A delirium is flaring through the Arab world, and it is a delirium
about U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181. It is very rare these days
that any action of the General Assembly garners attention; it is even
rarer that something that passed almost 52 years ago could cause a
fuss. But, after half a century of trashing the U.N. Partition Plan
for Palestine, which is what Resolution 181 recommended, the Arabs
have suddenly discovered its virtues. Early last month, for example,
Amr Moussa, the foreign minister of Egypt, called on Israel and the
"state of Palestine" to partition the land once held under the British
Mandate. In this, Egypt echoes the Palestinians themselves. The
speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Ahmed Qurei, has
already proclaimed unproclaimed Palestine's borders. They are
resolution." In a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the
Palestinian Authority's observer at the U.N., Nasser al-Kidwa, calls
for "implementing the resolutions of the General Assembly of 29
November 1947." This would be hilarious, if it wasn't so outrageous.
At the very moment that the Israelis are tearing themselves apart over
the magnitude of the territorial compromise that they must make for
peace, the Palestinians are demonstrating yet again the bizarre and
delusional nature of their politics.
This long backward look at 1947 is now official Palestinian policy,
enunciated by Yasir Arafat himself, and even by his more moderate
consiglieri. The Palestinians have even managed to edge a few
mischievous European states into taking this old map of the land
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, against which the
Arabs themselves waged no fewer than three (losing) wars, as the
reference point for the cartography of peace. Of course, one reason
that countries like Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, congenitally
pro-Arab in any case, now have renewed nostalgia for the Partition
Plan is that it did more than recommend a particular division of
Palestine. It also contrived to make Jerusalem a corpus separatum
under international authority. (On the model of the Free City of
Danzig?) In this respect, the Europeans are serving an ecclesiastical
design. For this notion of Jerusalem's future has always appealed most
forcefully to the Holy See, and, even now, when it has no chance of
getting it, the Vatican is eager for a sovereign stake in Jerusalem
not altogether unlike its stake in Rome. Greece has its own parallel
Orthodox Christian reasons for taking a similar position.
Not having pressing internal reasons of their own to disagree, the
northern Europeans go along with the antique formula. It was none
other than the German foreign minister who, representing the chair of
the European Union, wrote the Foreign Ministry of Israel announcing
Europe's fidelity to the idea of the internationalization of the city,
as if the internationalization of anything has worked in our time. It
was the U.N. Human Rights Commission, headed by former President of
Ireland Mary Robinson, that, in its annual ritual (and highly
selective) condemnation of Israel, referred not to the usual standards
of the Oslo agreement or Resolution 242 of 1967 but to the quite
literally antediluvian artifact of Resolution 181. And, in South
Africa, President Nelson Mandela himself has met with Arafat to
discuss ways in which the U.N. General Assembly, through its nearly
defunct Trusteeship Council, could help the Palestinians put
international law on the side of their claim to statehood.
Some history is in order. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly
accepted, with minor changes in detail, the recommendations of the
U.N. Special Commission on Palestine that the land west of the Jordan
be partitioned into "a Jewish state" and "an Arab state," with a
special status for Jerusalem outside the two polities. As the Arabs
vehemently argued then, the Partition Plan resolution did not come
from the Security Council and therefore lacked the force of
international law. The Jews, by contrast, saw an opportunity to
achieve at least some sovereignty and security for the Yishuv, and
they wisely took Resolution 181 as the moral sanction that it was for
the achievement of the Zionist idea.
The partition of 1947 was, in fact, the second partition of Palestine.
The first had been effected 26 years prior. The territory initially
envisioned for the Jewish National Home by both the Allied Supreme
Council of the Paris Peace Conference and the government of Great
Britain, to which was awarded the Mandate for Palestine, straddled
both sides of the Jordan. But, in 1921, Colonial Secretary Winston
Churchill almost surgically excised the east bank out of Palestine in
order to create Transjordan as a consolation prize for the Hashemites,
who had lost the Arabian desert to the House of Saud. (Over the long
haul, this has turned out to be fortuitous surgery for the Zionists:
the Hashemites have proven to be relatively moderate neighbors.) Do
not be shocked. Other states were being carved out of the Ottoman
Empire in similar fashion, in the last creative acts of imperialism.
This is how Iraq was born, and Syria, too. The lopping off of the most
fertile areas of Palestine was a bitter pill for the Zionists, and it
incurred the bitterness of many in the movement's leadership,
including someone as statesmanlike as Louis D. Brandeis.
