Content area
Full Text
November 1947 Palestine Partition Launched 40 Years of Warfare
"Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question." - David Ben-Gurion, 1937.
"Israel's ostensible acceptance of the resolution remained its most important propaganda weapon, even as it violated one section of that document after another." - Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel, Pantheon, 1987.
Warfare between Jews and Arabs in Palestine did not begin with the arrival of Zionists in the Ottoman Turkish-ruled Holy Land in the late 19th century, nor in outbreaks of Arab-Jewish rioting in the 1920s under the British Mandate. Even the heavy fighting of 1936 was mostly between British troops and Arab Palestinians who felt Britain was giving in to pressure to establish a Jewish state on their land. Similarly, the bloody guerrilla warfare there during and after World War II was mostly between British troops and Jewish extremists, who felt the British were giving in to Arab pressure against such a state.
Nor did the warfare begin on May 14, 1948, with the proclamation of the state of Israel, or on the following day with withdrawal of British forces and the entrance into Palestine of Egyptian, Iraqi, and Jordanian army units. By then, the shooting was well underway, triggered by the debate that led to the November 29, 1947, United Nations resolution to partition Palestine between more than 1,300,000 Arabs, who owned 90 percent of the land, and 600,000 Jews, who owned seven percent of the land. The resolution gave 53 percent of the land and 497,000 Arabs living in it to the Jewish state and the remainder of the land, in which 10,000 Jews were living among 900,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs, to the Palestinian Arab state. That masterpiece of gerrymandering set off fighting all over the Holy Land.
The statistics cited explain the injustice that might have prompted Palestinian Arabs to fight. In fact, however, Jewish militias initiated the warfare, as they sought to link together the territories they had been awarded, clear as many Arabs as possible out of the Galilee, and occupy Arab towns and villages along the road...