The Arab-Israeli Conflict 1947–1973

IN NOVEMBER 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommendedthat the area of Palestine, under a British mandate from the League of Nations since 1922, be partitioned into separate Arab and Jewish states, with an economic union proposed to tie the two states together and an international regime established for the city of Jerusalem. The Arab world vehemently opposed the partition of Palestine into two states, preferring instead the creation of one federal state. For Jews, living among the 1.2 million Arab people who inhabited Palestine would have made them a religious minority of 600,000 in a federal Arab-Jewish state, a minority political status that was not the goal of Zionism.