Still, the Zionist Executive acceded to the surgery and to other
draconian restrictions prescribed at the same time for the west side
of the river. As the historian Howard M. Sachar points out, however,
the League of Nations and the British mandatory power remained
committed to "the Zionist redemptive effort." In the document
confirming Great Britain's role in Palestine, the League assumed that
an embryonic Jewish state was in the making. "The word `Arab' did not
once appear.... The Arabs and other nations in Palestine were
repeatedly described as merely `non-Jews.'"
But partition was not to disappear from the lexicon of the Mandate. In
1937, a Royal Commission broached the proposal that there be a further
partition of what was left of Palestine. Even though it allocated to a
Jewish state only ten percent of the map of Palestine as drawn in 1919
and just 20 percent of western Eretz Israel, the Arabs rejected it.
But the mainstream Zionists had come to accept the commission's terms
precisely because of that Jewish state, and this especially in light
of the ever more perilous situation faced by Europe's Jews.
In the end, however, Britain, not willing to buck the Arabs, withdrew
the commission's proposals. After all, instigated by Haj Amin
Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arabs were in revolt and riot all
over the country, and both British soldiers and Jews were being
killed. Ultimately, the insurrection fizzled out. But, two years
later, at the St. James's Palace conference, where Palestinian Arabs
would not sit in the same room as Palestinian Jews, it became evident
that His Majesty's government was pursuing a policy of appeasement
toward the Arabs. While the conference was actually still in session,
a frightful portent invaded the confident world of the appeasers. The
Mufti's friend, Adolf Hitler, invaded Prague. The British responded,
so to speak, by issuing their notorious 1939 White Paper shutting the
gates of Palestine to the Jews about to be locked up in ghettos and
death camps.
Partition remained the only feasible solution for Palestine, and it
surfaced again after World War II. Inevitably, any new partition
scheme would be more favorable to the Jews than the one proposed ten
years earlier, because the Yishuv itself was far larger than it had
been. Tens of thousands of Jews had run the blockade to Palestine and,
even if the Nazis in the interim had not killed millions of others w
might otherwise have immigrated, there were legions that needed to
come immediately. As it happened, moreover, and despite the British
abandonment of Zionism during the late '30s and early '40s,
Palestinian Jewry was already a strong and substantially
self-governing polity, increasingly competent in matters of defense.
According to resolution 181, the Jewish state to be carved out of
Mandate Palestine was composed of three noncontiguous segments and was
smaller than the cartography proposed by the U.N.'s own study
commission. (It was also less than half the territory reserved by the
League for the Jews after the separation of Transjordan.) More to the
point, it left out virtually the entire western Galilee up to the
Lebanese border and parts of the almost wholly unpopulated Negev
desert. The map was grotesque from almost every practical standpoint,
the very image of a begrudged and unworkable polity. For almost all
Zionists, it represented an ideological defeat and a pragmatic burden
But hundreds of thousands of "remnant" Jews were still legally
stateless, and many of these either lived in displaced persons' camps
in Europe or were imprisoned by the British in Cyprus, and the misery
of the Jews was deemed a more pressing matter than their ideological
purity.
It is useful to recall the particular nomenclature in the Partition
Plan for the companion polity to the Jewish state. Everywhere it was
called an "Arab state," and that is because no one at the
time--certainly not the Arabs of Palestine--imagined the establishment
of a truly Palestinian state, least of all a democratic one. In any
case, the Palestinian Arabs did not come forward in 1947 to claim
their distinctive patrimony.
There are at least two reasons for this. One is that the population
was not at all clear about what that patrimony entailed or meant. It
was one thing to resent the Jews; it was altogether a different thing
to have concrete political aspirations. The second reason is that the
Palestinians had long ago ceded their fate to the neighboring Arab
governments, some to Syria, some to Egypt, the rest to Jordan. To be
sure, untrained and more than slightly wild indigenous Arab gangs,
mainly extremists associated with the Mufti, waged primitive warfare
almost without reference to strategic considerations. But it was the
Arab states that did most of the talking and their armies that did
most of the fighting. The 1949 armistice agreements ending the war
between Israel and the invading armies were negotiated between Israel
and the governments that had dispatched those armies. The operative
fact was that Great Britain wanted Jordan to be its legatee in
Palestine, and, since the Jordanian Arab Legion at the end controlled
almost all of the territory not lost to the Israelis, the kingdom was
simply able to annex that territory, Gaza excepted, to itself.
Remember that this territory included East Jerusalem and the Old City
with its ancient Jewish Quarter.
Local Palestinians did not protest Jordan's annexation of these areas;
nor did international authorities, though only Pakistan recognized it
entirely. During the 18 years from 1949 to 1967, during which Jordan
governed the non-Israeli part of Palestine, no one asked: Where is the
"Arab state" intended by the Partition Plan? Jordan was that Ara
state.
