Why didn't the UN leave Palestine alone the Jews and Arabs were living together in peace back then?

Answer 1

This question makes the explicit assumption that Jews and Arabs were living in peace in the 1940s when this was actually not the case and is fallacious. Palestine was quite vuolent by the 1930s and 1940s as will be discussed below.

It is important to note that the lack of constant violence is not peace or else what is going on inside of Iran (i.e. massive amounts of torture and vote-rigging by fundamentalist ideologues) would be peace. The Muslim idea of the "Andalucian Solution" is not based on historical fact or precedent. In Andalucia, sure Jews lived in relative security and prosperity for the Middle Ages. It did not come close to peace, though, in that Jews were still repressed, still taxed, and still subject to occasional pogroms. The question supposes that this system, one that rejects universal rights and freedoms applicable to all people, is viable today and would be desirable to non-Muslims is preposterous and absurd. Such a system was what prevailed in Ottoman Palestine a century ago. While there were far fewer skirmishes at that point in time, there was widespread repression of Ahl ad-Dimma (the Protected People or Non-Muslims under Muslim Control). However, there were violent attacks by Muslims under the protection of the Ottoman Banner on Jews and Christians in the territory to recover extra funds for the government. With increased communal awareness and better education, it was the natural trajectory for Jews in Palestine to demand equality and parity with their Muslim overlords. This set the stage for violence when the Muslims were less than willing to give the people they had treated as second-class citizens a seat at the rulers' table.

This led to the formation of Arab militias and the Jews (both immigrants and endemic population) responded by forming their own militias as early as the mid-1920s. This made Mandatory Palestine the site of numerous militias and violent activities perpetrated by both Arab Jihadists and Zionist Settlers during the Interwar period. The idea that the British Mandate of Palestine was peaceful actually runs counter to historical evidence.

In fact, the violence between Jewish and Arab militias throughout the 1930s was what prompted the British to accept the Arab request to halt all further Jewish Immigration to Mandatory Palestine in 1939 (believing that preventing such immigration would quell the conflict). However, the conflict became more bitter. A UN factfinding mission was actually sent to Mandatory Palestine after the British had conceded in 1947 that it could no longer control the Mandate effectively. It was this UN mission that came to the conclusion that the Jewish population and the Arab population were each large enough to sabotage a single nation for both of them and both hated each other sufficiently to make one state non-viable. The only way to accomodate both of them was through dividing Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State. It was after this resolution was implemented that what was originally a set of continual skirmishes became a proper war.