Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (46 page)

The other was that the UN would be obliged to accept that the proposed solution was unworkable. In that event, the resolution would be vitiated and the diplomats would have to go back to the drawing board.

Simply stated, the Palestine problem was about to become the first test of the UN’s authority. If it could resolve the conflict of interests in Palestine by diplomatic and political means, or even by enforcement action, the hope that had been invested in the UN as the global institution to oversee the creation of a more fair and better world would be justified and given a boost. If it failed, the outlook was for a continuation of jungle law, with might, as ever, prevailing over right.

While the Truman administration waited for the UN’s recommendation, the President took what amounted to a vow of silence.

On 8 August 1947 he told a cabinet meeting that he was not intending to make any announcements or statements on Palestine until UNSCOP had presented its findings. In his report to his diary of the meeting, Forrestal quoted the President as saying that he had “stuck his neck out on this delicate question once” and did “not propose to do so again.”
²
The “once”, Truman told his cabinet was in the autumn of 1945 when, to appease the Zionists, he had put pressure on Britain to admit 100,000 Jews to Palestine. (My interpretation from reading between the lines is that Truman came to understand that he had made a bad situation for the British worse and, possibly, had wrecked whatever small prospect there was of Britain persuading the Arab League to accept a Jewish homeland that was less than a state).

Truman made his comments after Secretary of State Marshall had presented his assessment of the situation in Palestine. Marshall said his view was that Britain’s withdrawal would be followed by “a bloody struggle between the Arabs and the Jews.”
³

On 3 September UNSCOP submitted two recommendations to the General Assembly.
⁴

The first, the majority plan, proposed the termination of the Mandate and the partition of Palestine—the creation of an Arab and a Jewish state with economic union between them, and a corpus separatism for the City of Jerusalem. It would become an international city administered by the UN.

The second, the minority plan, put forward by India, Yugoslavia and Iran, also envisaged the termination of the Mandate but it was against partition. It proposed a unitary Palestine—the creation of an Arab and a Jewish state in a federal structure with Jerusalem its capital. (This was effectively the fallback position of those Arab and other Muslim leaders who knew they had to face reality).

When subsequently things started to go wrong at the UN, Britain admitted that the partition plan had “not been impartially conceived.”
⁵
This was the diplomatic way of saying that, by fair means and foul, Zionist influence on the majority of the Special Committee’s members had been sufficient to guarantee that their recommendation would favour Zionism at the expense of the Arabs. But this exercise in truth-telling by Britain was not necessary for understanding. The facts spoke for themselves. In a very loud and very clear voice.

The partition plan proposal was that: 56.4% of Palestine should be given for a Jewish state to people (many of them recently arrived alien immigrants) who constituted 33% of the population and owned 5.67% of the land.

The Arabs were not only the overwhelming majority in the territory allotted to them, they were also a near majority in the territory allotted to the Jews.

And that was not all. The territory allocated to the Jewish state—in size, 10 times the area owned by Jews—included the greater part of the valuable coastal area and other fertile areas, while the Palestinians were left mainly with mountainous and sterile regions.

It was a proposal for injustice on a massive scale. Lilienthal rightly called it the “original sin” which underlies the Arab–Israeli conflict. If approved and implemented, the partition plan would make a complete nonsense of the principle of self-determination, the noble ideal to which the governments of the so-called democratic nations of the West professed they were committed.

The Arabs rejected partition on the grounds that it violated their rights and was incompatible with law and justice. They also challenged the competence or power of the UN to recommend the partition of their homeland and thus the destruction of its territorial integrity.

So far as the legal aspects of the matter were concerned, the Arabs had 100% of the right on their side. Cattan put it this way.

The UN is an organisation of states which was formed for certain purposes defined in the Charter. At no time did this organisation possess any sovereignty or any other right over Palestine. Accordingly,
the UN possessed no power to decide the partition of Palestine, or to assign any part of its territory to a religious minority of alien immigrants in order that they might establish a state of their own.
Neither individually, nor collectively, could the members of the UN alienate, reduce or impair the sovereignty of the people of Palestine, or dispose of their territory, or destroy by partition the territorial integrity of their country.
⁶
(emphasis added).

Just as Britain with the Balfour Declaration had had no right to give away what it did not possess, so it was with the UN.

The most explicit statement on the UN’s lack of competence was however that delivered by one of its own sub-committees, Subcommittee 2 to the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestine Question. It was charged with the responsibility of determining whether or not the UN did have the competence or power to partition Palestine. In its report on 11 November 1947, the Sub-Committee said this:

A study of Chapter XII of the United Nations Charter leaves no room for doubt... neither the General Assembly nor any other organ of the United Nations is competent to entertain, still less to recommend or enforce, any solution other than the recognition of the independence of Palestine and that the settlement of the future government of Palestine is a matter solely for the people of Palestine... The United Nations cannot make a disposition or alienation of territory, nor can it deprive the majority of the people of Palestine of their territory and transfer it to the exclusive use of a minority in their country.
⁷

More to the point, the Sub-Committee was alarmed by the prospect of the United Nations acting without regard for international law—so alarmed that it submitted a draft resolution instructing Secretary General Trygve Lie (pronounced Lee) to transmit the partition resolution to the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
⁸
The draft resolution raised eight legal aspects of the matter, (a) to (h), on which it believed the Secretary General should have the advisory opinion of the International Court. Of the eight issues, (g) and (h) were the most pertinent. They were as follows:

