70 Years Of Broken Promises: Untold Story Of The Partition Plan – OpEd

In a recent talk at the Chatham House think tank in London, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approached the issue of a Palestinian state from an intellectual perspective.
Before we think of establishing a Palestinian state, he said, “it is time we reassessed whether the modern model we have of sovereignty, and unfettered sovereignty, is applicable everywhere in the world.”

It was not the first time Netanyahu had discredited the idea of a Palestinian state. Despite clear Israeli intentions of jeopardizing any chances for the creation of such a state, US President Donald Trump’s administration is reported to be finalizing plans for an “ultimate peace deal”  built around the two-state solution.

But why the wasted effort, when all parties know that Israel has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state and the US has neither the desire nor the political capital to enforce one?

The answer may lie not in the present, but in the past.

A Palestinian Arab state had initially been proposed by the British as a political tactic to provide legal cover for the establishment of a Jewish state. It continues to be used as a political tactic, though never with the aim of finding a just solution to the conflict, as is often propagated.

When British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour made his promise to the Zionist movement in November 1917 to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the once distant and implausible idea began to take shape. It would have been effortlessly achievable, had the Palestinians not rebelled.

The 1936-1939 Palestinian rebellion revealed an impressive degree of collective political awareness and ability to mobilize, despite British violence. The British government dispatched the Peel Commission to Palestine to examine the roots of the revolt, hoping to quell it.

In July 1937, the commission published its report, which immediately ignited the fury of the native population, who were already aware of the British-Zionist collusion. It concluded that “underlying causes of the disturbances” were the desire of the Palestinians for independence and their “hatred and fear of the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Based on that view, it recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, the latter to be incorporated into Transjordan, which was itself under the control of the British.

Palestine, like other Arab countries, was supposedly being primed for independence, under the terms of the British Mandate, as granted by the League of Nations in 1922. Moreover, the Peel Commission was recommending partial independence for Palestine, unlike the full sovereignty granted to the Jewish state.

More alarming was the arbitrary nature of that division. The total Jewish land ownership then did not exceed 5.6 percent of the country. The Jewish state was to include the most strategic and fertile regions of Palestine, including the Galilee and much of the water access to the Mediterranean.
Thousands of Palestinians were killed in the rebellion as they continued to reject the prejudicial partition and the British ploy aimed at honoring the Balfour Declaration and rendering Palestinians stateless.

A new powerful Zionist ally, President Harry Truman, began filling the gap left open by the British, who were keen on ending their mandate in Palestine. In “Before Their Diaspora,” Walid Khalidi writes that Truman “went a step further in his support of Zionism by endorsing a Jewish Agency plan for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The plan envisaged the incorporation into the Jewish state about 60 percent of Palestine at a time when the Jewish land ownership in the country did not exceed 7 percent.”

On Nov. 29, 1947, the 33 member states of the UN General Assembly, under intense pressure from the US administration of Truman, voted in favor of Resolution 181 (II) calling for the partition of Palestine into three entities: A Jewish state, a Palestinian state and an international regime to govern Jerusalem.

If the British partition proposal of 1937 had been bad enough, the UN resolution was a reason for total dismay, as it allocated 5,500 square miles to the proposed Jewish state, and only 4,500 square miles to Palestinians — who owned 94.2 of the land and represented over two-thirds of the population.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in earnest after the Partition Plan was adopted. In December 1947, organized Zionist attacks on Palestinian areas resulted in the exodus of 75,000 people. In fact, the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, did not begin in 1948, but 1947.

That exodus of the Palestinians was engineered through Plan Dalet, which was implemented in stages and altered to accommodate political necessities. The final stage of that plan, launched in April 1948, comprised six major operations. Two of them, Operation Nachshon and Operation  Harel, were aimed at destroying Palestinian villages on and near the Jaffa-Jerusalem border. By splitting the two main areas of the proposed Palestinian Arab state, the Zionist leadership wanted to destroy any possibility of geographical cohesion. That remains the aim to this day.

The Israeli achievement after the war was hardly guided by the Partition Plan. The disjointed Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem made up 22 percent of the historic size of Palestine.

The rest is painful history. The carrot of the Palestinian state is dangled from time to time by the very forces that partitioned Palestine 70 years ago, and worked diligently with Israel to ensure the demise of the political aspirations of the Palestinian people.

Eventually, the partition discourse was remodelled into the “two-state solution,” championed for decades by various US administrations who exhibited little sincerity in trying to make it a reality.
And now, 70 years after the partition of Palestine, there is only one state, governed by two different sets of laws, a state that privileges Jews and discriminates against Palestinians.

“A single state has already existed for a long time,” wrote Israeli columnist Gideon Levy in Haaretz. “The time has come to launch a battle over the nature of its regime.”

Many Palestinians already have.