Summary
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, to which in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine an inexperienced, two-year-old UN entrusted the future of Palestine, none of whose members had prior experience in solving conflicts or knew much about Palestine’s history, and which recommended the partition that became Resolution 181.
Details
- UNSCOP sponsored partition as the guiding principle, deliberating for a while over making all of Palestine one democratic state decided by majority vote before abandoning the idea; it recommended two states bound together federation-like by economic unity, with Jerusalem as corpus separatum under an international regime administered by the UN, and stressed that both entities adhere to liberal democratic precepts — which on 29 November 1947 became General Assembly Resolution 181 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.57).
- By accepting partition the UN “totally ignored the ethnic composition of the country’s population”: had the territory the Jews had settled on corresponded to the size of their future state, they would have been entitled to no more than ten per cent of the land; instead UNSCOP’s members veered towards the Zionist point of view, also because the Palestinian leadership had been opposed since 1918 to partitioning their land (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.57).
- The Arab League and the Arab Higher Committee boycotted the negotiations with UNSCOP before the resolution and took no part in the deliberations on implementing it after November 1947, leaving a vacuum into which the Zionist leadership stepped, setting up a bilateral dialogue with the UN (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.58).
- The Zionist emissaries demanded a state comprising over eighty per cent of the land and produced a map incorporating all the land Israel would occupy a year later; most UNSCOP members convinced the Jews to be satisfied with fifty-six per cent, and UNSCOP rejected the Zionist claim for Jerusalem after Catholic countries persuaded the UN to make it an international city (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.58).
- Within a few weeks of UNSCOP starting its work the Palestinians realised the cards had been stacked against them; Pappe concedes in its defence that Resolution 181 may have assumed peaceful coexistence of the two entities, in which case its members were “guilty of totally misreading Zionism and grossly underestimating its ambitions” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.59-60).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, Arab Higher Committee, Zionism