Sixty-four years ago, in August 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine presented to the General Assembly a startling and unexpected report, calling for an end to the British Mandate of Palestine and division of most of the territory into two independent states, with the Jewish state occupying the majority of the land. What came next, of course, is well known — a vote in the General Assembly on Nov. 29, 1947, in favor of partition, and the war that immediately followed. The decision is viewed in the Arab world as “the great crime,” and Palestinian leaders, including the current president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, regard it as the original sin that led to the catastrophe, the nakba, that befell their nation — a disaster they now want the General Assembly to remedy. What is not widely known is how a possibly pro-Arab committee, or at least one that was supposed to be neutral, came to issue a report that led directly to the establishment of the state of Israel. What happened on that committee’s trip to Palestine, and how were the minds of its members changed in a way that so radically altered history?

For decades, Unscop’s classified documents were scattered in archives all over the world, and only recently have they been made available. Many were discovered by the historian Elad Ben-Dror, whose book on the Unscop role in the Arab-Israeli conflict will soon be published. The committee consisted of 11 members who arrived in Palestine on June 15, 1947. Because the U.S. and Britain wished to maintain the appearance of neutrality, no international powers were represented in the delegation. The Palestinians believed a deal to establish a Jewish state had already been made behind closed doors and so ordered a complete boycott of committee proceedings. Palestinians were warned against making any contact whatsoever with Unscop, and Arab journalists were forbidden to cover their visit. Out of fear of appearing to support one side over the other, the British, too, avoided contact with the committee. In the vacuum created by the Arabs and the British, Zionist diplomats and spies were able to work unencumbered on the Unscop members. The Jewish Agency (the representative body of the Jewish community in the British Mandate) appointed a former British intelligence officer, Aubrey (Abba) Eban, to serve as a liaison with Unscop. Eban focused his energies on two Latin American members, from Guatemala and Uruguay, who became increasingly pro-Zionist as the committee’s investigation proceeded, providing Eban with inside information on specific members and their deliberations.

Alongside Eban, the entire intelligence service of the Jewish underground organization Haganah was put to work monitoring Unscop members. Microphones were placed in hotel and conference rooms. All phone conversations were tapped. The cleaning staff in the building in Jerusalem where the committee held daily hearings was replaced by female agents who reported back each day on its activities. The tactic did not go unnoticed. A member of the Swedish delegation complained that the women on the cleaning staff were “too pretty and educated. They are the eyes and ears of the Zionist leaders, who come to hearings with replies prepared in advance.” The committee’s chairman, Emil Sandstrom, also suspected the Guatemalan member of leaking information to Eban. “I don’t know that he took their money,” Sandstrom commented, “but he certainly took their girls.” At the end of each day, intelligence was collated and circulated to the heads of the Jewish community under the code name Delphi Report, which bore the inscription “Read and destroy!”

The Haganah also gathered personal information on each member, in an effort to discover his particular areas of interest and vulnerabilities. On many of the field trips that committee members took, efforts were made to ensure that they serendipitously encountered someone who spoke their language or shared a common interest. N. S. Blom, a former Dutch official in Indonesia, arrived in Palestine with a pro-Arab agenda, but during his stay he found himself in frequent impromptu meetings with immigrants from the Netherlands, who pressed a different perspective upon him. On one occasion, while traveling in his official vehicle, he came across two farmers herding dairy cows across the road. When Blom got out of the car he discovered that, amazingly, the two farmers were immigrants from the Netherlands. Even more important, their cows were also of Dutch stock! In his otherwise dry reports to the Dutch Foreign Ministry, a welling up of national pride over the contribution of Dutch dairy farming to agriculture in the Holy Land stands out.