Jerusalem Divided 1948–67

The British Mandate sought to defuse the Arab uprising (1936–39) by repeated plans for the partition of Palestine, and restrictions on Jewish immigration. In 1947, with the British Mandate scheduled to end, the United Nations backed a new partition plan that would maintain Jerusalem as an internationally administered corpus separatum. The Arabs were wholly opposed, and further inflamed by an Anglo-British decision to relax controls on Jewish immigration (of Holocaust survivors). An Arab-Jewish Civil War broke out, which became the Arab-Israeli War at the end of the British Mandate in May 1948. When armistice agreements were concluded between the new state of Israel and the Arab states in 1949, the ‘facts on the ground’ determined the division of Jerusalem, with the west (and an exclave round the Hebrew University) in Israeli hands, while the east (and the Old City) remained in Jordanian hands. A no man’s land separated the two sectors.