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The Jewish side of the partition  was to have 500,000  Jews and 400,000 Arabs. The Arab side  was  to have  700,000 Arabs  and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem was  to have  about  100,000  of  each ethnicity. The Jews would get the blasted wasteland of the Negev desert, and  the Arabs  would  get  the fertile  upper  Galilee region. The UN thought  all these  arrangements were  entirely fair. So fair, in fact, that after Israel declared Statehood and the UN realized the Displaced Persons were  being handed rifles as soon as they got off the boat at Haifa, another SC resolution was passed to prevent immigration of males from age 17 to 45.

David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency whose authority had been established by  the League of  Nations, knew  the Jews would have to fight even for the lousy territory  they had been assigned. He ordered every Jew in Palestine  mobilized for war, both men and women alike.

On the day after Partition, a bus carrying  Jewish civilians to Jerusalem  was  attacked  by  Arabs with  rifles  and  grenades, killing five people,  including  a young  bride named  Shoshona Mizrachi Farhi  on  the  way   to  her  wedding. The war  for independence had begun, It would claim the lives of 6,000 Jews, or one percent of the total population.

Armed Bedoin nomads surrounded a number of isolated settlements in the south,  including Judith's  collective farm. Ben-Gurion swore that not one single settlement would be evacuated. Armored cars produced  in  Tel  Aviv  were used  to  secure  the  water pipelines that  these  settlements  depended on,  and  to  send weapons and reinforcements through the Bedoin lines.

A convoy  of  armored  buses  was attacked  on  April  15,  and seventy-seven Jewish doctors, nurses, and patients were killed. Only twenty-eight survived, and  only eight  of these  were not wounded. King Abdullah of Transjordan offered the Jews autonomy, but only if they remained under his sovereignty. A Jewish Agency negotiator named Golda Meir was  pained to disappoint  her good friend the  king,  but  she  had to  reject  his  offer. After everything the Jews had suffered it was simply not enough to be represented in a foreign parliament.

This led directly to the declaration of the State  of Israel on May 15, 1948. Eleven minutes later, the American President Harry S Truman officially recognized  the state  by cable,  before he even knew what the name of the country would be.

Britain opened  the  camps  on Cyprus  and  thousands  of  Jews streamed into Israel by ship.