The Jerusalem Fund

by Jeff Mendez

After World War II, Britain was unable to maintain control over Palestine and transferred responsibility to the United Nations (UN). The UN decided that the only means of resolving the escalating conflict between Jews and Arabs was to partition the land into two states. Although Jews constituted only one-third of the population and owned less than 7 percent of the land, the UN partition plan assigned 55 percent of Palestine’s territory to the Jewish state. In March 1948, Zionist forces launched major operations throughout Palestine. Their attacks were brutal. Through terror, psychological warfare, and direct conquests, Palestine was dismembered, many of its villages destroyed, and many of its people expelled as refugees. By the time the British withdrawal had been completed, Palestinian resistance had been largely broken. British evacuation and the Zionist leaders’ proclamation of the Israeli state on 15 May 1948—forcibly created beyond the area allotted to the Jewish community in the UN partition plan—prompted military intervention by the neighboring Arab states, precipitating the first Arab-Israeli war.

Palestine was divided into three parts. The 1949 armistice agreements gave Israel control over 78 percent of the territory of British Mandate Palestine. Jordan occupied and annexed East Jerusalem and the hill country of central Palestine, thereafter known as the “West Bank” of the Jordan River. Egypt took temporary control of the coastal plain around the city of Gaza, later referred to as the Gaza Strip. Both Jordan and Egypt held on to these respective territories until the 1967 war, during which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Arab state provided for in the United Nations partition plan was never established.

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