The End of the Mandate and the Creation of Israel, 1945–48
The Yishuv’s Underground Armies, 1945–46
By 1945 the Jewish community in Palestine had three armed groups, each with a different strategy for forcing Britain out. The largest was the Haganah, the official defence force of the Yishuv, which mostly cooperated with British rule but ran an illegal immigration network bringing Holocaust survivors past the Royal Navy blockade. The Irgun, led by Menachem Begin from 1944, broke with the Haganah and adopted open insurgency. The smallest and most extreme group was Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, which had assassinated the British minister Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944. After the 1945 Labour government in London refused Truman’s call to admit 100,000 Holocaust survivors, the three groups briefly united in a Jewish Resistance Movement and turned their weapons on British targets.
By 1945 the Yishuv had three armed groups: the Haganah (the mainstream defence force, around 60,000 strong), the Irgun (right-wing insurgents under Menachem Begin) and Lehi/Stern Gang (the smallest and most extreme). Their united campaign of attacks made Britain’s position in Palestine politically unsustainable.
The King David Hotel Bombing, July 1946
The most damaging single attack came on 22 July 1946, when the Irgun bombed the south wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel housed the headquarters of the British administration and the British army in Palestine. Disguised as Arab workmen, Irgun fighters smuggled milk churns packed with explosives into the basement. Telephone warnings were given but were either ignored, dismissed or did not arrive in time. The blast killed 91 people — British, Arab and Jewish — and injured 46. International reaction was sharp: even mainstream Zionist leaders condemned the attack, and the Haganah formally broke from the operation. The bombing showed the British government two things: insurgent groups could strike at the heart of British rule in Palestine, and holding the Mandate would mean an open-ended counter-insurgency.
The point to analyse is what the bombing led to, not just what happened. The Irgun struck in retaliation for Operation Agatha, the British round-up of around 2,700 Jewish suspects at the end of June 1946. Specific consequences of the bombing include: Operation Shark, the army’s cordon-and-search of Tel Aviv from 30 July to 2 August 1946, which screened about 102,000 people; the formal Haganah break from the Irgun; the political shift in London under Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin towards withdrawal; and the loss of British public will to keep paying for a Mandate that was costing about £40 million a year. By February 1947 the cabinet had decided to refer the whole problem to the United Nations.
From Britain to the UN: UNSCOP, 1947
In February 1947 Foreign Secretary Bevin announced that Britain would hand the question of Palestine to the United Nations. The UN set up a special committee, UNSCOP (the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine), with eleven members from neutral countries. The committee toured Palestine in June and July 1947. Its report, dated 3 September 1947, contained two plans: a majority plan recommending partition into a Jewish and an Arab state with an internationalised Jerusalem, and a minority plan for a single federal state. While UNSCOP was working, the British navy intercepted the refugee ship Exodus 1947 and forcibly returned its 4,500 Holocaust survivors to camps in Germany. The image was a public-relations disaster for Britain and pushed undecided UN members towards partition.
UN Resolution 181, 29 November 1947
On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted on the partition plan. Resolution 181 passed by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions. The plan divided Palestine into a Jewish state on about 56 per cent of the land, an Arab state on about 43 per cent, and an internationalised zone around Jerusalem and Bethlehem under UN trusteeship. Both states were to be linked by economic union. Crucially, the Jewish state was awarded territory where Jews were still a minority of the local population, because the plan included the largely empty Negev desert to make the new state economically viable.
Reactions split immediately. Jewish communities in Palestine and around the world celebrated. The Yishuv leadership, including David Ben-Gurion, accepted the plan despite reservations about Jerusalem. Arab leaders — the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine and the Arab League outside it — rejected partition outright. They argued the UN had no right to award the territory of the indigenous majority to a Jewish state, and that the plan gave 56 per cent of the land to a community owning roughly 7 per cent of it.
UN Resolution 181 was passed on 29 November 1947 by 33 votes to 13. It awarded around 56% of Palestine to a Jewish state, 43% to an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international control. Jewish leaders accepted; Arab leaders rejected.
Civil War in Palestine, December 1947 – May 1948
The day after the vote, civil war began. From December 1947 to May 1948 Palestine descended into open fighting between Jewish forces (the Haganah, with the Irgun and Lehi operating alongside) and Palestinian Arab militias supported by volunteer fighters of the Arab Liberation Army. Early Palestinian attacks on supply convoys to Jewish settlements were partly successful, but from March 1948 the Haganah’s Plan Dalet went on the offensive. Towns including Haifa, Tiberias and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces. The most controversial episode was the Deir Yassin attack of 9 April 1948 by Irgun and Lehi forces, in which around 100 Palestinian villagers were killed. News of Deir Yassin spread rapidly and accelerated the flight of Palestinian civilians from areas near the fighting — the beginning of the displacement that Palestinians call the Nakba (‘catastrophe’) and that Israelis remember as part of the War of Independence (covered in detail in Lesson 3).
14 May 1948: The State of Israel is Declared
On 14 May 1948, with the British Mandate set to expire at midnight, David Ben-Gurion read out the Declaration of Independence in the Tel Aviv Museum, founding the State of Israel. The United States recognised the new state within hours. The Soviet Union recognised it three days later. The departure of the British administrator, Sir Alan Cunningham, marked the formal end of the 28-year Mandate. Within hours the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon would invade.
An answer on the importance of the end of the Mandate needs both perspectives. The British government framed the 1948 withdrawal as the only option after the UN had taken responsibility for partition. Critics — both Jewish and Arab — argued that Britain abandoned Palestine without proper transitional arrangements and refused to enforce the partition resolution it had referred to the UN. Strong answers acknowledge that Britain was economically broken (still on rationing, kept solvent by the 1946 American loan) and faced an insurgency it had no political will to defeat — while also recognising that the speed of withdrawal helped trigger the chaos that followed.