Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians remains an open sore in the Middle East even as Israel and Team Trump try to turn everyone’s attention to the red herring of Iran, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
The United Nations always has had, and rightfully so, a strong role in handling the conflict between Arabs and Jews over land in Palestine. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, Britain assumed administration of Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley at the United Nations on April 28, 2017.
In the aftermath of World War II, when an overburdened Britain declared that it was ridding itself of the burden of Palestine, and with the League of Nations having died, it was appropriate that the successor international organization, the United Nations, would address the issue. A special committee of the United Nations drew up a partition plan under which Palestine would be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The U.N. General Assembly approved a modified version of the plan in November 1948.
The plan was generous to the Jewish side, as reflected in heavy Zionist lobbying (especially lobbying in the United States) in favor of it, and Arab states voting against the plan in the General Assembly. Although Jews constituted only one-fourth, and Arabs three-fourths, of the population of Palestine at the time, the proposed Jewish state would get over half the land. Subsequent armed combat made the disconnect between population and land even greater. The land controlled by the Jewish state went from 55 percent of Palestine in the original plan of the UN committee, to 61 percent in the modified version that the General Assembly voted on, to 78 percent after the armistice of 1949, to 100 percent after the war that Israel initiated in 1967.
The U.N. partition plan remains Israel’s founding document: an international charter for the creation of the State of Israel. This is too easily forgotten among more recent rhetoric about the United Nations being allegedly an anti-Israeli forum. The same partition plan also was…