HIST 4339

The End of the Palestine Mandate

World War II

• 1941: Mufti to Germany

• 1943: Churchill’s Cabinet Committee on Palestine proposes partition:

            —“The one thing that can make a judgment of Solomon possible is the swift and            clean cut.  What we cannot afford to do is to saw away slowly at a squealing           infant in the presence of two hysterical mothers and amid the ululations of a    chorus of equally hysterical relatives in the Arab and Jewish world.”

• Foreign Office opposition

• Nov 1944: Lord Moyne’s assassination

• Churchill outraged

            —“If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of an assassin's pistol, and            the labours for its future produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany,          then many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so        consistently and so long in the past.”

• End to any serious British consideration of partition

Postwar Palestine

• 1945: Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin on Britain’s difficulties in Palestine

            —“The lack of any clear definition of this dual obligation has been the main cause           of the trouble which has been experienced in Palestine during the past 26 years.”

• Shifting demographic balance: Jewish population rises from 11% (1922) to 32% (1945)

• Increasing American sympathy for Zionists, pressure on Britain

• Feb 1947: British request that UN solve Palestine problem

• Nov 1947: UN General Assembly approval of (yet another) partition plan

• Arab-Jewish civil war in Palestine

• May 1948: official end of Britain’s Palestine Mandate

• 14 May 1948: Israeli declaration of independence

• First Arab-Israeli war, Palestinian exodus

• Reason for hope?  Or a “tunnel at the end of the light?”

Peel (1937) and UNSCOP (1947) Partition Plans

Sources: Woodhead Report and <http://domino.un.org/maps/m0103_1b.gif>