>>1526648The Mandate for Palestine (assigned to the British by the League of Nations when it captured the land from the Ottomans) was supposed to split the land that is now both Israel and Jordan into a Jewish and an Arab states. Britain split the land along the river of Jordan and gave the eastern (larger) part to the Arabs as a state, and assigned a Saudi guy as its king. Logic would imply that what was left of the Mandate would be made the Jewish state. But the British decided that it still needed to be split between the Jews and the Arabs.
The Partition Plan of 1947. The Arabs like to say how it was unfair to them, giving so much land to the Jews. Between the land proposed to the Arabs and the land of Jordan, I think I calculated that the Arabs were to have about 80% of the original Mandate for Palestine. The Jews were to have 20% which was mostly a barren Negev desert and malaria-infested swampland (there is a map floating around of malaria spread in the land of the mandate at the time, and it matches the proposed partition plan scarily well). Also, if you look up a map of land ownership in the land, the partition plan was following it well. The regions mostly matched where each group already lived.
The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs did not. From that point on, the partition plan is null and void.
When the British ended their mandate in May 1948, they left the land a terra nullius. Uti possidetis juris is a principle that basically says that in a land unowned by any state, calling "dibs" automatically gives you its borders, if there are no set agreements with other countries/entities. If more than one calls dibs, you split the land within the existing borders.
Israel called dibs in its declaration of independence. The Arabs did not. The Arabs went to an all-out all-fronts war against Israel. They forfeited their freebie opportunity for yet another Arab country.
