DID THE UNITED NATIONS CREATE THE
United Nations General
Assembly Resolution no. 181 (II) of 1947 (commonly known as the “Palestine
Partition Plan”) recommended the creation from all of the lands of Mandatory
Palestine west of the Jordan River, representing 22% of original
Mandatory Palestine, a Jewish state (comprising slightly less than 11% of the
Land), an Arab state (comprising slightly less than 11% of the Land) and an
internationally-administered greater Jerusalem.
It is often asserted that
the modern State of Israel was created by this Resolution as a byproduct
of
Although widely accepted as
an unassailable truism, this assertion is quite false.
The Mandate for
MANDATE FOR
The Council of the
Whereas the Principal
Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of giving effect to the provisions
of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, to entrust to a
Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of
Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, within such
boundaries as may be fixed by them; and
Whereas the Principal
Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for
putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by
the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home
for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done
which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in
any other country; and
Whereas recognition has
thereby been given to the historical connexion of the
Jewish people with
Whereas the Principal
Allied Powers have selected His Britannic Majesty as the Mandatory for
Whereas the mandate in
respect of
Whereas His Britannic
Majesty has accepted the mandate in respect of Palestine and undertaken to
exercise it on behalf of the League of Nations in conformity with the following
provisions; and
Whereas by the
aforementioned Article 22 (paragraph 8), it is provided that the degree of
authority, control or administration to be exercised by the Mandatory, not
having been previously agreed upon by the Members of the League, shall be
explicitly defined by the Council of the League Of Nations;
Confirming the said
Mandate, defines its terms as follows:
ARTICLE 1 The Mandatory shall have full powers of
legislation and of administration, save as they may be limited by the terms of
this Mandate.
ARTICLE 2 The Mandatory shall be responsible for
placing the country under such political, administrative and economic
conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as
laid down in the Preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions,
and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants
of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.
ARTICLE 3 The Mandatory shall, so far as
circumstances permit, encourage local autonomy.
ARTICLE 4 An appropriate Jewish agency shall be
recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with
the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as
may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of
the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the
Administration, to assist and take part in the development of the country.
The Zionist
Organization, so long as its organization and constitution are, in the opinion
of the Mandatory, appropriate, shall be recognized as such agency. It shall
take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty's Government to secure
the cooperation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of
the Jewish national home.
ARTICLE 5 The Mandatory shall be responsible for
seeing that no
ARTICLE 6 The Administration of Palestine, while
ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are
not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions
and shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish agency referred to in
Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the Land, including State lands and
waste lands not required for public purposes.
ARTICLE 7 The Administration of
. . .
Since the Jewish people’s
right to reestablish their nation-state in the biblical Land of Israel became a
pillar of international law decades before the advent of the Holocaust,
and since this aspect of international law was merely a formal acknowledgment
of the 4,000-year-old aboriginal Jewish right to the Land, it is
a gross misrepresentation of History to claim that the State of Israel instead
emerged from the womb of the United Nations, impregnated by alleged European
remorse over the Holocaust.
Moreover,
while the Holocaust did not create the State of Israel, the absence of
the State of Israel did create the Holocaust. For, had the Jewish State
already existed when Nazi Germany arose from the ashes of World War I,
virtually all of those who perished in the Holocaust would, instead,
have been forcibly expelled by Nazi Germany to a welcoming
Furthermore, if genuine
European remorse over the Holocaust had really existed in 1947, then the United
Nations General Assembly would never have issued its niggardly Palestine
Partition Plan -- a recommendation of the international community which
(following the decades-earlier severing from Mandatory Palestine of all of its
lands east of the Jordan River, representing 78% of original
Mandatory Palestine, first in 1922, territory which later became the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan, being 77% of the Land, and then again in 1923, territory
which comprised the Golan Heights, being 1% of the Land) left the Jewish people
with less than 11% of that which the League of Nations had
originally allocated to them under the Mandate for Palestine, deprived them of
any sovereignty over Jerusalem, and saddled them with a demographic and
sectarian time bomb in the form of a population that was 45% Arab, virtually
all of whom were hostile to the creation of a Jewish State. Rather -- especially in light of the
uncompromising language of Article 5 of the Mandate for Palestine -- a
penitent U.N., acting through its Security Council, would have issued at
that time an authoritative resolution under Chapter VII of the U.N.
Charter (which, unlike Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter, authorizes coercive
enforcement measures): (1) affirming the
continuing primacy of the Mandate for Palestine as the legal foundation
for the establishment of a Jewish State, (2) recognizing full Jewish
sovereignty over the entire western portion of Mandatory Palestine, including
Jerusalem, which constituted the remaining 22% of original Mandatory
Palestine and (3) acknowledging that the Jewish people had the right to
repatriate to their countries of origin the many hundreds of thousands of
hostile Arabs who, from 1920 onward, had been permitted by Great Britain, as
Mandatory trustee, to inundate the western portion of Mandatory Palestine in
rank violation of its fiduciary obligations to the Jewish people under the
Mandate for Palestine.
Clearly, Israel exists neither
due to Europe's alleged guilty conscience nor due to the issuance of the
meager Palestine Partition Plan, but due only to the fact that
the renascent Jewish State militarily defeated the seven Arab states
(namely, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan fka
Transjordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) which, together with the Arab
League’s “Arab Liberation Army” and local “Palestinian” militias drawn from
Arab population centers throughout the western portion of Mandatory Palestine,
had sought to annihilate the Jewish State, thereby igniting Israel's War
of Independence.
