Sunday, December 28, 2008

[palestine] just the facts please

This blog doesn't usually print slabs of text from Wiki but today it will. I've been reading both Arab and Jewish source material on Palestine and the only conclusion is that there is no agreement on the history.

Leaving to one side for now everyone's atrocities and quite frankly callous behaviour, there seems to have been been about two thirds Arab population around 1947 and about one third Jewish.

Both should have had a homeland there. However:

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly, with a two-thirds majority international vote, passed the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181), a plan to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states, with the Greater Jerusalem area (encompassing Bethlehem) coming under international control.

Jewish leaders (including the Jewish Agency), accepted their portion of the plan, while Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it and refused to negotiate. Neighboring Arab and Muslim states also rejected the partition plan. The Arab community reacted violently after the Arab Higher Committee declared a strike and burned many buildings and shops.

In a speech delivered on 25 March 1948, US President Truman recommended a temporary trusteeship and stated: We could not undertake to impose this solution on the people of Palestine by the use of American troops, both on Charter grounds and as a matter of national policy.[132]

As armed skirmishes between Arab and Jewish paramilitary forces in Palestine continued, the British mandate ended on May 15, 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel having been proclaimed the day before (see Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel).

The neighboring Arab states and armies (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Transjordan, Holy War Army, Arab Liberation Army, and local Arabs) immediately attacked Israel following its declaration of independence, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War ensued. Consequently, the partition plan was never implemented.

What I'm interested in is not the rights and wrongs but whether the above quote is factually accurate.

5 comments:

  1. Looking at the map, what was the chance of that mish-mosh ever working?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is true.

    The Arab solution in the next post is more realistic, land wise but the Jerusalem question from Proposal 181 also seems the most realistic.

    The Arab solution has been accepted by Israel, except for its East Jerusalem provisions, so why not adopt the original Proposal 181 for that?

    The answer, as everyone knows, is that each player in there, for its own historical reasons, wants control of that holy hill. It all centres on that hill, when all is said and done.

    ReplyDelete
  3. How come no one ever talks about the fact that 'Palestine' used to be mostly Jordan :) and no one ever wants Jordan to give back the land they took.

    (pre-1948)

    There never was a Palestine until it was created by Fiat; however there has been a land of the Jews documented for 3k or so years.

    ReplyDelete

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