UN General Assembly Votes to Partition Palestine

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 by a vote of 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions, recommending the partition of Mandatory Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states with economic union, and placing Jerusalem under international administration. The proposed Jewish state would receive approximately 55–56% of the land at a time when Jews comprised roughly 33% of the population and owned approximately 7% of the land. The proposed Arab state would receive approximately 42–43%. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan, though some Zionist factions objected that it fell short of their territorial ambitions. The Arab Higher Committee and all Arab states rejected it, arguing the plan was fundamentally unjust: the majority population was being partitioned off its own land without consent, in a General Assembly of only 56 member states representing a fraction of the world's population. Violence broke out almost immediately after the vote between Palestinian Arab and Jewish communities. Britain announced its intention to withdraw from Palestine by May 1948, leaving no mechanism to enforce the partition. Resolution 181 became the primary legal foundation both sides reference: Israel cites it as international recognition of Jewish statehood, while the PLO — which initially rejected it — later cited it in 1988 as the basis for Palestinian statehood claims.