But it did not occupy all of the territory allocated to that state,
because the Arabs lost that territory in the war they had started.
After the Six Day War in 1967, when the same armies that were defeated
in 1948-49 were defeated again, the Arab world, dazed by the collapse
of pan-Arabist expectations, went into a long mourning period of
denial. "No recognition of Israel, no negotiations, no peace," as the
Arab League so gracefully put it at Khartoum shortly after the war.
Here is what the war's instigator, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, had to
say on the matter: "We lost the battle in 1967 without coming
face-to-face with the enemy. We lost the war without entering it....
Since we did not have the opportunity to enter the war, we cannot say
that we lost."
Yet Egypt had agreed to Security Council Resolution 242, which called
upon Israel to withdraw from "territories occupied in the recent
conflict" (after lengthy Security Council haggling, the words "the" or
"all" were intentionally omitted before "territories"), and even this
was tied to a broad agreement on the sovereignty and independence of
every state in the area--which meant Israel, since it was the only
state whose very existence was routinely questioned.
This resolution was not the final word of the Arabs. They continued to
deny the right of Israel to exist at all. The PLO charter with its
denials of Jewish nationhood, only recently canceled, remained in
force. But, before the world, Arab states, at least, had grudgingly
forfeited the formal demand that Israel withdraw to the 1949 armistice
lines which were the frontiers still in effect in 1967. Of course, the
Arabs caviled even over the idea of small changes in those lines.
Still, they seemed to understand that there would be no return to th
1967 borders. On the other hand, 1967 was the reference point.
With Israel having returned the entire Sinai to Egypt at Camp David in
1978, the question became: What would Israel give up on the Golan and
in the West Bank? I don't know what the prospects are with Syria. But
no plausible Israeli government, neither one led by Benjamin Netanyahu
nor one headed by Ehud Barak, would surrender more than, say, 6
percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians. There must be a price
for starting and losing three wars in a quarter-century. Perhaps more
important: If a small country like Israel wants to safeguard its
security, it must hold the geographical approaches that make it
vulnerable. And this is the roughly 40 percent of the West Bank, all
of it uninhabited, that Israel dares not relinquish. As the current
war in the former Yugoslavia shows yet again, control of the air is no
substitute for actually holding ground.
The U.S. peace team, the same people exhausted from repeating the same
tired formulas for almost a decade, has perpetuated the agony by not
telling the Palestinian Arabs the truth. They will not go nonstop from
Hebron to Jenin; they will not camp on the river Jordan; it will be
not them but the Israelis who watch from the high hills and ranges;
they will not have the real Jerusalem--as opposed to a few acres
outside it--as their capital. Yes, it might have been otherwise had
the Arabs acknowledged--in 1919, or in 1937, or in 1947, or even in
1967--that they must share western Palestine with Israel. But they
didn't. Indeed, for the past 50 years, the missed golden opportunity
of Resolution 181 has inwardly haunted and taunted the Palestinians.
Time marches on.
Fifty years of time, actually. But the Palestinians, who came so late
in history to crystallize their own ambitions, now want to abolish
time as a way of abolishing their own mistakes and to pretend that the
maps are still being newly drawn and that generations of Israelis ha
not built lives in those areas which Yasir Arafat has now reverted to
claiming as his own. Yes, some of these are places where Arabs once
lived and which they left. It makes no sense now to deny that, during
Israel's war for independence, Arabs were pushed out, and not always
so gently. On the other hand, many of them, most of them, abandoned
their homes at the call of the haughty elites who assured them that
they would return in triumph. In any case, Israel has also built a
modern society in the empty spaces of old and dusty Palestine, and it
is a sign of its both sullen and intoxicating attachment to the past
that the Palestinian leadership should tell its crowds that this, too,
is still up for grabs.
And these Palestinians, what and whom do they echo? They echo the
silence of the United States. In response to these provocations,
President Clinton's press secretary issued what can only be called an
extremely perfunctory reproach: "The United States calls upon both
parties to continue to adhere to the terms of reference of the peace
process as defined in Madrid and Oslo. The objective of the
negotiating process is the implementation of U.N. Security Council
Resolutions 242 and 338," the latter being an extension of the former
passed after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In contrast to the
administration's public and quasi-public tantrums against the Israeli
government over other issues, this is not even a slap on the wrist. It
is, moreover, just one statement. Count on it: the Palestinians know
how to gauge the attitudes of the United States, and they have neither
seen nor heard anything from Washington to deflect them from their new
campaign. Don't the American peace processors understand that
Israelis, whether left or right, dovish or hard-line, will see this
Palestinian revival of the maps of 1947 as another sign of
uncompromising irredentism? And who can say that they are wrong?
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)