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The idea of partitioning Palestine into two states as a way of satisfying both Palestinian and Zionist national aspirations is not a new one. It was first proposed at the official level by the Peel Commission of Inquiry in 1937, following the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. The Arabs, under the leadership of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, rejected the plan, not least because the Arab state was to be merged with Transjordan. The Zionist movement was divided but the moderates, led by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, won the argument. "The Jews would be fools not to accept it," said Weizmann, "even if the Jewish state were the size of a tablecloth. C 'est le premier pas qui compte /" - It is the first step that counts!
A decade later, in 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 which called for replacing the British Mandate for Palestine with two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with a special international regime for the City of Jerusalem. The logic of partition was now endorsed by the international community. Once again, however, the Partition Plan was accepted by the Jewish Agency and rejected by the Arabs.
The Arabs went to war in 1948 to resist partition and to liberate Palestine, but they suffered a resounding defeat. The winners in this war were Israel and Jordan; the greatest losers were the Palestinians: 750,000 Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map of the Middle East. This was the nakba, the catastrophe. One of the reasons for the Arab defeat was a tacit understanding reached the previous year between King Abdullah of Jordan and the Jewish Agency to divide up Palestine between themselves at the expense of the Palestinians. This secret understanding laid the foundation for limiting the clashes of their armed forces during the war and continuing collaboration in its aftermath.1
In the course of the 1948 war, the newly bom state of Israel enlarged its territory from the 55% proposed by the UN cartographers to 78% of Mandatory Palestine. Jordan captured, and two years later formally annexed, the West Bank, which would have been the heartland of the Palestinian state. The Palestinians were reduced from a nation in search of a state to a...