When at the end of World War II Britain no longer had the will or the means to maintain control over an increasingly riotous, bitterly divided population, the problem of Palestine was handed over to the newly formed United Nations, which split the country in two. On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181, calling for the creation of two separate and distinct states, each containing its own ethnically and religiously homogeneous “nation.”
