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Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor

The UN Palestine Partition Plan was the "Two State Solution" that the Arabs Rejected

July 5, 2015 --

We are going to hear a lot more about the "Two State Solution" for Palestine in the weeks and months ahead, with the possibility of a UN Security Council lresolution calling for such a "solution" to the "problem of Palestine." LPR expects that adoption of a Security Council "Two State Solution" will be followed by demands for sanctions against Israel.

LPR is NOT confident that the current anti-Israel campaign will be seen as merely an update on the original anti-Israel campaign, in 1948-1949. There are also reports that the Palestinian Authority will seek war crimes charges against Israeli officials. And so, the anti-Israel forces in 2015 wave the anti-Israel banner first waved in 1948 and 1949 -- avoid direct negotiations leading to peace with Israel.

In 2015, not only does the Obama administration continue the practice of demanding concessions from Israel, a practice begun by the State Department in 1948-- it also will see Israel made vulnerable to a nuclear-armed Iran.

In January 1948, five months before the establishment of Israel, the State Department indicated that it had difficulty with the UN Palestine Partition Plan, approved by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1949. In the view of George F. Kennan, head of the policy planning staff at State in 1948, "We should take no further initiative in implementing or aiding partition."

American backing of the partition plan, according to Kennan, "brought about loss of US prestige and disillusionment among the Arabs and other neighboring peoples as to US objectives and ideals. Kennan charged the "Jewish leaders and organizations" with "[t]he main responsibility" for the violence in Palestine. Another State Department official, Samuel K.C. Kopper, early in 1948, asserted that the UN Palestine Partition Plan "was only a recommendation." Kopper doubted that "the Arabs of Palestine" were "under any obligations whatsoever, legal or moral, to be bound by General Assembly recommendations."

The argument of State Department officials in early 1948 was that the Arabs opposed Palestine and due to this opposition, partition could not be achieved peacefully. What State Department officials did, of course, was to give Arab violence as the excuse to do nothing to implement partition.

Once Israel was established itself and fought off Arab invasion, State Department officials took a rather different view of the partition plan. Now the plan bound Israel to the partition. boundaries.

According the the State Department, any territory that Israel gained it fighting off the Arabs, now had to be offset by relinquishing territory Israel was awarded under partition. If Israel wished to retain the western Galilee that it took in battle, it must cede the Negev to the Arabs, according to the State Department view.

Israel rejected this view, pointing out that the territory it was given under the partition plan "was based on a series of assumption which failed to materialize."

The Israel position added, "The hopes of peaceful implementation were erased by the Arab revolt from within and the Arab invasion from without. The Arab state of Palestine and the economic union [of the Arab and Jewish states] did not come into being." Noting that Israel achieved "independence alone and unaided," the Israeli government concluded that it "cannot agree that the act of aggression committed by the ASrab states in defiance of the [UN] Charter and of the [UN General Assembly] calls for a territorial award [the the Arabs]."

Additionally the State Department pressed Israel to accept the return of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees who fled Palestine. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in 1949, wrote that the situation of the Arab refugees should not be "subordinate[d]...to mass Jewish immigration into Israel." To demands that Israel repatriate hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees, the Israeli government declared that it "cannot in the name of humanitarianism be driven to commit suicide."

On the matter of Jewish immigration, in 1950, Samuel K.C. Kopper, then Deputy Director of State's Near East office, proposed that U.S. policy should "discourage where possible continued immigration into Israel." He also proposed that the United States should "maintain an attitude of impartiality as between the Arab States and Israel."

The Israeli government's statement in 1949, that it "cannot in the name of humanitarianism be driven to commit suicide" applies equally, in the view of LPR, today, to The New York Times which, in a bizarre editorial , June 23, ignored the Hamas practice of putting Arab civilians in harm's way, asserting that it was "unrealistic to expect Hamas" ...to comply with international law or police itself/" This incredibly invidious editorial then demanded that Israel do more to prevent civilian casualties.

The New York Times, apparently, would have the Jewish State committing suicide by not returning Hamas fire lest it kill people placed by Hamas in harm's way. As the late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban pointed out, years ago: Israel fought off Arab assault and, thereafter, was expected to sue for peace. This was the position held, effectively by the U.S. State Department in 1948-1949.

The State Department opposed establishment of a Jewish State and, after the establishment of Israel, continuously offered "friendly advice" to the Israeli government that, if taken, would have left Israel vulnerable to renewed Arab onslaught. The anti-Israel forces in Washington have yet to explain how they can reconcile their demand of concessions from Israel with their insistence that Arab-Israel peace must come out of Arab-Israel negotiations.

Do not expect The New York Times ever to wonder that perhaps Arab-Israel peace has not been achieved, except as between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan -- because U.S. policies have encouraged Israel's enemies to wait until the Jewish State has been delivered to them on a diplomatic platter.