The Files and the Vote

Somewhere in Palestine, in the late 1930s and through the 1940s, a young man would walk into an Arab village carrying a notebook.

He usually said he was a hiker. Or a student doing research on ancient sites. Or a surveyor. He was polite, curious, and interested in everything, and Palestinian village hospitality being what it is, he was fed, given tea, given a bed, and given answers.

He wanted to know how many houses there were. How many men of fighting age. Which families mattered and which ones argued with each other. Whether anyone in the village had taken part in the revolt. How good the land was. How many fruit trees. Where the water came in. How many roads led in, and how wide they were, and whether a truck could use them.

Then he went home and typed it up.

The village files

This was the Village Files project, run by Zionist intelligence, and by the mid 1940s it had built a detailed dossier on almost every Arab village in Palestine. Photographs from the air. Sketch maps. Lists of names. Notes on which villagers were considered hostile.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé went through this archive and described what it was for. It was not a geography survey. Each file built towards the same question: if we had to take this village, how would we do it, and who would have to be dealt with first?

There is something deeply painful about this part. The information came out of hospitality. A guest was fed by a family, and he wrote down how many sons they had, and the file was still sitting in a drawer ten years later when soldiers came up that same road.

By 1947 those files existed for roughly every Arab village in the country.

That is what “planning” looks like before it looks like anything else.

The war years

While that quiet work went on, the world was on fire.

For Jews in Europe the Second World War was the Holocaust. Six million people murdered, communities that had existed for eight hundred years erased in eighteen months, and the survivors coming out of the camps in 1945 with no families, no homes and nowhere on earth that wanted them.

Britain’s 1939 White Paper had capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at exactly the moment it became a matter of life and death. Ships full of refugees were turned away.

One of them was the Patria. In November 1940 she sat in Haifa harbour, loaded with around 1,800 Jewish refugees whom the British were about to deport to Mauritius. The Haganah decided to disable the ship with a bomb to stop the deportation. The charge was too big. The Patria sank in the harbour in about fifteen minutes and roughly 260 refugees drowned, people who had survived Nazi Europe and died in sight of the shore.

The whole story is full of moments like that. Nobody comes out of it clean.

New York, 1942

In May 1942, hundreds of delegates gathered at the Biltmore Hotel in New York.

Something important changed in that room. Up to then, the official Zionist demand had been careful language about a “national home.” At the Biltmore conference, Ben-Gurion pushed through a straight demand: a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine. A state. Openly. And unlimited immigration controlled by the Jewish Agency, not by Britain.

The other change was the address. The movement had spent forty years lobbying London. From Biltmore onwards, it lobbied Washington.

That turned out to be the smartest decision anyone in this story ever made.

In 1943 an American general, Patrick Hurley, toured Palestine, met Ben-Gurion, and sent President Roosevelt a report describing what he thought the Zionist aims really were: a sovereign Jewish state over all of Palestine and Transjordan, the transfer of the Arab population elsewhere, and Jewish economic leadership across the whole region.

He wrote that in 1943. It was filed.

Britain becomes the enemy

After the war, Britain found itself hated by everybody in Palestine at once.

Palestinians hated Britain for the Balfour Declaration and the crushed revolt. Jews now hated Britain for keeping Holocaust survivors out with the White Paper quotas.

So the Jewish underground turned its guns on the British, and for two years Palestine was one of the most dangerous postings in the British Empire.

22 July 1946. The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the building holding British administrative and military headquarters. Milk churns packed with explosive were carried into the basement. The blast took down a whole wing of the hotel. Ninety-one people were killed, and they were British, Arab and Jewish, most of them clerks and typists and hotel staff.

The Irgun said a warning had been telephoned and ignored. Britain said no usable warning came. The argument has never been settled. Ninety-one people were still dead.

The Irgun’s commander was a Polish-born fighter named Menachem Begin. Britain printed posters of his face, put a heavy bounty on his head, and ran two words across the top of them.

WANTED FOR MURDER.

The Irgun’s own emblem is worth looking at properly, because it tells you what Begin thought he was fighting for. A hand gripping a rifle, raised over a map. And the map is not Palestine. It is Palestine plus the whole of Transjordan, the entire country we now call Jordan, shaded in as ground to be taken. Beneath it ran two Hebrew words, Rak Kach, meaning Only Thus. Only this way. Only by force.

Thirty-one years after those posters went up on walls in Jerusalem, Menachem Begin was Prime Minister of Israel. A year after that, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing it with Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

More followed, and there was far more of it than most people realise. British records for the final years of the Mandate count over 500 armed attacks by the Jewish underground on British targets. Police stations bombed. Officers shot in the street. Letter bombs posted to British officials in London.

12 January 1947. Lehi drove a stolen truck packed with explosives up to the British police headquarters in Haifa and detonated it. Four men were killed, two British policemen and two Arab policemen.

The newsreels that week reported more than 60 police, soldiers and civilians injured. Later counts put the wounded at 142. First reports of a bombing nearly always come in low, and that is a useful habit to carry into any history you ever read: the number on the day is a guess, and the real one arrives later and quietly.

Windows blew in streets away.

Historians of terrorism mark that morning as the first time a truck bomb was used as a deliberate weapon of urban warfare anywhere. The technique did not stay pointed at the British for long. Within twelve months it was being driven into Arab city centres, and you have already met the results in Jaffa and Jerusalem.

