MAP 2: 1947 UN PARTITION PLAN

Throughout the Mandate period, Palestinian resentment increased as European Jews began colonising their homeland and Palestinians could see that they were being denied their inherent right to national self-determination. They resisted, and a major rebellion broke out in 1936-39.
This led to The Peel Commission report and the 1939 White paper, which recommended partitioning Palestine and restrictions on land transfers. Britain tried to implement various formulae, but now had to deal with violence from both the Jews and the Arabs. Unable to undo the escalating violence it had helped fuel, it turned the problem over to the United Nations.

The UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 recommended the partition of Mandate Palestine into two states: one Jewish on 55% of the land where the population was 499,020 Jews to 509,780 Arabs and the other an Arab State on 45% of the land where the population was 9,520 Jews to 749,101 Arabs. Jerusalem was to be established as corpus separatum – an international city under UN administration.

The Partition Resolution totally ignored the ethnic composition of Palestine and was in direct contradiction to the UN Charter of Human Rights, which should have recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their homeland. By ignoring this, the UN bowed to Zionist lobbying which claimed Palestine over and above the rights of the indigenous peoples. It sought to compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust in Europe but at the expense of the Palestinians who had no part in the Holocaust.

No Palestinians or Arabs were part of the Special Committee, UNSCOP, that came up with this plan. The Arabs refused to accept this partition because it was unjust to the indigenous Palestinians. By giving the Zionist movement more than half of Palestine, when the Jews owned less than 6% and constituted no more than one third of the population bolstered by recent immigration, and against the consent of the native Arab population who refused to divide the land with a European settler population, the UN directly contributed to the seeds of the current Israeli-Arab conflict that has not been resolved to this day.

The Palestinians were at the mercy of the UN which refused to endorse its own charter vis-a-vis their rights and was willing to endorse a solution that was illegal and immoral. Despite demands for its legality to be tested in the International Court of Justice, this has never been done.