It wasn't easy to balance American interests in the Mideast after the war. The United States had millions of dollars invested in military bases in Saudi Arabia and already was proposing an oil pipeline from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean. But many Americans were urging President Harry Truman to remember the displaced Jews.

In his autobiography, Truman said he figured he could watch out for America's long-range interests and still help "those unfortunate victims of persecution find a home."

It took two years for the world powers to formulate a plan.

Palestine would be two distinct states, Arab and Jewish, the U.N. General Assembly decided. The Jewish state would be a narrow band along the coast, in the north reaching inland to the Sea of Galilee, and in the south encompassing the Negev Desert. The Arab state would be Gaza, the West Bank of the Jordan River and a piece of land to the north, bordering on Lebanon. Jerusalem would be an international city administered by the U.N. The British would leave.

It was a mild November evening in 1947 when news of the U.N. agreement reached the people who lived in Palestine.

In the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the people cheered and cried with joy and danced in the streets. There was no cheering in the Arab neighborhoods. There, the plan was denounced with gunfire and promises to throw the Jews into the sea.

Tel Aviv's outskirts were soon under sniper fire; Jerusalem's commercial center was looted and set ablaze. It would not have appeared difficult for the Arabs to make good their promise to push the Jews into the Mediterranean. Most of the Zionist immigrants had settled along the coast. Most of the country they decided to call Israel -- after the Old Testament Kingdom of Israel -- was surrounded by Arab nations with a combined population outnumbering them 60-to-1.

Historians say the British authorities, eager to end their mandate and go home in May, largely ignored the guerrilla warfare that raged around them after the U.N. decision.

Arab irregular bands shot up Jewish buses, strewed nails on roadways frequented by the British and stationed snipers on the walls of the Old City above Jerusalem's busiest streets. Jewish underground agents bombed cafes favored by the British and strafed Arab neighborhoods. Assassinations were matter of course.

As the British prepared to leave, they turned many of their military emplacements and police stations over to the Arabs. Worse, as far as the Jews were concerned, the British tried to quash the Haganah, confiscating weapons caches and arresting Haganah leaders.

The British lowered the Union Jack in Jerusalem for the last time on May 14, 1948.

At 4 that afternoon in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion read the declaration of Israeli independence.

The place and time of the announcement were kept secret until the last minute for fear of sabotage. It was done in a bare room in the Tel Aviv Museum, before a small audience, most of whom had been notified by phone. They sat on chairs borrowed from a nearby coffeehouse, one historian wrote, and Ben Gurion read his statement into a microphone borrowed minutes before from a radio shop around the corner. He stood beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl, the 19th-century founder of modern Zionism.

The state of Israel extended a hand "in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples," Ben Gurion said, and he invited the Arabs "to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all."

Ruth Or remembers there was no dancing in the streets. There was only fear and danger.

That night, Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese forces crossed into Israel, joined by Iraqi troops and Transjordan's Arab Legion. The next day, Tel Aviv and the other Jewish settlements were bombed.

The war, which Israelis call the 1948 War of Independence, became the first of many with Arabs from neighboring countries and with the Palestinians, as those Arabs who lived in the West Bank region, Gaza or refugee centers in Transjordan began to be called.

It is the war Ruth Or is most familiar with.

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