29 November 1947 · UN General Assembly
Resolution 181
The new United Nations voted to divide the land into two states.
Exhausted, Britain handed the problem to the new United Nations.
On the twenty-ninth of November 1947 the General Assembly voted, thirty-three to thirteen, to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international rule.
The Jewish state would get about fifty-six percent of the land. Jews were then about a third of the population.
Jewish leaders accepted the plan. Arab leaders rejected it, arguing it denied the majority its right to decide its own future.
Chapter IV · Step 6 · 1947
The UN Partition Plan
A UN Special Committee (UNSCOP), created in May 1947, recommended partition with an economic union; a minority (India, Iran, Yugoslavia) proposed a federal state. General Assembly Resolution 181 passed on 29 November 1947 by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions.
- Proposed Jewish state
- 56.5%
15,264 km² · about 498,000 Jews and 407,000 Arabs and others
- Proposed Arab state
- 42.9%
11,592 km² · about 725,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews
- Jerusalem and Bethlehem
- An international zone (0.65%) under a special UN regime
about 105,000 Arabs and others and 100,000 Jews (UNSCOP, 1945 data)
Jewish AgencyAccepted, reluctantly, criticising some boundaries: it would allow a Jewish state with control of its own immigration.
Arab Higher Committee and Arab statesRejected it: Arabs were two-thirds of the people and owned most of the land, and partition violated their right to self-determination.
Much of the land given to the Jewish state was the arid Negev. The boundaries here are traced from a public-domain CIA map and are approximate.
Sources:
Wikipedia: UN Partition Plan for Palestine;
Wikipedia: UNSCOP;
CIA map of the 1947 plan (public domain)1948 – 1949 · War
Independence and Nakba
The same war, remembered in two opposite ways.
Fighting broke out as soon as the vote was passed. On the fourteenth of May 1948, as British rule ended, David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel.
The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq entered the war.
When the 1949 armistices were signed, Israel held about seventy-eight percent of the former Mandate. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem; Egypt held Gaza. No Arab state of Palestine emerged.
Israelis call it the War of Independence. Palestinians call it the Nakba: the catastrophe.
Chapter IV · Step 7 · 1948–1949
1948: one war, two names
Fighting broke out as soon as the vote was announced, with Arab attacks on Jewish areas and, from spring 1948, large Jewish offensives. On 14 May 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed in Tel Aviv; the United States recognised it de facto that night, and the Soviet Union fully on 17 May. On 15 May, Egyptian, Transjordanian, Syrian and Iraqi forces entered the country. Armistices followed in 1949: Egypt (24 February), Lebanon (23 March), Jordan (3 April) and Syria (20 July).
For IsraelisThe
War of Independence: a new state, three years after the Holocaust, survived an invasion by its neighbours.
For PalestiniansThe
Nakba, “the catastrophe”: the loss of their homeland and the scattering of their society.
- Israel after the armistices
- ~78%
of Mandate Palestine, inside the “Green Line”
- West Bank and East Jerusalem
- Jordan
annexed in April 1950; recognised by very few states
- Gaza Strip
- Egypt
administered, not annexed
- Arab state of 1947 plan
- Never created
Compare the armistice lines with the 1947 plan using the button on the map.
Sources:
Wikipedia: 1948 Arab–Israeli War;
Britannica: 1948 Arab–Israeli War;
Wikipedia: Israeli Declaration of Independence;
Wikipedia: 1949 Armistice Agreements;
Wikipedia: Jordanian annexation of the West Bank;
OpenHistoricalMap (CC0)1948 and after · Refugees
The people who left
Two exiles, in opposite directions, that still shape the region.
About seven hundred thousand Palestinians, roughly half the Arab population, fled or were driven out. More than five hundred villages were emptied, and Israel did not let the refugees return.
Why they left is fiercely debated. Israel long said most left of their own accord or on their leaders’ advice; Palestinians say they were expelled. Historians have documented both flight from the fighting and expulsions.
Camps grew in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Today more than five point nine million Palestinians are registered as refugees with the UN.
Over the next two decades, some eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews left or were driven from Arab and Muslim countries. Most of them settled in Israel.
Chapter IV · Step 8 · 1948 and after
Refugees
In 1949 the UN Conciliation Commission estimated 711,000 Palestinian refugees outside Israel; other estimates run from about 700,000 to 800,000. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (11 December 1948) said refugees wishing to return in peace “should be permitted to do so”. Israel refused, apart from a 1949 offer to take back about 100,000 as part of a peace deal, which Arab states rejected. Laws on “absentee” property transferred their land and homes to the state.
Traditional Israeli accountMost Arabs left voluntarily or at the urging of Arab leaders, in a war the Arab side started.
Palestinian accountPeople were driven out by attacks, massacres and deliberate expulsions, and then prevented from returning.
Historian Benny Morris, using Israeli archives, concluded that Jewish military attacks were the most important single cause of flight, and documented expulsions such as Lydda and Ramle (50,000–70,000 people); some historians call it ethnic cleansing, others, including Morris and Yoav Gelber, dispute the term. From 1948 to the early 1970s about 850,000–900,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab and Muslim-majority countries; about 650,000 of them settled in Israel. Historians also debate how far they were pushed or pulled.
- UNRWA rolls, 1950
- 914,221
Jordan incl. West Bank 506,200 · Gaza 198,227 · Lebanon 127,600 · Syria 82,194
- Registered today
- 5.9 million+
Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA, in 58 official camps and elsewhere
Sources:
Wikipedia: 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight;
Wikipedia: Nakba;
Wikipedia: Jewish exodus from the Muslim world;
Wikipedia: UNRWA;
UNRWA figures 1950–2020 (Jewish Virtual Library table)
