United Nations Partition of Palestine
In the partition arrangement recommended in the majority report and adopted by the General
Assembly in November 1947, the Jewish state (15 000 square kms) would contain 538 000 Jews and
397 000 Arabs, and the Arab state (11 000 square kms) would contain 800 000 Arabs and 10 000
Jews. The international trusteeship of Jerusalem would contain 105 000 Arabs and 100 000 Jews. The
Jews who made up 1/3 of the total population of 1 269 000 and owned 6-8% of the total land area were to receive 56% of the land and the Arabs were to retain only 43% of the total land. The Jewish
Agency welcomed the majority report, but the Arab Higher Committee followed the pattern of Arab responses to all European interventions in the affairs of Palestine since the Balfour Declaration and rejected both reports outright. Indeed, the Arab Higher Committee threatened war if partition went ahead. The British agreed to leave Palestine but did not endorse either report as they did not want to be seen by the Arab states as supporting something so unacceptable to them as a Jewish state. On 29th
November 1947 the United Nationals General Assembly in UN Resolution 181 voted in favour of the partition of Palestine by a vote of 23 to 12, with ten abstentions. Australia voted in favour of the resolution. Summary - World War II provided motivation for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Zionists and many Christian Europeans shared this view, the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust made it crucial to find a safe haven for Jews.
The British could no longer contain the situation in Palestine with the unrest caused by the 1939
White Paper and the terrorist attacks conducted by Jewish paramilitary organisations during and after
World War II.
The presence of Jewish displaced persons in Europe following World War II led the US to pressure
Britain to allow more Jewish people into Palestine, which in turn led Britain to hand Palestine over to the UN. (At the end of World War II more than 11