This half truth has been repeated too many times without glossing over some important details.
Yes the Arabs rejected the 1947 partition plan
but they did so because the Partition plan was unfair to the Arabs.
The Partition plan allotted
56% of the land to Israel even though Jews made up at best
30% of the population in 1946.
The Jewish population of Palestine increased greatly in the late 19th and early 20th century because of Ottoman and later British administrators encouraged immigration of jews from Europe against the will of the native Arab population.
Jewish & Non-Jewish Population of Israel/Palestine (1517-Present) | Jewish Virtual Library
Even after this immigration jews still did not make up close to the majority of the population of Palestine in the 1940s.
At the time, the British Mandate of Palestine was divided into districts.
In 1946, Of the 16 districts in the Mandate of Palestine west of the Jordan river, 14 of them, including Jerusalem, had an Arab majority. One district, Haifa, had an Arab plurality. The only district that had a Jewish majority was Jaffa.
Sometimes zionists claim that the creation of Israel was justified because the Jewish immigrants bought the land in Palestine.
This is disingenuous because in 1945, Jews did not own the majority of the land in any of the 16 districts.
In 1945, 4 of the districts had Arabs owning a plurality of the land and in the remaining 12 districts Arabs owned the majority of the land.
...
So if you ever hear why Arabs rejected the partition plan you should know why, as you can see it was clearly unfair to them as it dispossessed them of the land that was theirs.