1 March 1947. The Irgun went for Goldsmith House, the British officers’ club in Jerusalem, and the way they did it shows how confident they had become. A van rammed the barbed wire around the compound and pulled up at the door. A guard asked them for a permit. They shot him. Bren guns opened up from outside to pin everybody down, and three men walked in carrying rucksacks with thirty kilos of explosive in each, ninety kilos in all, and put them down inside the building.

Seventeen British officers were killed, several of them senior intelligence men, and 27 were wounded.

The Irgun said it was retaliation for the way Britain was handling the refugee ships, hauling Holocaust survivors off boats at Haifa and deporting them. That framing comes from the Irgun’s own account of the raid, so weigh it accordingly, but the grievance underneath it was real, and you have already read what happened to the Patria.

In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill got to his feet and condemned it, and that is worth stopping on. Churchill had backed Zionism his entire political life, loudly, at real political cost, and had defended the Balfour Declaration for thirty years. Now here he was calling the killing of British soldiers by Jewish fighters a betrayal.

When you have lost Churchill on this subject, you have lost the argument in London. In July, after Britain hanged three Irgun men, the Irgun seized two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice. They held them in an underground cell for a fortnight. Then they hanged them in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya and wired the bodies with explosives, so that the officer who cut the first one down was hurt by the blast.

The two of them are buried in the British military cemetery at Ramleh. The graves are still there.

Britain answered with mass raids and pulled in around 25 senior men from the Irgun and Lehi.

It made no difference to anything.

That last one broke something in Britain. There were anti-Jewish riots in British cities. And in London the government looked at the bill, looked at the empire falling apart, looked at the fact that it was still rationing bread at home, and decided it was done.

In February 1947, Britain announced it was handing Palestine to the United Nations.

The government’s own explanation, read out on the newsreels, did not pretend to anything nobler than exhaustion. Britain, it said, would no longer spend British lives enforcing a policy in Palestine that had earned it nothing but hatred from the Jews and bitter resentment from the Arabs.

That was the official reason for leaving. Both sides hate us, and it is not worth the funerals.

Not solving it. Handing it over. Britain had made the promise, taken the land, crushed the revolt, trained one army and disarmed the other, and then walked out of the room and left everyone else holding it.

Two societies, and they were not the same size

Look at what the UN was actually handed.

On one side: about 630,000 Jews, roughly a third of the population, owning around 6 or 7 percent of the land, but with a fully built state ready to switch on. A parliament in all but name. Tax collection. Schools, hospitals, universities, banks, factories, newspapers, a trade union running an economy, and an army, the Haganah, with tens of thousands of trained members, plus the Irgun and Lehi.

On the other side: about 1.3 million Palestinians, roughly two thirds of the population, owning or using most of the land, and possessing almost nothing else. No government. No treasury. No army. No air force. No arms industry. The leaders were dead or in exile from a revolt crushed eight years earlier. The best fighters were in graves in the hills.

The two sides in what was about to happen were not two equal teams. Anybody who tells the story as a fair fight is not telling you the truth.

Thirty-three votes

The UN sent a special committee, UNSCOP, to look at Palestine in summer 1947. Its members visited for five weeks. The Arab Higher Committee boycotted it, on the grounds that Palestinians should not have to argue for the right to their own country, which was principled and which cost them dearly, because it meant the committee heard the Zionist case in detail and the Palestinian case barely at all.

UNSCOP recommended partition. And on 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted on Resolution 181.

The result was 33 in favour, 13 against, 10 abstentions.

Here is what those 33 votes decided.

The Jewish state would receive about 56 percent of Palestine. The Arab state would get the rest. Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be an international zone run by the UN. You will see that first figure written as 55 as well, depending on how the desert edges are counted, but the plan’s own arithmetic comes out a shade over 56.

Now put that beside the numbers you just read. The Jewish population was about a third of the people and owned about 7 percent of the land, and it was allotted the larger and much better half of the country, including nearly the whole coastline and the fertile valleys. And inside those borders would live roughly 400,000 Arabs alongside roughly 500,000 Jews, so the “Jewish state” would begin as a state where almost half the people were Palestinians.

Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership accepted the plan publicly, and privately several of them wrote quite openly that these borders were a starting point, not a finish line.

The Palestinians and the Arab states rejected it. Their argument was simple: nobody had the right to give away 56 percent of their country to people who had mostly arrived in the last twenty-five years, and no vote in New York changes who owns a field in Galilee.

There is a fair question people ask now, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan. Should the Palestinians have taken the deal? Some Palestinians today think refusing it was a disaster. Others say look at what accepting it would have meant: signing away more than half your homeland while nearly half your people ended up living as a minority inside the other state. Both of those are serious positions and you are allowed to sit with the difficulty.

The night the shooting started

In Jewish towns in Palestine, people danced in the streets when the vote came through. After the Holocaust, after everything, there was going to be a state. That joy was completely real and you should not sneer at it.

In Palestinian towns, people understood that the country had just been cut in half by strangers.

The very next morning, 30 November 1947, the shooting started.

Nobody waited for May. Nobody waited for the British to leave. The war for Palestine began the day after the vote, and by the time any Arab army crossed any border, more than half the refugees of the Nakba had already lost their homes.

That is the part of the story most people have never been told.