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and began administering them with complete authority. It took over the facilities, institutions, and public administrations that had belonged to the British Palestine government. In this way, they were able to work freely to bring in weapons and combat trainers, young Jewish men, and other officers, soldiers, and mercenaries from outside Palestine. The British prime minister, Mr. Attlee, acknowledged that British forces would spare no effort to prevent Arab forces from entering Palestine.

This biased British position helped the Jews adopt similar positions in committing massacres and atrocities in cities inhabited by Arabs and Jews, such as Tiberias, Jaffa, and Haifa, despite the Arabs’ desperate efforts to protect them and their strong performance in defending them. The danger was increased by the British authorities’ announcement that any military intervention before 15 May, the date set for their withdrawal from Palestine, would be met with force and that they would remain responsible for order and security until then. In reality it was otherwise. The British authorities began evacuating Arab neighborhoods in the various cities and leaving their inhabitants prey to Jewish attacks. Then came the vile and terrible deception perpetrated by those authorities in Haifa. They assured Arab officials there that they would retain control of the Haifa area in particular until August. Yet the English surprised the Arabs by withdrawing 24 hours after that assurance, leaving them exposed to a planned Jewish attack in the ugliest English-Jewish conspiracy witnessed in the history of Palestine. I will give details of this later in these memoirs.

The British Palestine government had prevented the Partition Commission sent by the United Nations to Palestine from entering Palestine before the beginning of May so that it could carry out its assigned task of assuming the administration of Palestine. It allowed only some of its officials to enter for preliminary contacts. It refused to use British forces to implement partition. This provoked the Partition Commission’s protest. Britain was trying to reach a secret agreement with the United States to obtain from the Security Council and the UN General Assembly a decision granting it trusteeship or extending its Mandate over Palestine, but the Soviet representative on the Security Council denounced this attempt and it was thwarted.

The Security Council resumed consideration of the Palestine question in February 1948, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified, until it became impossible for the Partition Commission to carry out its task. Its chairman declared in a statement to the Security Council that it was impossible to do useful work under the dangerous conditions prevailing in Palestine and that the only solution was to abandon partition or send an international army to implement it by force.