabs lived in Tiberias, Safed, Haifa, and Bet Shean, and another 40,000 were Bedouins, most of whom lived in the desert. The remainder of the Arab population was spread throughout the Jewish state. The Arab State was to be 4,500 square miles with a population of 804,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews.8
Critics claim the UN gave the Jews fertile land while the Arabs were allotted hilly, arid land. On the contrary, approximately 60% of the Jewish state was to be the desert in the Negev, while the Arabs occupied most of the agricultural land.9
Further complicating the situation was the UN majority’s insistence that Jerusalem remain apart from both states and be administered as an international zone. This arrangement left more than one hundred thousand Jews in Jerusalem isolated from their country and circumscribed by the Arab state.
According to British statistics, more than 70% of the land in what would become Israel belonged to the mandatory government. Those lands reverted to Israeli control after the departure of the British. Jews owned another 9% of the land; Arabs who became citizens of Israel owned about 3%. That means only about 18% belonged to Arabs who left the country before and after the Arab invasion of Israel.10
Israel usurped all of Palestine in 1948.
FACT
Nearly 80% of the historic land of Palestine and the Jewish National Home, as defined by the League of Nations, was severed by the British in 1921 and allocated to Transjordan. Jewish settlement there was barred. The UN partitioned the remaining 20-odd percent of Palestine into two states. With Transjordan’s annexation of the West Bank in 1950 and Egypt’s occupation of Gaza, Arabs controlled more than 80% of the Mandate territory, while the Jewish State held a bare 17.5%.11
Before 1948, the Palestinian Arabs were never offered a state.
FACT
The Peel Commission in 1937 concluded that the only logical solution to resolving the contradictory aspirations of the Jews and Arabs was to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jews would have received only 15% of eastern Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. A small area, including Jerusalem, was to remain under British control, but 80% of the land was to be united with Transjordan and become independent.
The Arabs rejected the plan because it forced them to accept the creation of a Jewish state and required some Palestinians to live under “Jewish domination.” Muslim religious leaders said supporters of the plan were heretics, while the political machine controlled by the Mufti labeled them traitors.12
The Zionists opposed the Peel Plan’s boundaries because they would have been confined to 1,900 out of the 10,310 square miles remaining in Palestine. Nevertheless, the Zionists decided to negotiate with the British, while the Arabs refused to consider any compromises.
In 1939, the British White Paper called for establishing an Arab state in Palestine within ten years and limiting Jewish immigration to no more than 75,000 over the following five years. Afterward, no one would be allowed in without the consent of the Arab population. Though the Arabs had been granted a concession on Jewish immigration and been offered independence—the goal of Arab nationalists—they repudiated the White Paper.
With partition, the Palestinians were given a state and the opportunity for self-determination. This, too, was rejected.
The UN should have created a unitary Palestinian state.
FACT
At the time of the partition resolution, the Arabs had a majority in western Palestine—1.2 million Arabs versus 600,000 Jews.13 But the Jews were a majority in Jerusalem and the area allotted to them for a state.
The Jews never had a chance of reaching a majority in the country, given the restrictive immigration policy of the British. By contrast, Palestine’s Arab population, which had been declining before the Mandate in 1922, grew exponentially because Arabs from all the surrounding countries were free to come—and thousands did—to take advantage of the rapid economic development and improved health conditions stimulated by Zionist settlement.
The decision to partition Palestine was not determined solely by demographics; it was based on the conclusion that the territorial claims of Jews and Arabs were irreconcilable and that the most logical compromise was the creation of two states. Ironically, that same year, 1947, the Arab members of the United Nations supported the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of the new, predominantly Muslim state of Pakistan.
Arab leaders were prepared to compromise to avoid bloodshed.
FACT
As the partition vote approached, it became clear that little hope existed for a political solution to a problem that transcended politics: the Arabs’ unwillingness to accept a Jewish state in Palestine and the refusal of the Zionists to settle for anything less.
