It opens:
His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will cease to be responsible for the administration of Palestine from midnight on 14 May 1948. The ending of thirty years of British rule in Palestine, begun when General Allenby's troop occupied that country towards the close of the first world war, provides a fitting occasion for a brief review of its history and of the policy pursued by His Majesty's Government.
The various sections are entitled:
I. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE BRITISH MANDATE FOR PALESTINE
II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PALESTINE
III. THE JEWISH NATIONAL HOME
IV. THE OBSTACLES WHICH FRUSTRATED THE EFFORTS OF HIS MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT TO ESTABLISH SELF-GOVERNING INSTITUTIONS IN PALESTINE
V. THE PROBLEM REFERRED TO THE UNITED NATIONS
VI. THE LAST MONTHS OF THE MANDATE
So, what is the official British explanation for quitting the Mandate?
Here:
His Majesty's Government had now striven for twenty-seven years without success to reconcile Jews and Arabs and to prepare the people of Palestine for self-government. The policy adopted by the United Nations had aroused the determined resistance of the Arabs, while the States supporting this policy were themselves not prepared to enforce it. 84,000 troops, who received no cooperation from the Jewish community, had proved insufficient to maintain law and order in the face of a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organized Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman. Since the war, 338 British subjects had been killed in Palestine, while the military forces there had cost the British taxpayer 100 million pounds. The renewal of Arab violence on the announcement of the United Nations decision to partition Palestine and the declared intentions of Jewish extremists showed that the loss of further British lives was inevitable. It was equally clear that, in view of His Majesty's Government's decision not to enforce the partition of Palestine against the declared wishes of the majority of it inhabitants, the continued presence there of British troops and officials could no longer be justified.
In these circumstances His Majesty's Government decided to bring to an end their Mandate and to prepare for the earliest possible withdrawal from Palestine of all British forces.
So, who were those "extremists", those "highly organized Jewish forces"? Who killed over 300 British security personnel? The Hagana? The Palmach?
Or were they the soldiers of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi and the Lechi fighters?
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2 comments:
no cooperation?
didnt the haganah assist in capturing irgun fighters?
27 years to reconcile the jews and the arabs? my gosh...they were rewriting history as it was being created
i guess this is the research that was used while making the promise
This is the classic British get-out it practised all over the world, in regard to its colonies and protectorates: in India, 1947 and in Nigeria 1960. Nigeria was a particularly egregious episode, where the Brits handed over control of the oil, that was found in the South East Nigeria, to the mozlems in the North.
Note the Brits did not mention any of the massacres of Arabs against the Jews, and that the Brits leaned on the side of the Arabs. They stopped Jewish convoys going through areas where Arabs attacked, but protected Arab convoys going through Jewish-controlled areas of Palestine. There was no way they could continue in Palestine without taking the side of the Arabs against the Jews, as the Jews could see the treachery of the British, and rightfully, felt entitled to defend themselves against the pro-Arab forces.
Also it would have been a continuation of world war 2 as the Arabs were being supported and encouraged by "former" Nazis.
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