Historical Background and Interviews
III. A New Beginning A New Beginning
The 1947 United Nations Plan for Partition and Economic Union proposed the creation of a Jewish state, half of whose population would be Jewish and half Arab, and an Arab state that would be entirely Arab, linked in an economic union, with Jerusalem con- trolled by a United Nations Trusteeship Council. On the day of the partition vote, November 29, everyone at Yagur listened to the radio broadcasts from New York and kept count of its supporters and opponents. A majority of thirty-three countries supported the partition, with thirteen against and ten abstaining. The minute the deciding vote was announced on radio, they left the underground shelter where they had been listening and rushed into the dining room, dancing, singing, and celebrating. Arab leaders immediately declared a protest strike and instigat- ed prolonged rioting that claimed the lives of hundreds of Jews and Arabs. The area around Haifa was among the most danger- ous. In the Yagur Book, Ze’ev Dor reported that Arabs attacked Jewish transport almost daily, and Jewish reprisals were intense. Yagur member Hanan Zelinger, who had grown up in Berlin and immigrated to Israel before the Holocaust, where she became a commander in the Haganah, was killed in a skirmish on the road to Haifa. In March of 1948, at least 20 Jews and 100 Arabs were killed in the Haifa area. Rubinstein and Sherman recalled other conflicts in the vicinity at this time. Rubenstein said, “About 75 Jews and 150 Arabs worked at an oil refinery outside Haifa. A few months before the Declara - tion of the State of Israel [May 1948], Arabs from Balad El Sheikh closed the gates of the refinery one day and slaughtered 40 or 50 of the Jewish workers. Then the Palmach, from Yagur, went into the village with bulldozers and wiped it out. I do not know how many people were killed.” Shoshana Ben Ari, a nineteen-year-old sabra from Yagur, was killed during an Arab ambush on a medical convoy bringing doc- tors and nurses to their shifts at the well-known Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus. British soldiers did nothing to rescue the Jews.
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