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From Mandate to State: Planning the Institutions and Policies of Israel, 1947 – 1948

Tue, December 18, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 3 Ballroom

Abstract

This paper will engage in the history of the Emergency Committee (va'adat ha-matzav) that was established in November 1947 in Jerusalem by the Jewish Agency and the National Council of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. The reasons for its formation were the gradual disintegration of the British Mandate government, and the necessity to pave the way for the founding of a Jewish state in a part of Palestine, according to the United Nations Partition Plan that had been approved by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947. The Emergency Committee appointed a Legal Council and sub-committees for economics and finance, public services, social services, law and administration, civil services, Jewish settlements within the projected Arab state, and other matters. The Committee's secretariat collected detailed information on the British Mandatory Government that had ruled Palestine from 1920 to 1948, and made specific plans for the transfer of power following with the imminent British evacuation, into the institutions of the future Jewish state. On April 21, 1948 the Emergency Committee's final report was submitted to the National Administration. The paper will examine the planned institutions and policies vis-à-vis the Arab population that lived within the proposed borders of the Jewish State, and will compare it to other planning undertaken by the Zionist leadership, headed by David Ben-Gurion. Research has, so far, mostly neglected the aspects of planning Israeli statehood in regard to the Palestinian Arabs, even before and during the 1948 War. The research, which this paper is based on, is aiming to fill this lacuna. Toward this end, this study, which belongs methodologically to the discipline of History, will consider the evidence of archival documents, diaries, and memoirs.

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