Monday, Nov 30, 2015 04:29 PM +0100

U.N. voted to partition Palestine 68 years ago, in an unfair plan made even worse by Israel’s ethnic cleansing

Palestinians were 2/3rds of the population but offered 43% of land. Then, Israel ethnically cleansed it & took more

Ben Norton

Topics: Israel, Palestine, U.N., History, News, Politics News

(Credit: United Nations)

68 years ago yesterday, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, with General Assembly Resolution 181.
The front page of the November 29, 1947 edition of the New York Times read “[General] Assembly Votes Palestine Partition; Margin Is 33 to 13; Arabs Walk Out; Aranha Hails Work as Session Ends.”

(Credit: New York Times)

Why were the Arabs angry? Because, for the indigenous Palestinians, the deal was a thoroughly bad one. Palestinians comprised approximately two-thirds of the population, yet were offered just 43 percent of their land in the deal.
“Aranha” refers to Osvaldo Aranha, a Brazilian diplomat. As president of the U.N. General Assembly, Aranha lobbied strongly on behalf of the Zionist movement (a settler colonialist Jewish nationalist political movement that called for the creation of the state of Israel). He delayed the vote on resolution 181 by two days in order to give the U.S. and other pro-Israel countries more time to pressure U.N. member states to vote for the plan. Scholar Fred Khouri writes that, in these two days:

“The United States and Zionists led the lobbying efforts of the pro-partition forces. The delegates, as well as the home governments, of Haiti, Liberia, Ethiopia, China, the Philippines, and Greece were swamped with telegrams, telephone calls, letters, and visitations from many sources, including the White House, congressmen, business corporations, and other fields of endeavor. As a result of these tremendous official and nonofficial pressures, Haiti, Liberia, and the Philippines finally agreed to vote for partition.”

These last-minute changes ensured that resolution 181 would have the two-thirds majority vote needed to pass.
The following is the U.N.’s map of the proposed partition. The blue areas comprising roughly 57 percent of the land were to be allotted to Jews; orange areas were to be allotted to Palestinians. Jerusalem was to be left under the governance of the international community, because of its historical and religious importance for numerous religions and cultures.

(Credit: United Nations)

The Partition Plan was never implemented, however. The very next day after it was voted on, the 1947-1948 war broke out.
In this war, Zionist militias systematically ethnically cleansed large portions of historic Palestine, sacking hundreds of Palestinian villages and expelling more than 750,000 people — around two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population. Prominent Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes that, in Israel’s Plan Dalet (also known simply as Plan D), “veteran Zionist leaders” created “a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” They dispatched military orders in March 1948, Pappé explains:

“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”

Plan D “spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go,” writes Pappé. “The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine,” he adds, and it “contain[ed] a repertoire of cleansing methods that one by one fit the means the U.N. describes in its definition of ethnic cleansing.”