Those who assert that Israel was created,
rather than diminished, by the Palestine Partition Plan knowingly reverse
Cause and Effect, as U.N. General Assembly Resolution no. 181 was the result
-- rather than the determinant -- of Great Britain’s decision to quit
the remainder of Mandatory Palestine.
This is because, in February 1947, Great Britain had already announced
its intention to completely withdraw from the cis-Jordania
portion of Mandatory Palestine (i.e., that portion of the Land of Israel which
was west of the Jordan River, being situated between the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean Sea). Since this withdrawal announcement was made some 9
months prior to -- and, in fact, served as the direct impetus for -- the
United Nations’ issuance of its Palestine Partition Plan, it is clear that the
subsequent British withdrawal from the cis-Jordania
portion of Mandatory Palestine in May 1948, the consequent Arab war of
annihilation against the Jewish population centers thereof (in rank
violation of the Palestine Partition Plan) and the ensuing emergence of the
State of Israel intact therefrom all would have occurred
regardless of the existence of the Palestine Partition Plan.
Conversely, had the Jewish
population centers of the cis-Jordania portion of
Mandatory Palestine been destroyed by the Arabs, and had Israel thereby lost
its War of Independence, then neither United Nations’ resolutions nor
supranational remorse would have sufficed to reverse such a
catastrophic denouement.
Clearly, there is an enormous difference
between endorsement and creation.
While the United Nations certainly endorsed the establishment of
modern Israel (at least within the tiny Partition Plan lines), that feckless
endorsement (which was so violently rejected by the entire Arab, and larger
Muslim, world) had no operative effect on the creation of the
Jewish State precisely because that endorsement was stillborn.
Nonetheless, that endorsement did bestow upon
Israel a unique international legal status, namely, that of being the only
nation in the World whose establishment was officially endorsed by both
the League of Nations and the United Nations.
However, delving deeper into the
realm of Cause and Effect, it may be cogently argued that the State of Israel
presently exists in the biblical Land of Israel as a demographically-dominant
Jewish nation-state within defensible borders due only to a
combination of the belligerence and the impatience of the Arabs. This denouement was portended by the prescient
declaration of the biblical Joseph to his brothers: “ ‘Although you meant [to inflict] Evil
upon me, God meant it for Good, in order to accomplish -- it is as
[clear as] this Day -- that a vast people be kept alive.’ ” (Genesis 50:20).
In the absence of this belligerence
and impatience, approximately 45% of the citizenry to be encompassed
within Israel, as defined by the 1947 Partition Plan lines, would have been Arab,
thereby constituting a demographic time bomb within the renascent Jewish
State.
Now, let us hypothetically assume
that neither the Arabs residing within the proposed Jewish State, nor
the Arabs residing within the proposed Arab State, nor the Arabs
residing within the surrounding Arab states had ever initiated a war of
annihilation against the Jewish population centers of the western portion of
Mandatory Palestine, but that they had instead simply acquiesced to the
creation of Israel within the Partition Plan lines recommended by U.N. General
Assembly Resolution no. 181.
In these circumstances, the State of
Israel would have included a huge law-abiding Arab electorate, which,
never having warred against Israel, would have remained in place from
the outset and, although still constituting a voting minority, would
nonetheless have amassed decisive parliamentary power. In such circumstances, Israel’s parliament
would not have been able to enact the exclusionist, but morally imperative, Law
of Return (which, in implementation of Articles 6 & 7 of the Mandate for
Palestine, grants automatic residency and appurtenant citizenship rights to any
Jew in the World). For, it is this Law,
coupled with the exodus of approximately 600,000 Arab belligerents during
Israel’s War of Independence, which (in tandem with an increasing Jewish
birthrate) has allowed the Jewish population of Israel to maintain its
overwhelming demographic dominance and, consequently, electoral
dominance over the extant Arab population thereof. In this context, it is noteworthy that
numerous other nations (including such liberal democracies as Ireland, Greece,
France, Italy and Germany) have similar laws based upon the principle of ethnic
repatriation known as Jus Sanguinis (meaning:
Right of Blood).
Also, in these circumstances, a
miniscule Israel that was not invaded by the Arabs of the proposed Arab
State or by the surrounding Arab states would not have fought any War of
Independence; and it consequently would not have expanded from its 1947
Partition Plan lines to its 1949 armistice demarcation lines -- let alone to
its present post-1967 minimally-defensible borders.
Consequently, it is likely that such
a demographically-challenged Israel (i.e., a country hosting a large,
undisturbed and growing Arab population) would have quietly ceased to exist as
a Jewish nation-state several generations ago.
That the impatiently belligerent
Arabs are themselves principally responsible for the State of Israel’s present
entrenchment in the biblical Land of Israel as a Jewish nation-state within
minimally-defensible borders is not only ironic but -- more importantly -- also
constitutes a grand historic replay of the circumstances under which the Jewish
people’s forebears, under the leadership of Joshua, originally returned to and
thereafter conquered the Land. As is
related in the Hebrew Bible: “Joshua waged war with all of these [Canaanite]
kings for a long time. There was not a city that made peace with the Children
of Israel except for the Hivvite inhabitants of
Gibeon; they [the Hebrews] took everything in battle. For it was from HaShem, to harden their [the Canaanite nations'] hearts
towards battle against Israel, in order to destroy them [the Canaanite nations]
-- that they not find favor [with the Hebrews] -- so that they would be
extirpated [by the Hebrews], as HaShem had commanded
Moses.” (Joshua 11:18-20).
In sum, modern Israel may
credit its legal creation to the League of Nations Mandate for
Palestine, and its de facto existence to the impatient belligerence of
its enemies and the consequent resolve of the Jewish people to survive.
© Mark Rosenblit