On the eve of the British withdrawal, on May 14, Jewish authorities declared the independence of the Jewish state in Palestine, called Israel. Local Arab authorities, on the other hand, while rejecting the Jewish state, did not declare or otherwise move to create an Arab state in Palestine.
Shortly thereafter, the Arab states that had conquered parts of Palestine imposed a military administration on the areas they had seized. In September, fearing Transjordanian annexation of parts of mandatory Palestine, Egypt initiated the creation of an Arab government of “all Palestine,” which, on October 1, declared an independent Arab state in all of Palestine. While six Arab states recognized the new “government” of Palestine, it never exercised any authority anywhere, and it quietly retired to anonymous offices in Cairo and then dissolution.
The war ended by late 1948, with Israel controlling roughly three-quarters of the territory of the Palestine Mandate. The remaining territory was conquered by Syria, Egypt and Jordan (the new name of Transjordan). Egypt ruled the conquered parts of Palestine (the Gaza Strip) by military administration, while Transjordan and Syria treated the conquered areas as part of their municipal territories. No other Arab state claimed sovereignty within the area. Syria, Egypt and Jordan all signed armistice agreements with Israel, marking the lines between the territory controlled by Israel and the lands conquered by the Arab states. However, the armistice agreements were clear in stating the armistice lines were not boundaries, and that the parties retained their claims to territorial sovereignty.
Interestingly, while neither Israel nor any of its neighboring states treated the partition lines as the borders of Israel, and while there were never any moves to create a Palestinian Arab state along the proposed partition lines, there were states outside the region that attempted to hold on to the one feature of the proposed partition that they found genial — the temporary internationalization of Jerusalem. After the war, the General Assembly passed several resolutions calling for Jerusalem to be internationalized. Many states refused to recognize Jordanian and Israeli sovereignty over the parts of the city that each controlled, and Israel’s establishment of Jerusalem as its capital in 1949 was widely dismissed.
On May 14, 1948, when Israel declared its statehood, its forces controlled only a small part of Palestine. While Israel’s geographic scope of authority expanded by the end of the war, the armistice agreements that ended the war in 1949 left large parts of Palestine in the hands of Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
Israel was the only state that emerged from mandatory Palestine, and it was a state whose identity matched the contemplated Jewish homeland required of the Mandate, and that fulfilled a legal Jewish claim to self determination in the Mandatory territories There was therefore no rival state that could lay claim to using internal Palestinian district lines as the basis of borders.
The potential exception to this general rule is the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which might be seen as an abandonment. As well, the growing maturity of Palestinian Arab claims of self-determination, and several Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization agreements that provided for Palestinian autonomy will no doubt prove relevant in the creation of a future boundary, if and/or when a Palestinian state achieves independence.
The Mandate did not follow an orderly pattern of termination in which the Mandatory determined to bestow independence upon the Mandate, won approval for its action from the League of Nations, and then terminated the Mandate by agreement. Britain simply abandoned the Mandate on May 15, 1948. The League of Nations was no longer in existence at the time, and the United Nations, which played a substitutive role of disputed legality, never voted to accept the abandonment as a termination. The General Assembly did vote to recommend a particular means of terminating the Mandate, but it left implementation of its recommendation to the Mandatory and the Security Council, neither of which chose to follow the recommendation.
Even Transjordan, granted independence by Britain in 1946, failed to make a smooth exit from the Mandate system. Britain did not request permission from the League of Nations or from the General Assembly (after the League ceased to function) to terminate mandatory rule in Transjordan. As a result, Poland challenged Transjordanian independence in 1946 when Transjordan applied for U.N. membership; Jordan was not finally accepted until 1955.
Another set of problems related to the Palestine Mandate concerned questions of self-determination. From the outset, the Palestine Mandate was anomalous, in that it recognized a particular people as entitled to express its self-determination on the territory of the Mandate, even though that people was not at that time the majority population of the Mandate. Over the years, Palestinian advocates have argued that this portion of the Mandate was ultra vires, and that the Jewish people were not entitled to receive a grant of the legal right to self-determination.
The Mandate itself gives no indication of there being another entitled nation, describing only a Jewish national home and no other national home or national expression. The Mandate provides for a single partition (the separation of Transjordan from the remainder of the Mandate), but no other. If there was a “Palestinian people” claim to self determination, General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 would have given both the Palestinian Jewish and Palestinian Arab peoples independent states. But, despite the potential self-determination claim of the Arab population of Palestine, only one state was born in 1948 at the termination of the prior administration. As the Palestine Mandate ended, the state of Israel achieved independence. No other state did.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence made no mention of borders. The Declaration did cite General Assembly Resolution 181, but recalled it as one of several sources of legitimacy of a Jewish state, and nowhere endorsed the particulars of its partition proposal. Ultimately, of course, the UN took no action to honor or enforce the terms of the partition plan recommended by Resolution 181. While the Resolution called for Security Council action, the partition plan was never brought to a vote in the Security Council.
The Shofar 