8
blow?”5 Yet when Churchill became prime minister in 1940 he kept the White
Paper in force, and throughout the war British naval forces sought to block
“illegal” Jewish immigration into Palestine.
As the horrific news of Germany’s destruction of European Jewry got out to the
world, the closing off of the Jewish national homeland to those managing to
escape Hitler’s inferno provided a potent argument that a Jewish state in Palestine
was needed, if for no other reason than as a haven for the refugees. Yet even after
the war ended in 1945 the new Labour government in Great Britain, eager to
remain in the good graces of the Arab world, continued to enforce the White
Paper of 1939 and barred Jewish immigration to Palestine. Illegal immigration
continued and armed Jewish resistance groups—the mainstream Haganah and the
more militant Irgun and Stern Gang—fought the Mandatory authorities.
In 1947 Great Britain announced it was washing its hands of the Palestine
problem and would give up the mandate. It asked the newly created United
Nations to decide the fate of Palestine. On May 15 the UN General Assembly
appointed a committee, known by the acronym UNSCOP, to visit the region and
investigate the matter. The majority report, issued August 31, called for partition
of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states as had the Peel Report ten years earlier,
and, like that document, set constricted boundaries for the Jewish state that
deeply disappointed the Zionists. Realizing nevertheless that this was the
best deal they could hope for at the moment, Zionist leaders announced their
support. Predictably, the Arab world once again refused to countenance a Jewish
state in any part of Palestine, and condemned partition.
The UN General Assembly voted on the UNSCOP report on November 29,
1947, approving the partition plan by 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions. Both the
United States and the Soviet Union—which at the time saw it as a means to
weaken British influence in the Middle East—voted with the majority. Most of
the dissenting votes came from Arab states. Great Britain abstained. Fifty years
since Herzl’s First Zionist Congress and thirty years after Lord Balfour issued his
declaration, the world body representing the community of nations brought into
5
Quoted in Laqueur, History of Zionism, p. 510.