@Moment-in-Time,
From my personal archives:
Article written by author Paul Findley, Professor Emeritus and former Congressman
More on the Palestinians
At the time of the 1917 Balfour Not only were a people already in Palestine, but they had a well-established society that was recognized by other Arabs as uniquely "Palestinian." It consisted of respected intellectual and professional classes, political organizations, and a thriving agrarian economy that was expanding into the crude Declaration there were about 600,000 Arabs in Palestine and about 60,000 Jews. Over the next thirty years the ratio narrowed as Jewish immigration increased especially as a result of the anti-Semitic policies of Adolph Hitler. However, on the eve of the 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine, Arabs still were a large majority, with Jews amounting to only one-third of the population——608,225 Jews to 1,2237,332 Arabs. When Max Nordau, an early Zionist and friend of Zangwill, learned in 1897 there was an indigenous Arab population in Palestine, he exclaimed: "I didn't know that! We are committing an injustice!"
The beginnings of modern industry. Observes scholar John Quigley: "The Arab population had been stable for hundreds of years. There was no substantial in-migration in the nineteenth century."
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It was only strong pressure exerted by the Truman administration that secured passage of the UN Partition Plan by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947, by a vote of 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions and 1 absent. Among those nations that succumbed to US pressure were France, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, Luxembourg, Paraguay and the Philippines. Former Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles wrote: "By direct order of the White House every form of pressure, direct and indirect, was brought to bear by American official upon those countries outside of the Muslim world that were known to be either uncertain or opposed to partition. Representatives or intermediaries were employed by the White House to make sure that the necessary majority would at length be secured."
The partition plan adopted as Resolution 181, divided Palestine between "independent Arab and Jewish states and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. Future Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett argued that the resolution had "binding force," and Israel's Declaration of Independence cited it three times as legal justification for the establishment of the state. But the General Assembly, in contrast to the Security Council, has no powers beyond making recommendations. I cannot enforce its recommendations nor are they legally binding except on internal UN Matters.
The Palestinians, as was their right, rejected the plan because it granted the Jews more than half of Palestine despite the fact that they made up only one-third of the population and owned only 6.59 percent of the land. In addition, the Palestinians maintained that the United Nations had no legal right to recommend partition when the majority inhabitants of Palestine opposed it. Nonetheless, by rejecting partition Palestinians did not reject their own claim to an independent nation. Their opposition was to a Jewish state established on Palestinian land, not to the Jews' right as a people.
Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion advised his colleagues to accept partition because, he told them, "There is no such thing in history as a final arrangement––not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements."
One of Zionism's great pioneers, Nahum Goldmann, expressed pragmatism in a different vein: "There is no hope for a Jewish state which has to face another 50 years of struggle against Arab enemies."
