In the second excerpt from Benny Morris's new book on Israel's founding, the author explains how violence and political frustration led the U.K. to walk away from its Mandate

On Feb. 14, 1947, the British cabinet decided to wash its hands of Palestine and dump the problem in the lap of the United Nations. Foreign secretary Ernest Bevin was later to say: "The Arabs, like the Jews, [had] refused to accept any of the compromise proposals which [Her Majesty's Government] had put before both parties."

The military chiefs of staff were unhappy with the decision; it would open the door to Soviet penetration and subvert the morale of British troops in Palestine.

But prime minister Clement Attlee and Bevin had already decided, in principle, in a tetea-tete on Dec. 27, 1946, that in the new, postwar circumstances, Britain could give up Palestine and Egypt (as well as Greece), and the cabinet stood firm: Britain had made what it saw as a series of reasonable offers and no one was interested. And the United States, far from expressing a willingness to shoulder or share responsibility, was continuously subverting Britain's efforts.

"We have decided that we are unable to accept the scheme put forward either by the Arabs or by the Jews, or to impose ourselves a solution of our own ? The only course now open to us is to submit the problem to the judgment of the United Nations," Bevin told the House of Commons on Feb. 18, 1947, adding that Britain would not recommend to the United Nations "any particular solution." The international community would have to take up the burden and chart a settlement.

Historians have since argued about Britain's reasons. Some have suggested that Bevin and the cabinet had not been entirely straightforward: By threatening the two sides with the prospect of the unknown and the unpredictable, Britain's intention had been to force the Jews and/or the Arabs to accept the latest set of Whitehall proposals or to agree to a continuation of the Mandate. Certainly David Ben-Gurion, then and later, believed that the move was a ploy designed to prolong British rule: Bevin would hand the United Nations an insoluble problem; the United Nations would flounder and fail and Britain would be reempowered to stay on, on its own terms, without UN or U.S. interference.

Other historians (myself included) have taken the British decision at its face value:Bevin and his colleagues had truly had enough of Palestine; passing the ball to the United Nations was their only recourse. In the aftermath of world war, Britain was too weak and too poor to soldier on. Irgun and Stern Gang veterans, and their political successors, have since claimed that it was mainly their terrorist campaigns that ultimately persuaded Bevin and the British public to abandon Palestine.

Others have pointed to the large-scale Haganah operations of 1945-1946 (the railway line and bridge demolitions) as being decisive: These portended an eventual full-scale British-Haganah clash that Whitehall was unwilling to contemplate. Another factor was the pressure from Washington in the British government's decision-making: Given the Cold War context and Britain's financial insolvency, Whitehall could ill afford to alienate Washington over a highly emotional issue that, when all was said and done, was not a vital interest.

---

The British decision of February, 1947, was firmed up over the following months by bloody events on the ground, in Palestine, in the Mediterranean and in Britain itself; Jewish provocations and British reprisals spiralled almost out of control. British efforts to block and punish Jewish terrorism and illegal immigration took on new, bloody dimensions -- though, it must be added, British officials and troops by and large displayed restraint and humanity in face of Jewish excesses.

By the end of 1947, with evacuation only months away, Britain appeared no longer capable of properly governing Palestine and had lost the will to continue. The violence of the IZL [Irgun] and LHI [Stern Gang] underlined the moderate Zionists' argumentation in Washington and London that, in the absence of a solution -- that is, a Jewish state--Jewish desperation would approach boiling point.

Without doubt, Britain's decision to withdraw heightened the terrorists' expectations; they sensed that the enemy was on the run. The British had almost 100,000 troops in Palestine, almost five times as many as had been used to crush the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 (a tribute, perhaps, to the greater efficiency and lethality of the Jewish terrorists). Against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the scrutiny in Washington and the world press of every British action, there were strict limits to what Attlee and Bevin could allow themselves in pursuit of effective counterterrorism.

On March 1, 1947, IZL gunmen killed more than 20 British service-men, 12 of them in a grenade attack on the British Officers Club in Tel Aviv. On March 31, the LHI sabotaged the Haifa oil refinery; the fire took three weeks to put out. And on May 4, IZL gunmen penetrated the British prison in Acre: Two dozen IZL members were set free (as, unintentionally, were some 200 Arab prisoners), but nine of the attackers were killed and eight were captured. The captured men were tried, and on July 8, death sentences were confirmed against three of them.