The implacability of the Arabs was evident when Jewish Agency representatives David Horowitz and Abba Eban made a last-ditch effort to reach a compromise in a meeting with Arab League secretary Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha on September 16, 1947. Pasha told them bluntly:
Meanwhile, the Mufti and his accomplices silenced supporters of partition. According to one of the Mufti’s associates who spied for the Haganah, “The opposition, which was prepared to agree to partition, had to go along with the opponents of partition after they learned of the decision to murder everyone who supported that opinion, even if they were among the greatest [leaders].”15
The Jews started the war with the Arabs in 1948.
FACT
The Arabs declared they would go to war to prevent the creation of a Jewish state. Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee’s spokesman, told the UN before the partition vote that the Arabs would drench “the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood.”16 After the vote, the chairman of the Arab Higher Committee said the Arabs would “fight for every inch of their country.”17 Two days later, the holy men of Al-Azhar University in Cairo called on the Muslim world to proclaim a jihad against the Jews.18
Husseini’s prediction came true almost immediately after the UN adopted the partition resolution on November 29, 1947. The Arabs declared a protest strike and instigated riots that claimed the lives of 62 Jews and 32 Arabs. Violence continued to escalate through the end of the year.19
The first large-scale assaults began on January 9, 1948, when approximately 1,000 Arabs attacked Jewish communities in northern Palestine. By February, the British said so many Arabs had infiltrated that they lacked the forces to run them back.20
In the first phase of the war, lasting from November 29, 1947, until April 1, 1948, the Palestinian Arabs took the offensive, with help from volunteers from neighboring countries. The Jews suffered severe casualties, and passage along most of their major roadways was disrupted.
On April 26, 1948, Transjordan’s King Abdullah said:
On May 4, 1948, Abdullah’s Arab Legion attacked Kfar Etzion. The defenders drove them back, but the Legion returned a week later. After two days, the ill-equipped and outnumbered settlers were overwhelmed. Many defenders were massacred after they had surrendered.22 This was before the invasion by the regular Arab armies that followed Israel’s declaration of independence.
The UN Palestine Commission, which the Arabs and British never permitted to go to Palestine to implement the resolution, reported to the Security Council on February 16, 1948, that “powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.”23
The Arabs were blunt in taking responsibility for the war. Jamal Husseini told the Security Council on April 16, 1948:
The British commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb, admitted:
Despite the disadvantages in numbers, organization, and weapons, the Jews began to take the initiative in the weeks from April 1 until the declaration of independence on May 14. The Haganah captured several major towns, including Tiberias and Haifa, and temporarily opened the road to Jerusalem.
The partition resolution was never suspended or rescinded. Thus, Israel, the Jewish State in Palestine, was born on May 14, as the British finally left the country. Five Arab armies (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq) immediately invaded Israel. Their intentions were declared by Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League: “It will be a war of annihilation. It will be a momentous massacre in history that will be talked about like the massacres of the Mongols or the Crusades.”26
The United States was the only nation that criticized the Arab attack on Israel.
FACT
The United States, the Soviet Union, and most other states recognized Israel soon after it declared independence on May 14, 1948, and immediately condemned the Arabs for their aggression. The United States urged a resolution charging the Arabs with a breach of the peace.
Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko told the Security Council on May 29, 1948:
On July 15, the Security Council threatened to cite the Arab governments for aggression under the UN Charter. By this time, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had succeeded in stopping the Arab offensive, and the initial phase of the fighting ended.
The West’s support of Israel allowed the Jews to conquer Palestine.
FACT
The Jews won their war of independence with minimal help from the West. In fact, they won despite actions that undermined their military strength.
Although President Harry Truman supported the partition resolution, many officials in the State Department did not and tried to sabotage the plan. Some of these officials – often called “Arabists” – were anti-Semitic. Others feared supporting partition would harm our relations with the Arab states (especially the oil producers), and the early Cold Warriors worried that the new Jewish state might side with the Communists or provide an opening for the Soviet Union to spread its influence in the region.
One way was to try to prevent the Jews from obtaining the means to defend themselves. “Otherwise,” Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett argued, “the Arabs might use arms of U.S. origin against Jews, or Jews might use them against Arabs.”28 Consequently, on December 5, 1947, the United States imposed an arms embargo on the region.