 


1. (g) Whether the United Nations is competent to recommend either of the two plans and recommendations of the majority or minority of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, or another solution involving partition of the territory of Palestine, or a permanent trusteeship over any city or part of Palestine, without the Consent of the majority of the people of Palestine.
   ⁹
   

 


2. (h) Whether the United Nations, or any of its Member States, is competent to enforce or recommend the enforcement of any proposal concerning the constitution and future government of Palestine, in particular any plan or partition which is contrary to the wishes, or adopted without the consent of, the inhabitants of Palestine.
   ¹⁰
   

The draft resolution as a whole was rejected by the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine by 25 votes to 18, but (h) was rejected by the narrower margin of 21 votes to 20.
¹¹

As a consequence the Secretary General was not instructed to seek the advisory opinion of the International Court. If he had been so instructed he would have been advised that the partition resolution had no juridical value and that to proceed with it would constitute a denial of justice.

In effect the United Nations was putting itself above and beyond international law.

A most interesting contribution to understanding was made by Dr. W. T. Mallison, Jr., in his Foreword to Cattan’s seminal work
Palestine and International Law
. At the time Mallison was Professor of Law at George Washington University. He wrote:

The implicit assumption in the book that international law is relevant to a just solution of both the causal Zionist-Palestinian conflict and the derivative Arab–Israeli confrontation may be an unproven one to many readers. But the answer is that if international law were to be conceived as an exclusive Western system which excludes the vast majority of mankind, it has no creative potential for solving difficult problems. The United Nations Charter, as the fundamental law of the organised world community, repudiates such an exclusivist conception of international law. Its affirmation of self-determination and its repudiation of discrimination do not except the people of Palestine and other victims of colonialism from its worldwide scope... The Palestine problem, as Mr. Cattan demonstrates so persuasively, is not a failure of international law, since universal international law has never been applied to Palestine.” [Cattan’s argument was that it should be.]

The most explicit statement of why Israel did not need the sanction or support of international law was to be made by Prime Minister Golda Meir. In an interview with
Le Monde
on 15 October 1971, she said: “This country exists as a result of a promise made by God himself. It would be ridiculous to ask for the recognition of its legitimacy!” Mallison commented, “Needless to say, the concept of the creation and legitimacy of states by divine purpose is unknown in international law.”

For their part the Zionists were far from happy with the partition plan proposal because it did not give them the amount of land they wanted, and because Jerusalem was not to be included in the territory assigned to the Jewish state. But Zionism accepted the partition proposal and worked for its approval by the necessary two-thirds majority in the General Assembly. It did so for three related reasons.

First was the anticipated political gain from being seen as an acceptor rather than a rejector of compromise. From here on, and no matter that they had 100 percent of the legal right on their side, the Arabs, if they did not accept partition, could be portrayed in Zionist propaganda as rejectors of compromise.

Second was that approval by the UN of the partition resolution would give the Jewish state a birth certificate of sorts and thus the appearance of legitimacy. (It is reasonable to assume that Zionism’s best legal minds told Ben-Gurion and his colleagues that a UN decision in their favour would not give the Jewish state legitimacy in the eyes of international law; but that would have been of no concern to the founders of the Zionist state. They would have taken comfort from the truth of the old cliché which says that, in the real world, “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”)

Third was Ben-Gurion’s confidence that his military forces could beat the Arabs in war—at least to the extent of taking by force more Arab land than had been allotted to the Jewish state in the partition plan. He was happy that “the final struggle would be between the Jews and the Arabs, with military force determining the outcome.”
¹²
In that context, the Jewish state of the partition plan proposal was therefore a necessary starting point. The truth was that Ben-Gurion would have been very disappointed if the Arabs had accepted partition. Ben-Gurion’s confidence that his Zionist forces would get the better of the Arabs on the battlefield was due in large part to the money Golda had raised in America. (It, as we shall see, made possible the purchase of military hardware of all kinds that was denied to the Arabs).

Before the minority report recommending a unitary Palestine was consigned to the dustbin of history—to leave only the partition resolution for the vote in the General Assembly, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Prince Feisal, expressed his willingness to meet with Secretary of State Marshal. With the blessing of his father, King Ibn Saud, Feisal was ready to discuss the possibility of a “reconciliation” with the majority on the Special Committee who had recommended partition.

The implication was that Saudi Arabia, the most important and influential of all the Arab states, was ready in principle to work for Arab acceptance of a UN resolution that would establish a Jewish administered entity in Palestine—provided it was part of unitary Palestine (i.e. was not an independent Jewish state); provided the size of the territory allotted to the Jewish entity was not out of all proportion to the number of Jews then in Palestine and the amount of land they owned; and provided also that there would be agreed limits on future Jewish immigration. Quietly Saudi Arabia was, in fact, thinking the unthinkable—there was need for an accommodation of sorts with Zionism. Why?

Despite what King Ibn Saud had said to President Roosevelt and Churchill, and despite what Feisal had said to American diplomats, the Saudis were realists. They knew that the creation of a Jewish entity in Palestine was now inevitable—because of the Jewish immigration Britain had allowed to give substance to the Balfour Declaration; and because of the Nazi holocaust and the way the Zionists had exploited it to consolidate their ability to influence the American political process. The Saudis also knew that the frontline Arab states, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, were in no position to fight and win a war to put an end to the Zionist enterprise.