Hi there,

The first point of yours is correct, in that the British never acted on giving Jews the "national homeland" promised, definitely not in the form of a state. While they did allow Jewish immigration, they did not make a concrete proposal for ending the British Mandate and creating a Jewish state until 1937, and that proposal was never implemented. Indeed, in 1922 the Churchill White Paper actually walked back the claim that Jews had been promised a state, and claimed it was solely promised a "national homeland" (which is textually true) and that this does not necessarily mean a state in all of Palestine, or even most of it, or even any of it in some sense.

Your second point is also correct, but only in part. It is true that the British allowed Jewish immigrants to move to Israel, but after WWII they made efforts to prevent Jewish immigration. In fact, those efforts began prior to WWII, with the British White Paper of 1939, that placed a limit on Jewish immigration. Jews largely gave up on legal immigration following that white paper, and chose to arrive illegally and be smuggled in. Even when Jews had arrived illegally, they were sometimes caught en route and sent to prison camps, or sent back to displaced persons camps. Your reference to ships off the coast is likely a reference to what is known as the Exodus affair. A ship carrying Holocaust survivors arrived in the British Mandate, or was due to, and was attacked in international waters and taken over by British forces, who killed 4 passengers during the raid. They were then taken to the port of Haifa, loaded onto prison ships (all of this happening in view of the UN Special Committee on Palestine's members, which Zionist leaders coordinated since they knew it would influence them in favor of a Jewish state), and sent to France. France refused to unload anyone who did not want to be unloaded, and so the British took the ships to Germany, unloading the Holocaust survivors back into the British-controlled area of Germany, the state where the Holocaust had been engineered. Obviously, this was a very unpopular occurrence, but British immigration policy did not really ease up; in reality, Holocaust survivors mostly flooded into Israel after Israel won the war (or through illegal immigration), and not thanks to the British.

The Israelis (at this point, best described simply as "Zionists", as Israel did not exist) did not have a "revolution", but they did launch a campaign to try and get the British to leave and abdicate the Mandate. This was initially considered following the 1939 White Paper, but at the outbreak of WWII, Zionist groups set it aside. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's biggest Founding Father, famously said that they would fight the White Paper as if there was no WWII, and fight WWII as if there was no White Paper, essentially saying that Zionist groups would not fight the British for the time being. The exception was a small, fringe group with roughly 400-500 members at its peak, called Lehi, who continued to fight the British through guerrilla and terrorist tactics. Irgun (also known as "Etzel") was also a smaller group, though it peaked at around 3-5,000 members, and it also carried out attacks, but it did not begin to carry them out again until 1944. Haganah, the main force and which peaked in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of members, waited until the end of WWII before joining in the campaign. Haganah was least willing to target civilians, while Etzel was more accepting of civilian casualties, and Lehi was even more extreme. The King David Hotel Bombing, which was perpetrated by Etzel, was one example; while Irgun maintained that they warned the British to evacuate the hotel, which was being used as a command base, the British insisted no such warning occurred and there is not really any evidence that a warning did happen. The bombing was extremely deadly and killed a large number of civilians.

The British eventually did decide to leave, but this was due to more than merely the Zionist campaign of sabotage and attacks. The British had already had to deal with a Palestinian revolt that lasted from 1936-39, and Palestinian groups were still quite restless as well and wanted the British gone. At the same time, Britain was struggling to reconstruct itself following WWII, and facing troubles in other colonial holdings. They had little to no interests left in the area either, and eventually simply decided it wasn't worth the trouble. They also saw coming violence, lack of ability to create a solution both sides would accept, and estimated that 100,000 troops would be needed to calm the situation, which they simply were not willing to commit.

They handed the problem over to the UN, which was the successor to the League of Nations. The League of Nations was the one who granted the British their Mandate and control in the first place, or at least solidified it, after WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The UN sent a committee I mentioned above, UNSCOP, which proposed a partition. To make a long story short, UNSCOP's partition passed the UN General Assembly with some minor revisions in UNGA Resolution 181, which was a recommendation to the UN Security Council to implement the partition plan. Following passage of the plan, violence began (historians believe the violence spiraled following an attack by an Arab militia on a Jewish bus), and a civil war began. The British were still in the area and still technically had control, but were evacuating and wanted no part in the fighting for the most part. After essentially winning the civil war, on May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself into existing effective at midnight on May 15, and at that moment, the Arab states surrounding Israel invaded, in a war that of course Israel eventually won, and which set what we now call the "1967 lines", which were the armistice lines of where the Arab and Israeli armies stopped when they signed ceasefires (but not peace deals, of course, and not border agreements) following the 1948 war.