126 chapter four scholars have pointed out, the parameters of the UN Partition Plan itself are what doomed it to failure. It gave the Jews, who numbered around one-third of the inhabitants and legally owned between 6–7 percent of the land of Palestine, a total of 57 percent of some of the most fertile land containing about 45 percent of the Palestinian population. The plan also bestowed upon the Arab state a mere 43 percent of their homeland (most of it unfit for agriculture), with the town of Jaffa as an isolated part of the state with a small Jewish community.7 This is what served as the first nail in the coffin of the Partition Plan. As we shall see, the inability (or unwillingness) of Yakobson and Rubinstein to view the proposal from the perspective of the Arab indigenous population who, at the time, were a majority in their homeland is a recurrent tendency in the book. Further, the political, strategic and tactical elements of the UN Partition Plan were also left out of the analytical picture of the authors. As argued by Israeli academic and popularly called “new historian” Simha Flapan, [t]he acceptance of the UN Partition resolution was an example of Zionist pragmatism par excellence. It was a tactical acceptance, a vital step in the right direction—a springboard for expansion when circumstances proved more judicious. And, indeed, in the period between the UN vote on November 29, 1947, and the declaration of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, a number of developments helped to produce the judicious circumstances that would enable the embryonic Jewish state to expand its border (Flapan 1987, 33; also quoted in Kamrava 2005, 81). With the acceptance of the Partition Plan, the existing conflict between Arab and Jewish forces was intensified and, in April 1948, a large scale Zionist military attack was launched. In this political climate – and in the context of major military atrocities such as the Dir Yassin Massacre which left over 200 Arabs killed, their bodies mutilated and later dumped in wells – a colossal Palestinian exodus of around 750,000 people who were either forced from their land, or fled under the duress of the ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Zionist forces to neighbouring Arab countries commenced.8 As the sections below will show, key elements of the Palestinian 7 See footnote 3 in this Chapter for more on Resolution 181. 8 See Kamrava (2005); Pappé (2006); and Morris (1988).Though one of the bloodiest and most publicized massacres, the Dir Yassin Massacre of April 1948 was preceded and followed by a string of other massacres and other violent outrages in Arab townships and villages by the Zionist military forces. These include, but are not limited to the villages and townships of: Iqrit (December, 1951), Al-Tireh (July, 1953), Abu Ghosh (September, 1953), Kufr Qassem (October, 1956) discussed again in Chapter Five below, and Acre (June, 1965). For a thorough and well-sourced list and description of Zionist massacres of Palestinians in towns and villages, see Abu Sitta (2000).