On this day in history, November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to approve the partition of British Palestine into a Jewish state (Israel) and a Palestinian Arab state. It is therefore both an important milestone in the establishment of Israel and also the anniversary of the first rejection by the Palestinian Arabs of their own independent state.
The wonderful Israpundit blog has more on the UN's historic vote.
Israeli writer David Frankfurter adds some additional perspective
This is not just the anniversary of the formation of a Jewish state, when a relatively small number of Jews, both natives and the refugees who had fled the murderous Nazis and the bloody hostility simultaneously unleashed in their Arab allies, decided to take on the threat of the surrounding sea of hostile Arab countries and declare that they would accept crumbs the world had given them, stop being ‘Palestinian Jews’ under British rule and start being independent ‘Israelis’.That's more or less all you need to know about the last 80 years of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 29, 2004 09:38 AMSimultaneously, the ‘Palestinian Arabs’ decided to set an equally historic precedent. This was the first time that they rejected the formation of a separate Palestinian Arab state.
Just as hundreds of thousands Jews fled Arab countries, a similar number of Palestinian Arabs fled the Jewish state, and became refugees – to this day waiting the promise of the surrounding Arab nations to ‘throw the Jews into the sea’.
The rag-tag Jews meanwhile, miraculously and with divinely inspired determination, defended their small nation time and time again from invading Arab armies. Sitting on land granted to them by international law, often (as with my home in Ra’anana) purchased at going rates from their Arab neighbours, they built a modern nation. A democracy with achievements that outstrip the neighbours’ – and often the rest of the world. While simultaneously dedicating resources to fight imposed war after war, Jews have built a full democracy in which learning of all types flourishes. Top of the list in innovation, patents issued, medical discoveries, new technologies, and almost every other field of human endeavour. Black and white, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Ethiopian and Russian, Eastern and Western, refugee and idealist, religious and secular, all mixed together. Making the most of the little that the world grudgingly granted.
I can’t help but contrast this with our Palestinian neighbours. Bent on destruction rather than building, rejecting every opportunity for a state granted to them. Their refugees still stay in cities that are labeled ‘refugee camps’, with a leadership determined to keep them as the world’s beggars. A front for creaming off billions in international aid, and a focus for their own self-destructive tendencies. Leading their people to start and lose war after war, they keep their people in grinding poverty just so the world can be encouraged to ‘see what those Jews have done to us’.
As you have no doubt already noticed, The United Nations, showing the love for democracy they are so noted for, picks today as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/ngo/calendar.htm#solidarity
More accurately:
On this day in history, November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to approve the [second]partition of British {mandatory]Palestine into a Jewish state (Israel) and a [second]Palestinian Arab state.
There must be another scandal in this peculiar calendar of events. Whom paid who for this one?
OT
Bush comment steals show. Bush thanked the hospitable Canadians for waving at him "with all five fingers."
Posted by: polltroll on November 30, 2004 04:22 PMThe ironic fact that no one wishes to bring up:
Had the Arabs accepted the partition plan, Israel likely would have been transformed already into a bi-national, Arab-majority state. That is, unless the Israelis had found some other way to get 750,000 Arabs and their descendents to leave their new state. Which of course they doubtlessly would have.
Those vast majority of those Arab refugees, whose return to Israel today along with their descendents would spell 'demographic doom' for the Jewish state, lived in the territory granted to Israel in the partition plan, and to a much lesser extent in the territory that Israel conquered and annexed during the Independence War. And the partition plan, which Israel agreed to initially, promised Israeli citizenship to these Arabs. Once Israel won the war started by the Arab nations, however, they immediately reneged on this, even for Arabs that owned property. They reneged because they (and the Arabs) knew that the initial partition plan was an unworkable: too many Arabs, not enough Jews, even in the most circumscribed area possible.
Am I mistaken in these assertions? If so, how?
Posted by: Markus Rose on December 7, 2004 10:59 AM