Remember that for the Arab peoples who lived in the Mideast for hundreds of years, the UN partition plan, as well intentioned as it may have been in Western minds freshly shocked and shamed by the horrors of the Holocaust, it was perceived as a bizarre and artificial concoction of a bunch of faraway, Western powers who controlled most of the world at the time but who were alien and outside to the world of the Arabs. In 1947 not a single Arab or Moslem country in the world supported the UN plan - they saw it as an unjust and humiliating carving up of their ancestrial territory, handing chunks of it over to the recently arrived Zionist immigrants. They didn't agree to accept the UN plan - they had it forcefully rammed down their throats by the major world powers. We shouldn't have been surprised at all that they resisted and went to war to defend the land their families had lived in for centuries. For no matter how much the Jews had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, what people on earth would have willingly abandoned their own villages to help others achieve the dream of their own homeland?