THE FOUNDING OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL • 1937: Peel Commission offers a plan to partition Palestine • May 1939: Rift between “revisionist” Zionists (Irgun and the Stern Gang) and the Jewish Agency in Palestine (whose armed wing was the Haganah) • July 1946: Bombing of the King David Hotel • November 1947: UN Resolution on the partition of Palestine leads to fighting between Jewish settlers and Palestinian irregulars • May 1948: Proclamation of the State of
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THE FOUNDING OF THESTATE OF ISRAEL
• 1937: Peel Commission offers a plan to partition Palestine
• May 1939: Rift between “revisionist” Zionists (Irgun and the Stern Gang) and the Jewish Agency in Palestine (whose armed wing was the Haganah)
• July 1946: Bombing of the King David Hotel
• November 1947: UN Resolution on the partition of Palestine leads to fighting between Jewish settlers and Palestinian irregulars
• May 1948: Proclamation of the State of Israel leads to war with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq
Arab household in Nazareth, ca. 1910.Most Palestinians were settled in towns and villages;
about 25% of them were Christian.
Only 30% of Arab children went to school in the 1920s:
The British spent next to nothing on their education.
The Bat-Nesher Kindergarten in Haifa, 1925: The Hebrew schools of the Yishuv had a student-teacher ratio of 22:1 and some of the best equipment in the world
Jewish settlers also commanded investment capital:
The Lodzia textile factory in Tel Aviv in the 1920s
THE LITERACY RATE IN PALESTINE IN 1930
Muslims Christians Jews
Male 25% 72% 93%
Female 3% 44% 73%
THE PEEL PLAN FOR THE PARTITION OF
PALESTINE(1937):
See Israel-Arab Reader,pp. 41-43.
David Ben-Gurion was outraged by the British White Paper of May 1939(see Israel-Arab Reader, pp. 44-51)
“Liberation for the tormented.
Vengeance for the slaughtered!” British Army
recruitment poster for Palestine,
1943.(About 30,000
Jews did enlist.)
The Seventh Million:Young
kazetniks arrive in Haifa in
July 1945
But Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940, born in Odessa) persuaded his “Irgun” (National Military Organization) to declare war on Britain; they killed about 135 British
soldiers.
The bombing of the King David Hotel by Irgun agents
in Jerusalem, July 1946, when 91 people died
British commentators assumed that Zionism
would forfeit all sympathy in the world
Irgun leaders claimed that they had phoned in a warning…
MENACHEM BEGIN:TERRORIST OR
FREEDOM FIGHTER?The Irgun leader
stood on the British Most Wanted List when he visited
Washington in 1946, but in 1978 he and Anwar Sadat won the Nobel Peace
Prize for negotiating the Camp David
Accord
The Haganah ship “Exodus” outside Haifa, July 18, 1947, with 4,515 illegal immigrants. On the day of its arrival, Irgun
announced that it had just hanged two British sergeants.
The United Nations plan for partition,
adopted in November 1947
with support from Truman, Stalin, and Leon Blum(see Israel-Arab
Reader, pp. 69-77)
Palestinian Arab officers, led by Abd el-Kader el-Husseini
A Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem bombed by the Palestinians early in 1948
Israeli forces capture Kastel, near Jerusalem, April 9, 1948
The Palestinian village of
Deir Yassin, west of
Jerusalem, was attacked by
Irgun and Stern Gang fighters
onApril 8, 1948, and at least 107 villagers were killed,
many of them after surrender
Palestinian refugees flee their homes in Jaffa, April 1948.The Haganah publicized Deir Yassin to discredit the
Revisionists, and perhaps to cause a stampede.
General Sir John Bagot Glubb, “Glubb Pasha,” commander of
Jordan’s Arab Legion
King Abdullah of Jordan, who hoped to annex the West Bank
The Arab League meets secretly in Cairo, April 10/11, 1948:Jordan persuaded the other countries to rely for now on the
Arab Legion to help the Palestinians….
David Ben-Gurion proclaims the
founding of the State of Israel
beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl,
Tel Aviv,14 May 1948(Israel-Arab
Reader, pp. 81-83)
Egypt, Jordan, Syria,
& Iraq invaded
Israel on May 15, 1948; a truce was
arranged on June 10, as
heavy weapons
poured into Israel
On the Jewish side, everyone fought in 1948,
including women and the ultra-
orthodox
Troops of Jordan’s Arab Legion enter East Jerusalem
The Israeli counter-
offensive of October
1948 (fought in large part with East
Bloc weapons)
Egypt fought bravely to
defend the Gaza Strip and Faluja
Pocket.Israeli forces surrounded
them briefly in December 1948,
but the USA demanded that they withdraw
from Egypt.
Israeli Troops hoist their flag at Elath on the Gulf of Aqaba,
10 March 1949
The British soldier Desmond
Rutledge had fallen in love with
the Jewish girl Miriam, so he
drove his Cromwell tank to join the Haganah.
There were 914,000 Palestinian refugees registered with the UN in 1950 and 4.3 million in