Truman did not recognize the embargo as an impediment to partition and went along because he hoped it could avert bloodshed. This was naive given Britain’s rejection of Lovett’s request to suspend weapons shipments to the Arabs and subsequent agreements to provide additional arms to Iraq and Transjordan.29
The Arabs had no difficulty obtaining all the arms they needed. Jordan’s Arab Legion was armed and trained by the British and led by a British officer. Meanwhile, the Jews were forced to smuggle weapons, principally from Czechoslovakia. When Israel declared its independence in May 1948, the army did not have a single cannon or tank, and its air force consisted of nine obsolete planes.
Although outgunned, Israel was not outmanned, despite the exponentially larger populations of Arab invaders. The Haganah had 60,000 trained fighters, but the newly formed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could only arm and mobilize 32,500, roughly the size of the enemy forces.30 On the eve of the war, Chief of Operations Yigael Yadin told David Ben-Gurion: “The best we can tell you is that we have a 50–50 chance.”31
The lack of participation by Palestinians in the war was particularly striking. Though Palestinians claim a close connection to the land going back centuries and a fervent desire for independence, a surprisingly low percentage fought in 1948. In village after village, Arab residents defied the call to arms, and those who joined often did so “to obtain free weapons for their personal protection and then return home.” The few who joined the fight often deserted; one commander complained the Palestinians were “unreliable, excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized warfare virtually unemployable.”32
The Arab war to destroy Israel failed. Indeed, because of their aggression, the Arabs wound up with less territory than if they had accepted partition.
The cost to Israel, however, was enormous. “Many of its most productive fields lay gutted and mined. Its citrus groves, the basis of the yishuv’s Jewish community economy for decades, were largely destroyed.”33 Military expenditures totaled approximately $500 million. Worse yet, 6,373 Israelis were killed, nearly 1% of the Jewish population of 650,000. Approximately 10,000 Arabs – from Palestine and the surrounding countries – were killed.
Had the West enforced the partition resolution or given the Jews the capacity to defend themselves, many lives might have been saved.
The Arab countries signed armistice agreements with Israel in 1949, starting with Egypt (Feb. 24), followed by Lebanon (March 23), Jordan (April 3), and Syria (July 20). Iraq was the only country that did not sign an agreement with Israel, choosing instead to withdraw its troops and hand over its sector to Jordan’s Arab Legion. None of the Arab states would negotiate a peace agreement.
Meanwhile, 40 of the 59 member states of the UN recognized Israel by the end of 1949.
The Arab economic boycott was a response to the creation of Israel.
FACT
The newly formed Arab League Council formally declared the Arab boycott on December 2, 1945: “Jewish products and manufactured goods shall be considered undesirable to the Arab countries.” All Arab “institutions, organizations, merchants, commission agents and individuals” were called upon “to refuse to deal in, distribute, or consume Zionist products or manufactured goods.”34 As this declaration shows, the terms “Jewish” and “Zionist” were used synonymously. Thus, even before the establishment of Israel, the Arab states had declared an economic boycott against the Jews of Palestine.
As it evolved after 1948, the boycott was divided into three components. The primary embargo prohibits direct trade between Israel and the Arab nations. The secondary boycott is directed at companies that do business with Israel. The tertiary boycott involves blacklisting firms that trade with other companies that do business with Israel.35
The objective of the boycott has been to isolate Israel from its neighbors and the international community and deny it trade that might be used to augment its military and economic strength. While undoubtedly isolating Israel and separating the Jewish State from its most natural markets, the boycott failed to undermine Israel’s economy to the degree intended. Instead, Israel flourished and enjoyed one of the world’s highest economic growth rates for many years.
After learning the extent to which US companies were cooperating with the boycott, and the number of firms on the Arab blacklist, Congress voted in 1977 to prohibit U.S. companies from cooperating with the Arab boycott. When President Carter signed the law, he said the “issue goes to the very heart of free trade among nations” and that it was designed to “end the divisive effects on American life of foreign boycotts aimed at Jewish members of our society.”36
The Arab League boycott remains technically in force but has gradually crumbled. Countries outside the Middle East rarely comply with it, and the primary sanction prohibiting direct relations between Arab countries and Israel cracked when Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. Later, nations such as Qatar, Oman, and Morocco negotiated deals with Israel and, in 2020, the Abraham Accords ended the boycotts by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Saudi Arabia has also engaged in quiet diplomacy with Israel in response to the shared concern over Iran’s nuclear program. This mutual interest has not changed the Saudis’ official adherence to the economic boycott, which they had pledged to end as a condition for membership in the World Trade Organization.37
Separate from the Arab League boycott, a global campaign by individuals, organizations, and some governments – the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement – seeks to isolate and, ultimately, destroy Israel.
