Partition and Catastrophe
By RON FORTHOFER
Friday, May 16, 2008
More Your Take 
Share and Enjoy This May, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its founding; Palestinians also commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (Catastrophe) they suffered as a result of the fighting from 1947-1949.
Since most Americans know little about the Nakba, here is some background. After WWII, political pressure increased for a Jewish state in Palestine. This pressure was due in part to guilt felt by Western nations over the horrific devastation and suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. In addition, a weakened Britain decided to end its mandate over Palestine. The British decision prompted the United Nations to form the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) on May 15, 1947. This committee issued a majority report on Aug. 31, 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states and an U.N. administered area of greater Jerusalem. A vote on partition occurred that November.
On September 22nd Loy Henderson, director of the State Department's Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, warned Secretary of State George Marshall of the dangers of partition.
"The UNSCOP [U.N. Special Committee on Palestine] Majority Plan is not only unworkable; if adopted, it would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future. "The proposals contained in the UNSCOP plan ... are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [U.N.] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based.
"These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state...."
The U.S. State Department was staunchly against partition, but President Truman overrode its objections. In 1945 Truman had said: "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."
On Nov. 29, U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181 calling for partition. Jews generally welcomed the news while Arabs strongly opposed it. Instead Arabs called for one democratic state. Palestinians were outraged that the U.N. was taking their land against their will and giving it to another people. For perspective, in 1947 Jews owned about 6 percent of the land in Palestine and constituted about 1/3 of the population. The partition gave Jews control of about 55 percent of Palestine.
The first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion recognized the grave injustice. In 1956 he said: "If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?" Jawaharlal Nehru, India's prime minister-designate in 1947, made a similar point saying the Zionist plan neglected "one not unimportant fact...Palestine was not a wilderness or an empty, uninhabited place. It was already somebody else's home."
After the partition passed, fighting began almost immediately and quickly escalated. On March 19th, 1948 the situation had become so critical that the United States renounced partition as unworkable and called for a U.N. trusteeship. It was too late.
Commenting on the fighting, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote: "In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948." As a result of these atrocities and other military actions, about 250,000 Palestinians had already fled their homes before Israel declared its independence on May 14th. Fighting intensified when neighboring Arab countries sent troops on May 15th to aid the beleaguered Palestinians. Israeli forces substantially outnumbered Arab forces in battles and were also better armed. By the end of the fighting in 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of Palestine. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians were refugees. They lost their lands, homes and most of their possessions. Israel also destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages.
On December 11, 1948 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 that, among other items, called for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes or for compensation to those choosing not to return. Unfortunately, the world has not yet dealt with the terrible effects of the Nakba.
Truman's support for the partition trumped U.S. interests, morality and international law, not to mention the rights of Palestinians. Shamefully, the United States continues to support the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.
Peace Train runs every Friday in the Colorado Daily. The opinions expressed in the column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflct the views of the Colorado Daily management or staff.
Comments
Posted by darkcloud on May 20, 2008 at 9:13 a.m. (Suggest removal)
On the other hand, it's been sixty years, and it can be argued that the Palestinians - so called - have clearly demonstrated their ineptitude to do much of anything. Corrupt, incompetent, with the mind set of meth laden street gangs with automatic weapons.
Once famous for their well educated and cosmopolitan elite, they're now a standing joke. If the Muslim world had given - or gave - an actual rat's ass about Palestine, or could gather to discuss it without slaughtering each other or selling each other out, something constructive could have been done early on. Still academically possible, but probably not now.
It's not a coincidence that most wars around the world involve Muslims on at least one side today. That society's ideal is as unable to provide for its people in the real world as the more moronic Christian patriarchies of pedophiles, and they have to fight something Other to justify current 10th century power structures to the populace. Because any advance of the 'people' would preclude the oligarchs and thugs who now hold power from retaining it, they NEED Israel to unite all hatred elsewhere.
Israel came about out of Balfour's philosophical vacillations, Zionist enthusiasm and Assimilationist capitulation, and a general well deserved western European guilt for the Holocaust and thousands of years of pogroms enacted for religious lust (or, sometimes, outright boredom) by sadistic Christianity in the debt of its merchant class. That, and the not entirely muted joy some felt (and feel) that all Jews might actually go somewhere else. Not pretty, but true.
But Israel is there now, and Arab property return - given the sixty years of recent history - ain't gonna, and probably shouldn't, happen. It was theft, and successful theft by an amazingly competent group.
Hey, everyone does it. God knows the Arabs (or anyone else) didn't have to invent a word for theft in 1948.
The thigh squeezing delight that the anti-Semites of the US populist goober wing feel now that they've usurped a new word - Nakba, oh! Holy Nakba! (quick! Where were you and what were you doing when you first noticed this word, and that it was applied to, let's see, The Catastrophe?) - is rather obvious.
Like those Arabs in power, they like an Israel guilty over its own conceptual hypocrisy. It provides cover for their own historic festering bigotry that was, frankly, responsible for a perceived need for a Jewish homeland in the first place. Credit where due.
(Requires free registration.)
Comments are the sole responsibility of the person posting them. You agree not to post comments that are off topic, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy. Violators may be banned. Click here for our full user agreement.