Following the defeat of Turkey in World War I, Britain
strengthened its power in Palestine. Massive immigrations of Jews from many
countries raised the Jewish population in Palestine from about 50,000 buy the
beginning of 1900 to approximately 300,000 before World War II.
The Palestinians staged a general strike in April 1936 protesting against this
massive immigration of Jews which they saw as a danger threatening their
rights.
The
British, from their side, put forward a plan for the partition of Palestine
into three states, a Jewish one in the
north, another state for the Arabs in
the south and a third section to remain under the British administration in the
Jerusalem-Jaffa (Tel Aviv) corridor. The plan was categorically rejected by the
Palestinians and lasted until 1939. London was forced to give the partition
idea and set limits to the Jewish emigration to Palestine.
Britain submitted the whole to the newly-established United Nations in the
aftermath of World War II.
When the United Nations (UN) General Assembly approved in 1947 a new partition
plan, 749,000 Arabs and 9,250 Jews lived in the territory where the proposed
Arab state would be set up, while 497,000 Arabs and 498,000 Jews lived in the
part which was to become the Jewish state.
To drive the Palestinians from their land, a detachment of the Jewish terrorist
organization Irgun, commanded by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin, raided the village of Deir Yasin on the 9th of April 1948, killing 254 civilians. The wave
of terror drove 10,000
Palestinians from their land.
Israel unilaterally proclaimed itself an independent country on the 14th
of May 1948. Armies from the neighboring Arab states attacked immediately, but
failed to stop the consolidation of the newly-proclaimed Jewish State. The new
Jewish state had, in fact, emerged from the 1949 war against the Arab armies
with a land area larger than one proposed by the United Nations.
More than half of the Palestinians had to abandon their homes and headed
towards the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where they lived as refugees. The West
bank had been annexed by the then Hashemite kingdom of Tran-Jordan , a
territory which had been annexed by the Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan; the
Gaza Strip was then under the Egyptian administration.
To the United Nations and, consequently, in the eyes of the international law,
the Palestinians were not a people but simply refugees, i.e. a “problem” to be
solved, although the 780000 Palestinian refugees were a direct result of war
and forcible displacement to accommodate Jewish immigrants from Europe and the
Arab world.