1 Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (May 15, 1947).
2 Voting in favor of partition: Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussian SSR, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Ukrainian SSR, Union of South Africa, USSR, USA, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Voting against partition: Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. Abstained: Argentina, Chile, China, Columbia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, the UK, and Yugoslavia. Source: Yearbook of the United Nations, 1947–48 (NY: United Nations, 1949), pp. 246–47.
3 London Times (December 1, 1947).
4 Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, vol. 2 (NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1956), p. 157.
5 “Discussion of the report of the First Committee on the establishment of a special committee on Palestine,” United Nations documents A/307 and A/307/Corr. 1.
6 Irwin Cotler, “Auschwitz 75 years later: Universal lessons,” Jerusalem Post, (January 22, 2020).
7 Dov Waxman, “Was Israel created because of the Holocaust?” Oxford Academic, (May 18, 2019).
8 Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 292.
9 Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), p. 238.
10 Moshe Aumann, “Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880–1948,” Academic Committee on the Middle East, (Israel, 1974), p. 18.
11 Historic Palestine comprised what is today Jordan (approximately 35,640 square miles), Israel (8,019 square miles), Gaza (139 square miles), and the West Bank (2,263 square miles).
12 Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 122–23.
13 Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 252.
14 David Horowitz, State in the Making, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 233.
15 Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 124.
16 J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine, (NY: Shocken Books, 1976), p. 308.
17 New York Times, (December 1, 1947).
18 Facts on File Yearbook, (NY: Facts on File, Inc., 1948), p. 48.
19 Palestine Post, (January 2, 7, 27; April 1; May 1, 1948).
20 Facts on File 1947, p. 231.
21 Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 322.
22 Netanel Lorch, One Long War, (Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1976), p. 47; Ralph Patai, ed., Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel (NY: McGraw Hill, 1971), pp. 307–8.
23 Security Council Official Records, Special Supplement (1948), p. 20.
24 Security Council Official Records, S/Agenda/58 (April 16, 1948), p. 19.
25 John Bagot Glubb, A Soldier with the Arabs, (London: Staughton and Hodder, 1957), p. 79.
26 “Interview with Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha,” Akhbar al-Yom (Egypt), (October 11, 1947), translated by R. Green.
27 Security Council Official Records, SA/Agenda/77, (May 29, 1948), p. 2.
28 Foreign Relations of the United States 1947, (DC: GPO, 1948), p. 1249. Henceforth, FRUS.
29 Mitchell Bard, The Water’s Edge and Beyond, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1991), pp. 171–75; FRUS, pp. 537–39; Robert Silverberg, If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: American Jews and the State of Israel, (NY: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1970), pp. 366, 370; Shlomo Slonim, “The 1948 American Embargo on Arms to Palestine,” Political Science Quarterly, (Fall 1979), p. 500.
30 Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem!, (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 352; undated letter from Professor Meron Medzini to the author.
32 Efraim Karsh, “1948, Israel, and the Palestinians – The True Story,” Commentary, (May 2008).
33 Sachar, p. 452.
34 Terence Prittie and Walter Nelson, The Economic War Against The Jews, (London: Corgi Books, 1977); Dan Chill, The Arab Boycott of Israel, (NY: Praeger, 1976), p. 10.
35 Prittie and Nelson, pp. 47–48; Sol Stern, “On and Off the Arabs’ List,” New Republic, (March 27, 1976), p. 9; Kennan Teslik, Congress, the Executive Branch, and Special Interests, (CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 11.
36 Bard, pp. 91–115.
37 “Saudis Flout Vow to End Israel Boycott,” Jerusalem Post, (May 29, 2006).
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