Grappler Truth Teller Feller wrote on Aug 23
rd, 2024 at 7:15pm:
Israel was always a Jewish nation, and was approved as such by a world vote in 1948....
THE UN’S PARTITION PLAN
An inexperienced UN, just two years old in 1947, entrusted the question of the future of Palestine’s fate into the hands of a Special Committee for Palestine, UNSCOP, none of whose members turned out to have any prior experience in solving conflicts or knew much about Palestine’s history...
The report UNSCOP came up with in the end envisaged that the two future states would be identical except for their internal demographic balance, and it therefore stressed the need for both entities to adhere to liberal democratic precepts. On 29 November 1947 this became General Assembly Resolution 181. It is clear that by accepting the Partition Resolution, the UN totally ignored the ethnic composition of the country’s population...
Partitioning the country – overwhelmingly Palestinian – into two equal parts has proven so disastrous because it was carried out against the will of the indigenous majority population. By broadcasting its intent to create equal Jewish and Arab political entities in Palestine, the UN violated the basic rights of the Palestinians, and totally ignored the concern for Palestine in the wider Arab world at the very height of the anti-colonialist struggle in the Middle East. Far worse was the impact the decision had on the country itself and its people. Instead of calming the atmosphere, as it was meant to do, the resolution only heightened tensions and directly caused the country to deteriorate into one of the most violent phases in its history.
THE ARAB AND PALESTINIAN POSITIONS
The Palestinian leadership decided from the start to boycott the UN proceedings. This decision features often in contemporary Israeli propaganda as proof that the Palestinians themselves – not Israel – should be held responsible for the fate that befell them in 1948. Palestinian historiography has successfully fended off such accusations by exposing the extent to which the procedures the UN opted to follow were unjust and illegal, and by exploring the raison d’être behind the establishment of UNSCOP.
By opting for partition as its primary objective, the UN ignored a basic principled objection the Palestinians were voicing against the plan, with which mediators had been familiar since Britain made the Balfour Declaration thirty years earlier. Walid Khalidi succinctly articulated the Palestinian position as follows: ‘The native people of Palestine, like the native people of every other country in the Arab world, Asia, Africa, America and Europe, refused to divide the land with a settler community.’
Within a few weeks of UNSCOP starting its work, the Palestinians realised the cards had been stacked against them: the final result of this process would be a UN resolution on partitioning the country between the Palestinians, as the indigenous population, and a settler colony of newcomers, many of whom had arrived only recently. When Resolution 181 was adopted in November 1947, their worst nightmare began to unfold in front of their eyes: nine months after the British had announced their decision to leave, the Palestinians were at the mercy of an international organisation that appeared ready to ignore all the rules of international mediation, which its own Charter endorsed, and was willing to declare a solution that in Palestinian eyes was both illegal and immoral. Several leading Palestinians at the time demanded that its legality be tested in the International Court of Justice (founded in 1946), but this was never to happen. One does not have to be a great jurist or legal mind to predict how the international court would have ruled on forcing a solution on a country to which the majority of its people were vehemently opposed.
The injustice was as striking then as it appears now, and yet it was hardly commented on at the time by any of the leading Western newspapers then covering Palestine: the Jews, who owned less than six per cent of the total land area of Palestine and constituted no more than one third of the population, were handed more than half of its overall territory. Within the borders of their UN-proposed state, they owned only eleven per cent of the land, and were the minority in every district. In the Negev – admittedly an arid land but still with a considerable rural and Bedouin population, which made up a major chunk of the Jewish state – they constituted one per cent of the total population...
Again in the words of Walid Khalidi, Resolution 181 was ‘a hasty act of granting half of Palestine to an ideological movement that declared openly already in the 1930s its wish to de-Arabise Palestine.’ And thus Resolution 181’s most immoral aspect is that it included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine...
The expected Arab and Palestinian rejection of the plan allowed Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership to claim that the UN plan was a dead letter the day it was accepted – apart, of course, from the clauses that recognised the legality of the Jewish state in Palestine. Its borders, given the Palestinian and Arab rejection, said Ben-Gurion, ‘will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution.’ As would be the fate of the Arabs living in it.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe, Chapter 3: Partition and Destruction: UN Resolution 181 and its Impact
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