In a repeat of the "whipping" cycle (when the IZL had flogged a British officer after the British had flogged several IZL men), on July 12 the IZL abducted two British sergeants and threatened to hang them if the British hanged the IZL men. The British -- despite a widespread dragnet and Haganah help -- failed to locate the sergeants and went ahead with the hangings, on July 29. The IZL hanged the sergeants the next day -- and booby-trapped their bodies. A British captain was injured when they were cut down. "The bestialities practised by the Nazis themselves could go no further," commented The Times of London. The "hanging of the two young sergeants struck a deadly blow against British patience and pride," Arthur Creech Jones, Britain's colonial secretary, was to comment 13 years later.

But bestiality was by no means a monopoly of the Jewish terrorists. On the evening of July 30, responding to the hangings, British troops and police in Tel Aviv went on a rampage, destroying Jewish shops and beating up passersby. In one area, the berserk security men sprayed Jewish pedestrians and coffee shops with gunfire, killing five and injuring 10. High commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham, in a cable to London, explained what had happened -- in the process highlighting the sorry state of his force's morale: "Most of them are young ? they have had to work in an atmosphere of constant danger and increasing tension, fraught with insult, vilification and treachery; and it can be understood that the culminating horror of the murder of their comrades ? in every circumstance of planned brutality, should have excited them to a pitch of fury which momentarily blinded them to the dictates of principle, reason and humanity alike."

Nor was this all. In London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Gateshead and Holyhead there were anti-Semitic demonstrations; Jewish shop and synagogue windows were smashed.

In Palestine, several policemen were fired -- though no criminal proceedings were ever instituted against anyone. In parliament, in special session on Aug. 12, there was an all-party consensus to quit Palestine, quickly; "no British interest" was served by soldiering on, said Winston Churchill.

On April 2, the British had asked the UN secretary-general to convene a special session of the General Assembly, which duly met in New York from April 28-May 9. The General Assembly resolved to set up the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to recommend a solution to the Palestine conundrum.

The Arab delegations opposed UNSCOP's appointment and sought, instead, a full-scale General Assembly debate and decision on immediate independence for an Arab-dominated "united democratic ? Palestinian state." They were handily defeated, the majority of the 55 UN members preferring to leave debate and decision until after the committee had examined the problem.

The Arabs then tried to restrict the committee's terms of reference to Palestine and Palestinian independence. The Zionists, for their part, sought to include the problem of Europe's Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) -- of whom there were more than 400,000. Again, the Arabs lost.

The final terms, hammered out in a General Assembly committee, authorized UNSCOP to recommend a solution on the basis of an investigation in the country and "anywhere" else it saw fit, an allusion to the DP camps. Holland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Canada, Australia, India, Iran, Peru, Guatemala and Uruguay were asked to send representatives. UNSCOP included no Zionist, Arab or Great Power members.

Zionist officials were not enamoured with this composition, given the membership of three Muslim, or partly Muslim, states (Iran, India and Yugoslavia) and two Dominions (Canada and Australia) that, it was feared, would automatically defer to London.

The Arabs were not overly concerned about the ultimate upshot in the General Assembly. With five member states and a handful of reflexive Islamic and Third World supporters, they expected an easy victory. They came to the assembly cocky and disorganized and remained so until the bitter end. They failed to appreciate the significance of Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko's General Assembly speech of May 14, 1947, a speech that stunned almost all Western and Zionist observers (though almost no one understood its full purport).

Hitherto, Soviet policy on Palestine had been anti-British and pro-Arab. Now, while criticizing the British, Gromyko spoke of "the Jewish people['s] ? exceptional [and 'indescribable'] sorrow and suffering" during the Holocaust and of the survivors' suffering as DPs across Europe since then; asserted the Jews' right to self-determination; and suggested that if a unitary state proved impracticable, then Palestine should be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states. Moscow had announced a pro-Zionist tack -- and sent UNSCOP off to the Middle East with a clear message.

What led to this unheralded Soviet volte-face remains uncertain. Anti-British considerations probably predominated; in all likelihood, Moscow was intent on causing a rift between London and Washington. But the Soviets, at some level, to judge from Gromyko's speech, which devoted a full three paragraphs to Jewish suffering, were also moved by the horrors of the Holocaust and by a sense of camaraderie with fellow sufferers at Nazi hands. - Excerpted, with permission, from 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris, published by Yale University Press.

Copyright 2008 Benny Morris.

TOMORROW:

Nov. 29, 1947: The UN Votes

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.