Summary
The UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947 that adopted UNSCOP’s partition recommendation. In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Pappe holds that it ignored the ethnic composition of Palestine, handed a movement that owned less than six per cent of the land more than half of the territory, included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and was accepted and ignored at the same time by David Ben-Gurion.
Details
- The resolution adopted UNSCOP’s recommendation: Palestine partitioned into two states bound together federation-like by economic unity, Jerusalem established as corpus separatum under an international regime administered by the UN, both states to adhere to liberal democratic precepts (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.57).
- The figures of the final map: on forty-two per cent of the land, 818,000 Palestinians were to have a state that included 10,000 Jews; the Jewish state over almost fifty-six per cent was to be shared by 499,000 Jews with 438,000 Palestinians; the Jerusalem enclave’s population of 200,000 was equally divided (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.61).
- The Jews, who owned less than six per cent of the total land area and constituted no more than one third of the population, were handed more than half the territory; within their proposed state they owned only eleven per cent of the land and were the minority in every district, and in the Negev they constituted one per cent of the total population; the resolution incorporated the most fertile land and also included 400 (out of more than 1000) Palestinian villages within the designated Jewish state (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.60).
- Pappe’s verdicts: by broadcasting its intent to create equal Jewish and Arab political entities the UN “violated the basic rights of the Palestinians” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.58); instead of calming the atmosphere the resolution heightened tensions and directly caused the country to deteriorate into one of its most violent phases, law and order collapsing when the vote was learned (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.58-59); Walid Khalidi’s words, quoted by Pappe, call it “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” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.60); and “Resolution 181’s most immoral aspect is that it included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.60-61).
- Palestinian objections: the native people refused to divide the land with a settler community, in Khalidi’s formulation; several leading Palestinians demanded the resolution’s legality be tested in the International Court of Justice, founded in 1946, but this was never to happen (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.59-60).
- Simcha Flapan’s point, reported by Pappe: the almost equal demographic balance within the allocated Jewish state meant Zionism would never have attained its principal goals under the map; had the Arabs or Palestinians decided to go along with the resolution, the Jewish leadership would have been sure to reject the map UNSCOP offered them (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.61).
- The Jewish reaction as Pappe gives it: Ben-Gurion led his associates simultaneously to accept and ignore the resolution; already in October 1947 he had said that if the map were not satisfactory the Jewish state would not be obliged to accept it; the Arab and Palestinian rejection allowed the leadership to claim the plan a dead letter apart from the clauses recognising the Jewish state’s legality, its borders, Ben-Gurion said, “will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.61-62).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, UNSCOP, David Ben-Gurion, Consultancy, Arab Higher Committee, Ethnic Cleansing