The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State - By Fouad Ajami

[editor]

The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State

The General Assembly vote that created Israel was the culmination of decades of hard work on the ground.

By Fouad Ajami
The Wall Street Journal
June 1, 2011

It had been quite a scramble, the prelude to the vote on Nov. 29, 1947, on the question of the partition of Palestine. The United Nations itself was only two years old and had just 56 member states; the Cold War was gathering force, and no one was exactly sure how the two pre-eminent powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would vote. The Arab and Muslim states were of course unalterably opposed, for partition was a warrant for a Jewish state.

In the end, the vote broke for partition, the U.S. backed the resolution, and two days later the Soviet Union followed suit. It was a close call: 10 states had abstained, 13 had voted against, 33 were in favor, only two votes over the required two-thirds majority.

Now, some six decades later, the Palestinians are calling for a vote in the next session of the General Assembly, in September, to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In part, this is an appropriation by the Palestinians of the narrative of Zionism. The vote in 1947 was viewed as Israel's basic title to independence and] statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous.

By the time the guns had fallen silent, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had held its ground against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Its forces stood on the shores of the Red Sea in the south, and at the foot of the Golan Heights in the north. Palestinian society had collapsed under the pressure of war. The elites had made their way to neighboring lands. Rural communities had been left atomized and leaderless. The cities had fought, and fallen, alone. '"

Palestine had become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.

Some had taken the keys to their houses with them to Syria and Lebanon and across the river to Jordan. They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez, but the idea of return, enshrined into a "right of return," would persist. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)

History hadn't stood still. The world was remade. In 1947-48, when the Zionists had secured their statehood, empires were coming apart, borders were fluid, the international system of states as we know it quite new. India and Pakistan had emerged as independent, hostile states out of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Israel had secured its place in the order of nations a year later. Many of the Arab states were still in their infancy.

But the world is a vastly different place today. The odds might favor the Palestinians in the General Assembly, but any victory would be hollow. . . . [More]
_________________
To comment, click the "Post reply" button below.



Help us stay online!

[acgold@bezeqint.net]

Dear Editor; Reports say that the Palestine Authority will turn to the UN to implement Resolution 181, which calls for the partition of Mandatory Palestine in 1947.
The PA has a problem with this. The resolution was implemented. The areas known as the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza were under Arab/Moslem control and could have been declared an independent entity. Instead, the areas were allowed to be absorbed by the existing countries. In 1964 an entity came into existence called the Palestine Liberation Organization, which called for attacks on Israel.
The Arab leaders had their chance to declare a state (comprising the West bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza) based on Resolution 181 and refused. They have no legal pretense to call on this past and inoperative resolution. There is legal nor moral justification for trying to erase history and their refusal and call on the UN to deal with a resolution that is not active nor relevant.
Aharon Goldberg
Hatzor Haglilit
Israel

[david barrett]

welcome and well said

[jm]

Having read Mr Ajami's article on Palestinian statehood, I feel it is all the more urgent that Israel send positive signs to the movements that seek to topple dictatorships, such as Syria, Lybia, and those that have already successfully toppled them, such as Egypt and Tunisia. These movements indicate a trend that, even if immediately unsuccessful, will eventually overturn the Arab world. They are also not based on hatred towards Israel or the West, nor, it appears, on a wish to reestablish a Caliphate, but on a wish for a reasonable degree of freedom.