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Jews and continued to block immigration. The punishment for possessing a weapon was death
by hanging. A number of Jews were executed, and on one occasion the Irgun killed kidnapped
British soldiers in retaliation.
The Jewish Agency for Israel, the Jewish authority established under the Balfour Declara-
tion, and the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, tried to work with the British
toward a political solution, launching the “Saison” operation to help the British capture Irgun
and Lehi members in 1943 since it opposed all anti-British operations by the smaller militias as
long as World War II continued. But the confl ict with Britain restarted the following year when
the Haganah joined other organizations in fi ghting the British, who had continued to repress
the Yishuv despite this cooperation.
The most important attack by the Jewish rebellion against British rule in Palestine took
place on July 22, 1946, when the United Resistance Movement — made up of the Haganah,
Irgun, and Lehi —bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the British Mandatory govern-
ment's main offi ce. Ninety-one people were killed —Jewish, British, and Arab employees —
and forty-six were injured. The movement claimed that a prior warning had been sent to
evacuate the building.
After World War II, the British wanted to divest themselves of this territory. Faced with re-
bellion there, its own domestic problems, and the need for strategic retrenchment, the British
decided to pull out and turned the question of Palestine's future over to the United Nations. A
series of investigations and plans culminated in the November 29, 1947, UN General Assembly
vote to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, with implementation to take
place on May 15, 1948. Thirty-three members voted for the plan, thirteen voted against it, and
ten abstained.
According to the Partition Plan, Jerusalem would be a UN-governed international zone.
The Arab state was to take up 43 percent of the land (4,500 square miles, or 11,655 square kilo-
meters), much of it surrounding Jerusalem; 804,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews lived there. The
Jewish state was to take up 56 percent of the land (5,500 square miles, or 14,245 square kilo-
meters); 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs lived there, and hundreds of thousands of additional
European Jewish Holocaust survivors were ready to arrive as soon as immigration was open.
Although the Jewish leadership accepted the Partition Plan, Palestinian Arab leaders, whose
chief, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, had recently returned from Berlin where he had collabo-
rated with the Germans during the war, rejected both the Partition Plan and the existence of
a Jewish state in any form. They launched the war they had been preparing since 1946. About
1,700 people were killed during the next fi ve months. An estimated 700,000 Arabs fl ed; some
were expelled from the Jerusalem corridor — the territory connecting Jerusalem to the land
along the coast allocated to the would-be Jewish state — and from the far north during the
last days of the war. The Palestinian elite were the fi rst to leave, setting off a panicked fl ight
throughout Palestinian society.
Although many outside observers thought the Jewish side would inevitably lose a military
engagement, the Yishuv's organization, discipline, unity, and preparation paid off. In April
1948, Jewish forces launched a full-scale attack. They had made signifi cant territorial gains by
the time the British mandate ended on May 14, 1948.
 
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