Content area
Full Text
Moshe Ma'oz is a professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.
The UN plan to divide Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states and a Special International Regime for Jerusalem (November, 1947) had been preceded by a somewhat similar design in July 1937. At that time, the British Peel Commission recommended that Mandate Palestine be partitioned into a small Jewish state, comprising the Galilee, the Jezreal Valley and the coastal plain, and a large Arab state - the rest of Palestine united with Transjordan. Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a few other areas would remain a British Mandate zone. 1
The major cause for the 1937 partition proposal, namely that Arab and Jewish interests could not be reconciled, was aggravated in 1947, after both parties rejected the 1946 recommendation by an Anglo-American committee to establish a bi-national state in Palestine under UN trusteeship. While the Jewish community accepted the 1937 and 1947 partition plans, the Palestinian Arab leadership, dominated by the Husseini family, rejected both plans categorically. Indeed, most Palestinians turned down the 1937 design, even though it designated only 20 percent of Palestine to the proposed Jewish state. Furthermore, the Palestinian leadership even rejected the 1939 British White Paper, which had promised them an independent state within ten years while limiting Jewish immigration and turning the Jews into a minority in an Arab Palestinian state. 2
Why, then, did the Palestinian Arabs reject these schemes, in particular the 1947 UN partition plan? Undoubtedly, some moderate or pragmatic Palestinians were prepared to accept a small Jewish state in part of Palestine. 3 But the Husseinis' leadership - not democratically elected but backed by the Arab League - continued to intimidate its moderate brethren and to maintain its uncompromising position against the Jews. Even according to moderate Palestinian intellectuals, this leadership adopted an extreme policy vis-a-vis the idea of two states, thus grossly ignoring the will of the UN and the Great Powers, and leading the Palestinians into war and tragedy. 4
Indeed, this militant syndrome of the Palestinian leadership significantly contributed to preventing a political solution to the Arab-Jewish dispute over Palestine in 1947, as in 1937. This syndrome was inspired by an intense Islamic and nationalist ideology, dominated by the...