Palestinian Arab State

In February 1947, the British government announced their intention to terminate their mandate over the Palestinian territory it inherited from the League of Nations after World War I.  Arabs and Jews who lived there were fighting each other and the British army that had been occupying the area for 30 years.

The British turned the problem of what would become of Palestine once the British army left over to the United Nations.  In May 1947, the UN established a commission to decide the fate of Palestine.

The chief problem the commission would have to decide related to the competing visions of the two sides, Arabs and Jews.  Each wanted Palestine for themselves.

In August 1947, the commission announced its decision.  It called for a partition of Palestine between a Jewish state (Israel) and a Palestinian Arab state.

33 countries (including Brazil and the USA) or 72% of the member states involved in the commission approved the partition plan.  

The Jews reluctantly accepted the partition plan.  The Arabs rejected the partition plan.  

Not getting the 100 % (of Palestine) that they wanted, the Palestinian Arabs lost an opportunity for their own state.

A few weeks after the UN commission released its report, Azzam Pasha, the General Secretary of the Arab League, told an Egyptian newspaper "Personally I hope the Jews do not force us into this war because it will be a war of elimination and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades.  We will sweep them [the Jews] into the (Mediterranean) sea." 

The Palestinian Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated.  They opposed the very idea of partition.  

When the British Mandate of Palestine expired on 14 May 1948, and with the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the surrounding Arab states—Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria—invaded what had just ceased to be Mandatory Palestine, and immediately attacked Israeli forces and several Jewish settlements.

In 1949, after a year of hostilities, Armistice Agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.  They formally ended the fighting and demarcated the Green Line, which separated Arab-controlled territory from Israel.  

The Arab controlled territory did not become the Palestinian Arab state as promised by the UN commission.  Instead, it was divided between Jordan and Egypt.  If the Palestinian Arabs had only accepted the partition plan...