UN Resolution 181: Partitioning Palestine
The fallacy of the partitioning being an altruistic, unbiased decision by the free and sovereign world states of the era. Who voted for it and for what reason?
UNGA Resolution 181 was passed on November 29, 1947, and its ultimate goal, at least what is the consensus that we’ve been force-fed ever since then, was to create two states: one Arab and one Jewish. The partition plan for Palestine would have meant the establishment of the Jewish state on an area of approximately 56.47% percent of the total land, which would be inhabited by 500,000 Jews, 400,000 Arab-Palestinians, and 92,000 Bedouins who were residing in the Negev desert at the time. In summary, this meant that the Jewish state would have hosted a nearly equal number of Jewish and Arab-Palestinians. Also at this time, in the region located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Jewish citizens accounted for about 30% of the aggregate population and they owned approximately 6.7% of the total land. Keep in mind, however, that the notion of “land ownership” was not a readily accepted and utilized concept in this region at the time, nor was land registered nor owned as “private property”. For example, in Iraq in 1951, only .3% of the land was registered as “private property”. The concepts of “states” and “nations” were also not readily accepted principles. The region had just recently been part of the Ottoman Empire, then had been put under the control of the British under the Mandate, and was now being partitioned yet again yet people had been residing there for centuries.
For the Arab state, the plan would have encompassed 42.8% of the total land with 10,000 Jewish citizens along with 800,000 Arab-Palestinians. With regards to Jerusalem, it would have been under a special regime governed by the UN and under UN control. What followed was a disruption in the region with both sides displeased with the plan set forth. Feelings of territorial, demographic, and a dilemma of existentialism arose despite the British Mandate still having governing authority over the region.
The Arab community raised the argument that a significant percentage of the Jewish population between the years of 1930-1940 was comprised primarily of immigrants despite Britain’s immigration policy of limiting European immigration and that just 40 years before this, at the turn of the 20th century, the Arab population was 90% of the total population of the region. Of this 90%, they were not immigrants from another continent, rather they were regional from neighboring areas, inter-migration and there was not a significant amount of outward migration.
However, during the latter half of the 1930s and into the 1940s, the regional instability and disorder of both the Arab and Jewish populations rising against British rule, the region experienced a substantial outward migration of mainly Arabs who migrated towards South America. South America still has the largest Palestinian presence outside of the Arab world.
The leadership of the Zionist faction laid claim to the Negev Desert and felt it should be included in the newly formed Jewish state even though it was an inhospitable environment. The Zionists felt that it could be used for future capital investments and at the time, the Jewish population only comprised about 1%. However, the partition plan excluded the area east of the Jordan River and this was frowned upon by the Zionists. They claimed that they were being robbed of 3/4 of the country that had been “promised to them” from a biblical position even though at the time no Jewish people resided there. The partition plan had taken the position of dividing the land based on who lived where meaning if the region had primarily an Arab population, that would go to the Arabs and vice versa. Many Zionists felt the Mandate for Palestine which had given Great Britain via the League of Nations the responsibility of the administration of Palestine, included the area west of the Jordan River as well as Transjordan. However, what is often overlooked is that the British White Paper of June 1922, excluded Transjordan from Palestine. It was requested and received by the League of Nations in July 1922, one month before the Mandate was confirmed in June 1922. As Chaim Weizmann said: “It was made clear to us that confirmation of the Mandate would be conditional on our acceptance of the policy as interpreted in the White Paper of 1922, and my colleagues and I, therefore, had to accept it, which we did, though not without some qualms.”
Further disputes arose out of the partition plan. For instance, the Zionists argued that the UN gave to the Jewish state land that had never been an integral part of any ancient Israelite kingdom, for example, the coastal plain between Ashkelon and Ashdod. They further argued that the UN had assigned to the Arab state several areas which were “part of ancient Israelite kingdoms”.
On the other hand, the Arabs felt that the UN did not sufficiently consider their needs from an economic and societal position. They had no strategic port on the Red Sea, no direct route nor communication thoroughfare to Syria. One-fifth of the land with wheat, and all the area with citrus fruits went to the Jewish state. Edward Atiyah, the secretary of the Arab League office in London stated:
“Not only were the Jews…given the larger and more fertile part of the country with the most useful section of the coastal plain and the only good port, so that the Arabs were almost debarred from effective sea communications, but also 500,000 Arabs (or nearly half of the Arab population) were to be left in the Jewish state. A large number of these were the inhabitants of Jaffa, the biggest purely Arab city in Palestine and the Arabs’ principal seaport.”
So then who exactly decided on the Partition Plan which would have the most significant impact on the world nearly a century later?
Today the UNGA is made up of 193 countries, yet, in 1947, only 56 states comprised the UNGA. This represented at the time only about 1/5 of the world’s population. The Partition Plan was approved by 33 countries, 13 opposed and 10 abstained. Of these 56 member states, 37 would have been required to meet the 2/3 majority that we know is required today for approval. Keep in mind, that the UNGA offers only resolutions. They do not have the power of enforcement of the resolutions, they can only recommend them. Only the United Nations Security Council has powers of enforcement. Because the abstaining states were not included in the overall count the resolution passed with only the “Yes” votes from the 33 member states. Had the abstaining states been counted which is the case with resolutions, the resolution might not have passed.
