Palestine: The End of the British Mandate

Britain's mandate in Palestine faced conflicting promises and growing violence. Britain had backed a Jewish 'national home' in the 1917 Balfour Declaration while promising to protect the rights of the Arab majority. Arab revolts in the 1930s, the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration, the Holocaust and the plight of survivors, and an armed campaign by Jewish groups against British rule after 1945, including the 1946 King David Hotel bombing, made the mandate unworkable. In February 1947 Britain handed the problem to the United Nations.

On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly voted for Resolution 181, a plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states with an international Jerusalem. Jewish leaders accepted it; Arab leaders rejected it as unjust to the majority. Civil war followed. Britain left on 14 May 1948, Israel declared independence that day, and neighboring Arab states intervened. Israelis remember 1948 as their War of Independence; Palestinians remember it as the Nakba, or catastrophe, when about 700,000 fled or were expelled.