of these pictures on the small Hebrew community, then comprising less than 650,000 people, faced with virtual extermination.
During this phase certain numbers of Arabs fled from their homes in urban quarters and villages that happened to be close to the Hebrew strongholds. They often did so without being attacked or conquered, apparently on the orders of regional commanders. In certain cases, the Haganah Army, endangering the lives of its soldiers, distributed leaflets in Arab villages calling upon the inhabitants not to leave. To understand this, it is necessary to remember that the Arabs, the British and the U.S. State Department were all trying to demonstrate to the world that the partition plan was not workable and that a U.N. trusteeship for Palestine was the only solution. Throughout the spring of 1948, the State Department and the U.S. military leaders tried to supersede the partition plan with a new plan of U.N. trusteeship. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense of the United States, who fought vigorously against the establishment of Israel, wrote in his diary, on March 29, 1948, that he asked President Truman to commit American troops to Palestine in order to enforce a trusteeship plan-against the Hebrew Army, of course. The President did not want to make such a commitment, but the editor of the Forrestal diary comments that "American policy had now shifted to the advocacy of a joint Anglo-French-American trusteeship, which [Warren R.] Austin was about to present to the United Nations."
One of the prime movers of the idea was Dean Rusk, then director of the State Department's Office of Political Affairs. "If we did nothing," Rusk said, according to the Forrestal diary, "it was likely that the Russians could and would take definite steps toward gaining control in Palestine through the infiltration of specially trained [Jewish] immigrants, or by otherwise capitalizing on the widespread, violent civil war that would be likely to break