At Her Birth Israel Had No Name

Even the Iranian delegate, Nasrollah Entezam, initially viewed by the Jewish Agency as a die-hard opponent of Zionism, turned into a supporter of sorts. During a visit to an agricultural settlement in the Negev, Entezam’s Jewish liaison officer (who was a Persian-speaking Haganah agent) overheard him telling a colleague: “What asses the Arabs are! The country is so beautiful, and it can be developed. If they gave it all to the Jews, they would transform it into Europe!”
By contrast, committee members were dismayed by what they saw of British rule in Palestine. The U.N. secretary general’s main representative on the committee, the American Ralph Bunche, wrote of “daily bombings, shootings, kidnappings, sirens, security checks.” Some members traveled to the port city Haifa, where they witnessed 4,500 Holocaust refugees being taken off the famous ship Exodus and transferred to another vessel that would take them back to Europe. The Swede Sandstrom was particularly affected by the experience. “Without this evidence, our investigation would not have been complete,” he wrote in one of the classified documents located by Ben-Dror.
There were also meetings, some held secretly, with Jewish representatives and leaders of underground organizations. The Jewish leadership impressed the committee with its moderation. David Ben-Gurion’s willingness to accept a watered-down partition plan, for example, went well beyond the Jewish political consensus of the day. The underground leaders painted a rosy (and false) picture of the Jewish community’s ability to defend itself in case of war. By contrast, the sole Arab official willing to speak to the delegation, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, informed the visitors that the Arabs would not under any circumstances give up on the establishment of an Arab state extending over the entire territory of Palestine.
Nearly three months later, Unscop duly presented its report. The General Assembly voted in favor of partition, and the next day the Arabs went to war with the express goal of annihilating the Jewish community in Palestine.
The day before the vote in the General Assembly, the C.I.A. sent President Truman a classified report, “The Consequences of the Partition of Palestine,” arguing that the Jewish community in Palestine would collapse under Arab attack and warning that partition and war in the Middle East would do serious harm to American interests in the region. The State Department took the same position. Last-minute U.S. diplomatic efforts to create an international trusteeship for Palestine failed, as did pressure on the Jewish leadership to delay the declaration of a Jewish state. President Truman acknowledged the inevitable, and the representative of the Zionist movement in Washington was invited to formally request recognition. The new Jewish state did not yet have a name. In his haste to submit the request, the representative left the name of the country blank — to be filled in later.
NYTimes