The senior officials administrating civil departments of Palestine, must have despaired after comparing the UN partition plan with their latest district and population maps.

All carefully constructed preparations for an orderly handover of police, post & telegraphs, railways and roads to an independent Palestine were now useless and, given the British government's announcement of an early withdrawal from Palestine, there was no time to start over.

The top echelons of the police must have been glad that they had trained up an independent Tel Aviv Force. At least they would slot neatly into the new partition plan and so, in theory would the newly trained Arab police, except the Arabs had no official body equivalent to the Jewish Agency to take control of their government departments. In any case three quarters of the Arab population lived in the section allocated to the Jews. The mixed cities were likely to cause considerable problems.

The administration's initial response to the problems of the mixed cities was to separate, where possible, the Arab population from the Jewish. A system of zones passes and checkpoints was set up and the army was asked to organise evacuations of population, if that was ever considered necessary.

To individal members of the Palestine Police the result of the UN vote came as a great shock. All worried about future employment and their pension schemes. Several wanted to stay in Palestine and transfer to the UN police force in the Jerusalem International Area but it was unclear as to whether they would have the opportunity to do so. In parliament the following question was put to Mr. Creech Jones.

"Under what conditions are the British policemen at present serving in Palestine to be taken into the International Force which will look after Jerusalem? That is a question which many are asking. They do not know on what terms, or, indeed, whether they are to be eligible for service in that force. We owe it to them that they should know, at as early a date as possible, on what conditions they will be allowed to serve, and what is to be the law operating in that area.
In our efforts to fulfil our duty we have been unsparing, and many British men have devoted their best years to this work. I wonder what the future will be for those British civil servants and British police still in Palestine? My right hon. Friend said he hoped they would be dealt with generously. The Secretary of State for the Colonies really said nothing specific about their treatment and I would ask that when proposals are formulated to deal with them they should be included in a White Paper which we could discuss and not merely contained in a regulation which we either have to throw out or accept without any power of amendment"

Mr. Creech Jones replied:

For all ranks of police the next few months were a period of personal uncertainty where writing applications for new jobs, and taking time out for interviews seemed more important than the job in hand. t wasn't until the beginning of May that plans were announced for the evacuation from Palestine. Pat Byrne, afrom the traffic police section writes,
"There were interviews by various police forces hoping to get already trained policemen. I was offered a sergeant's position with a promise of rapid promotion by the Malaysia police force, and a traffic officer's position with the Hong Kong and British police"