Countries that did not participate because they were not yet member states were:
Switzerland
Spain
Malta
Sweden
Portugal
Ireland
Germany
Italy
Austria
Romania
Japan
Africa was entirely excluded, too, being its vast continent was still under the direct influence of factions of Great Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Spain. Ethiopia, Liberia, Egypt (which voted against partition), and apartheid South Africa were the only non-Arab African states admitted to the UNGA. Asia was in a similar situation. China was under the authority of Chiang Kai-Shek who was heavily supported and financed by the US and their allies.
Those voting in favor of the Partition were Central and South America. Yet it is important to note that at the time both were little more than satellite countries of the United States and completely dependent on them. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other countries voting in favor existed yet had limited sovereignty as they had recently received emancipation in the war by the United States and the Soviet Union. So there was a sense of co-dependency on the US and Russia that existed. Stalin viewed Jewish immigration into Palestine as a strategy he could exploit to weaken and eventually dismantle the power of Britain, his nemesis and enemy power in the Middle East. Stalin felt that the Jewish people were so powerful and vast, as well as being in league with the British, that immigration to Palestine would weaken the UK.
What this all conceptualizes is that the Soviet Union, the Western powers except for Great Britain along with their satellite countries supported and voted in favor of a solution that parallelled their interests, never taking the Palestinians into consideration knowing they had very limited international support. Great Britain had Palestine under its umbrella, it was under their mandate yet they abstained. Had they had the courage to vote at the time versus using the opportunity to shirk itself of their responsibilities history may have been much different. They had a real chance at reversing the Partition Plan, however, due to the constant unrest in the region brought on by their illegitimate promises and backroom handlings, they wanted a swift exit and this opportunity presented exactly that.
Some historians regard 181 as an act of justice in favor of a “persecuted people”, the Jewish community, coming out of World War II, having endured the Nazi Holocaust so this was the only practicable solution. Others view it as grossly unfair, an intractable imposition unduly placed on hundreds of thousands of humans which ultimately fostered racialization and religious supremacy and placed upon them an unfair responsibility for an event they had relatively little participation in - the Nazi Holocaust and World War II.
It is probably most of this, yet one fact remains true to this day without question: It was not a solution that was a result of the prejudicial sentiment of a sovereign world. Many of the countries that were responsible for the implementation at the time were either non-existent or had limited decision-making ability and power and those with the majority of the power voted not for the interests of the region, rather they voted for what would ultimately benefit them.
Israeli writer and politician Uri Avnery once wrote:
“No one asked the Arab Palestinians whether to accept or reject anything. If they had been asked, they would probably have rejected partition, since—in their view—it gave a large part of their historical homeland to foreigners. The governments of the Arab states rejected partition, but they certainly did not represent the Palestinian Arabs, who were at the time still under British rule (as were we).”
In the period that followed the implementation of the passing of Resolution 181, 450 Palestinian villages were decimated by Zionist Israeli militias, and 770,000 Arab-Palestinians were expelled by Zionist terrorist groups the Irgun, Lehi, Haganah, and other Jewish militias via massacres including 20,000 Arab Jews from Hebron, Jerusalem, Jenin and Gaza. It only took mere days to force them out and then completely denied the ability to return nor be compensated for their property. Some Jewish people who had been in the British POW camps were given homes where food and clothing were still left behind as if someone had just walked out minutes earlier.
Many Arab Palestinians and Arab Jews fled out of terror after having heard and witnessed the fate that often befell their neighbors and/or relatives, and friends, of the organized seizure of their property. For example, the Lydda Death March and the mass expulsion in Ramallah in July 1948. These two incidents accounted for 10% of the overall Arab-Palestinian expulsion. Of the 50,000-70,000 Arab Palestinians that had been evicted from both cities, it was conducted under an official expulsion order signed by then-commander of the Harel Brigade Yitzhak Rabin:
“The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age”.
During the Lydda Death March, several hundred died from exhaustion and dehydration. Israel’s founder and first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Israel’s first agricultural minister Aharon Zisling, said:
“We must wipe them, (Palestinian villages) out and forgive instances of rape against Palestinian women. Houses and villages emptied by their Arab-Palestinian inhabitants in violation of these orders would be subject to demolition and destruction”.
Awareness is a way of acknowledging the hidden scars beneath the surface of this now nearly century-old conflict. I’m always loathed to call it a “conflict” as I feel that it is not a conflict because the implication of that word implies the existence of a dispute between two equal parties. This hasn’t been a dispute between two parties, it has been the existential usurpation of a community that at one time faced oppression, extinction and a murderous persecution mere years before they exacted it upon an unsuspecting indigenous population for the sole purpose based on some biblical text of nearly 2,000 years prior with the support of atheistic and secular opportunists looking for a solution to what they felt was the “Jewish problem”.
Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky once wrote:
“Today the Jews are a minority in Palestine. In twenty years’ time, they could easily be a vast majority. If we were the Arabs, we wouldn’t accept it either.”
A mere century after Jabotinsky’s words, it has become abundantly clear the loss of any two-state solution and rather the consolidation of a one-state reality, one which would grant the Palestinians full citizenship, full autonomy, and full rights to choose their future. Ultimately, no one is entitled to tell the Palestinians what they can or cannot do with their future or their quest for self-determination.