Ben Gurion “opposed” the Partition Plan? Well, according to the BBC....

...No mention is made of Arab ambitions to gain control of “the entire territory of Mandate Palestine” or of the Arab League’s refusal to come to terms with the concept of the existence of a Jewish state. No mention is made of the well-documented threats of violence made by Arab leaders against Jews living in Arab countries should partition go ahead.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
06 December '13..

Last Friday (November 29th) marked the anniversary of the 1947 UN GA adoption of the Partition Plan – resolution 181 – which was of course rejected outright by the Arab League and hence became null and void.

Anyone searching for information on that subject on the BBC News website will find a variety of items including maps and articles. One of those articles, dating from 2001, includes a rather curious assertion:

“Jewish representatives in Palestine accepted the plan tactically because it implied international recognition for their aims. Some Jewish leaders, such as David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, opposed the plan because their ambition was a Jewish state on the entire territory of Mandate Palestine.” [emphasis added]

No source is provided to back up the BBC’s claim that Ben Gurion “opposed the plan” or how that ‘opposition’ is supposed to have manifested itself. Of course Ben Gurion’s personal opinions on the subject are actually neither here nor there; what is important is the official position taken by the body he represented – the Jewish Agency – and as is well known, that body accepted the Partition Plan.

In the testimony he gave in July 1947 to the UNSCOP Commission (with which Arab representatives refused to cooperate) which preceded the UN vote, Ben Gurion was specifically asked about his views on the subject.

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The Partition Plan, the Negev and the Next Accusation

...When Chaim Weizman finally obtained the Negev’s inclusion into the proposed Jewish state, he did not imagine that Israel’s sovereignty over that desert would be challenged six decades later. And today’s Israeli leaders, who seem to believe that Israel will be left alone once it retreats to the 1949 armistice lines, would be well-advised to take note of the fact that Israel is being accused of “occupation” within its pre-1967 borders.

Emmanuel Navon..
I24 News..
01 December '13..

Sixty-six years ago, on 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide the British Mandate between a Jewish State and an Arab State (Resolution 181). There are many myths around this resolution, as well as a particular side effect that Israel did not expect at the time but which has recently become more palpable.

After the vote's results were announced, members of the Jewish delegation at the UN fell on each other in tears and across the pre-state mandate, Jews burst into celebrations. By contrast, Arab League Chairman Azzam Pasha was enraged and vowed that “any line of partition drawn in Palestine will be a line of fire and blood.”

In truth, however, Resolution was 181 legally meaningless. Like all General Assembly resolutions, it was a non-binding recommendation. The claim that the UN “created” Israel on 29 November 1947 is absurd. The General Assembly has no authority to “create” states. The Syrian ambassador to the UN was 100% right when he declared after the vote that “The recommendations of the General Assembly are not imperative on those to whom they are addressed. I fail to find in this charter any text which implies, directly or indirectly, that the General Assembly has the authority to enforce its recommendations by military force.”

A second myth around Resolution 181 is that the Arabs were justified to reject it because it was unfair to the Palestinians. For a start, the UN Partition Plan did not mention the Palestinians, nor did it recommend the establishment of a Palestinian state. There was a reason for this: nobody had ever heard of such a people at the time. Resolution 181 recommended the partition of the British Mandate between an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State.” But if anyone got discriminated against it was the Jews, not the Arabs.

“Palestine” did not exist in the Ottoman Empire. There were administrative districts called “Sanjaks” (such as the Sanjaks of Jerusalem, of Gaza, and of Nablus). The British revived the Latin word “Palestina” and re-created an administrative entity that had ceased to exist with the demise of the Roman Empire. In July 1922, Great Britain was entrusted by the League of Nations to implement “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” What the League of Nations meant by “Palestine” was the legal entity created by the Treaty of Sèvres (which covers today’s Israel and Jordan). In September 1922, Britain informed the League of Nations that it had decided to exclude the East bank of the Jordan River (otherwise known as “Transjordan”) from its legal commitment to the Jewish People.

This was a de facto partition of the League of Nations Mandate, a partition that amputated from the Jews 77 percent of the territory on which the Jewish national home was supposed to be established. The 1947 UN partition plan was an additional partition on the remaining 23 percent. In the second partition, the Jews were granted 56 percent of Western Palestine and the Arabs 43 percent --hence the claim that the 1947 partition was unfair to the Arabs (the remaining one percent was the Jerusalem region, which was to become a “corpus separatum”). But, in fact, the 1947 partition plan left the Jews with 12 percent of Mandatory Palestine – hardly an unfair deal to the Arabs.

The passing of Resolution 181 and the day the war began

...the Palestinians, in the service of their “long national struggle,” have literally pioneered the use of scientific terrorism in the modern era: from the Fatah-led border raids of the fifties and the sixties, to the hijackings and kidnappings of the seventies and the eighties, to the suicide bombings of the nineties and early 2000’s, all the way to the indiscriminate rocket attacks of today. This is how they have “ensure[d] harmony and conformity between the goals and means of their struggle and international law,” and preserved their “humanity,” and their “highest, deeply held moral values.”

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
30 November '13..

Sixty-five years ago today, after the passing of Resolution 181, the United Nations partition that created a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine on November 29, 1947, the Arabs, both in and outside Palestine, rejected it and declared it illegitimate, something they had been saying from the beginning. Arab UN delegates warned that any attempt to implement the partition would lead to war; after the partition vote was taken, the Arab delegations in the UN walked out of the plenum.

Eliahu Sasoon, of the Jewish Agency Executive, who was worried and doubtful about the Yishuv’s ability to win an all-out war against the Arabs, sent Azzam Pasha, the Arab League secretary, a letter in early December 1947 expressing the Jews’ desire to avoid conflict, and implored the Arab League to accept the Jewish state; the letter was unanswered.

The previous October, Pasha had rejected Jewish diplomat Abba Eban’s offer of Jewish-Arab conciliation and cooperation, telling him that the Jews were foreigners, their presence in Palestine was only temporary, and that their only hope was to abandon Zionism and statehood and accept Arab rule in a unitary state. He also told Eban that if he acceded to partition that he would be “a dead man within hours of returning to Cairo.”

Arab attacks on Jews in Palestine began on November 30, the day after the partition vote. On that day, a Jewish ambulance en route to the Hadassah Hospital outside Jerusalem came under fire, a group of Arabs ambushed a Jewish bus traveling from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five and wounding seven, and attacked another Jewish bus en route to Jerusalem from Hadera, killing two. A Jewish person was murdered in Tel-Aviv’s Camel Market; in the prison at Acre, Arab prisoners attacked Jewish ones, who were forced to barricade themselves in their cells before the British intervened; in Haifa Jews passing through Arab neighborhoods were shot at, and Jewish vehicles were stoned all over Palestine. Over the next several days there were shootings, stonings, and rioting, bombs tossed into cafes, Molotov cocktails thrown into shops, killing and maiming scores.

In Jerusalem, young Arabs commandeered the offices of the local national committees demanding weapons, and the AHC proclaimed a three day strike to begin the next day, enforcing closure of Arab shops, schools, and businesses and organized and incited Arab crowds to attack Jewish targets. On December 2, a mob of several hundred Arabs ransacked Jerusalem’s Jewish commercial center, looting, burning, stabbing, and stoning all before them.

Arab violence in response to the partition was hardly limited to Palestine; violence literally exploded in all the Arab capitals, with thousands taking to the streets chanting anti-Jewish and anti-Western slogans. There were also physical attacks on British and American legations, so much so that the British government had to make arrangements to evacuate British citizens from Syria. In Cairo, the ‘ulema of Al-Azhar University (one of Islam’s supreme authorities) proclaimed a “worldwide jihad in defense of Arab Palestine.” Earlier, on November 2, 1947 the ‘ulema had issued a fatwa pertaining to “the Jews,” condemning anyone consorting or dealing with Jews (“buying their produce”) as “a sinner and criminal…who will be regarded as an apostate to Islam, he will be separated from his spouse. It is prohibited to be in contact with him.”

The Two-State Solution Has Already Been Implemented

Lacunar amnesia is cool

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
02 August '12..

Science attributes selective memory to defense mechanisms that generate blanks in patients’ awareness to repress trauma or humiliation. The result can manifest as lacunar amnesia, where the mind’s record-keeping is impeded by a gap (lacuna) relating to specific events.

In individual psychology these gaps form involuntarily. But in the spheres of politics and propaganda they become intentional and inherently advantageous. It pays to deliberately blot out entire episodes, decades and even eras. Cynical misrepresentation thrives on erasing contexts and causal connections.

Therefore, not forgetting what we’re encouraged to forget is critical.

There’s enormous importance to how far back in time we go to isolate a defining milestone in our collective history. Where we mark the starting point of ongoing struggles may invariably determine what we conclude about them. Put differently, our disinclination to retrace the steps which, for better or worse, brought us hitherto may mess with our perceptions or dictate profound misperceptions.

Arab-Israeli parliamentarian Haneen Zoabi (Balad), for example, purposefully peddles insidious misperceptions. Last week, she blamed Israel for the terror attack against Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Israelis, she insisted, have it coming because they have been “occupiers” since 1967.

The problem, of course, is that terrorist atrocities predate 1967, but Zoabi would rather we overlook troublesome truth.

Those who turn June 5, 1967 – the beginning of the Six Day War – into their zero-hour marker usually seek to advance a predetermined agenda, whereby all that preceded Israeli “occupation” is discarded, as is everything that triggered the direct outbreak of hostilities.

Their bottom line is to persuade the uninitiated that Israelis woke up one sunny morning, and overtaken by inexorable and inexcusable territorial appetites, invaded their peace-loving neighbors’ homes and usurped them arbitrarily. The cruel conquistadors then illegally settled in their neighbors’ property, which impelled the downtrodden natives to resist the interlopers.

The logic here is unmistakable. Justice demands a return to the status quo ante – in other words to the situation as it was on June 4, 1967 (while failing to mention that on that date Israel was existentially vulnerable, surrounded and threatened with extinction by the aforementioned neighbors who blusterously bayed for Jewish blood).

Re: What the Palestinians Really Want

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
06 December 09

In his post on Friday, Rick correctly identified the myth that has foiled every peace-making effort for decades: namely, that the Palestinians actually want a state.

To understand just how untenable this myth is, it’s worth comparing Palestinian behavior with that of the Jews in 1947. The UN Partition Plan proposed that year gave the Jewish state only 12 percent of the territory originally allotted to it under the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, and only 56 percent of what remained after Britain tore away 78 percent of the original territory to create Transjordan (today’s Jordan). Moreover, it excluded Jerusalem, the focus of Jewish national and religious longing throughout 2,000 years of exile. And its borders were completely indefensible, as the plan’s map shows.

Nevertheless, the pre-state Jewish leadership accepted it. Why? Because two years after the Holocaust — which not only proved the dangers of not having a state, but left hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors as stateless refugees in desperate need of a home — this leadership believed any state, even one so badly flawed, was better than none. Only a state could resettle the survivors and allow them to rebuild their lives; only a state could make “never again” a reality rather than an empty slogan.

The Palestinians, according to their own universally accepted narrative, are in a similar situation today. For 42 years, according to this narrative, millions of them have lived under brutal occupation. For 61 years, millions more have lived in squalid refugee camps, with no hope and no future. Only statehood can end these evils.

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