Partition Plan
In the short period of time between 1917 and 1947, the promissory clause of the Balfour Declaration of a “national Jewish homeland” without prejudice to the Palestinian Arab majority’s civil, religious, and political rights was transformed into the recognition of Jewish aspirations for an independent Jewish state on part of the territory of Palestine.
With the strong political support of the United States, driven by the emerging Jewish lobby, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted in November 1947 a resolution partitioning Palestine into more or less two geographically equal states. This occurred notwithstanding the fact that the proportion of Jews in Palestine was estimated at about 10 percent at the start of WWI. The 1931 census of Palestine showed the number of Jews to be 18 percent. By 1947, estimates of the percentage of Jews fluctuate between 20 percent and 30 percent, depending on whether that percentage includes illegal immigrants. Nevertheless, the territory allocated to the prospective Jewish state by the Partition Plan consisted of approximately half of the total territory of Palestine. Thus, 80 percent of the Arab population of Palestine, who owned 90 percent of the land, received approximately half of the overall territory. The plan was viewed by Arab Palestinians and by the neighboring Arab states as fundamentally unfair, and they rejected it. They also saw such a plan as lacking legitimacy because it violated the Palestinian’s right to self-determination, a right enshrined in the United Nations Charter. This, and the fact that hundreds of thousand of Palestinians were expelled or driven to leave during the 1948 war, is why Palestinians today claim a “right of return.” The conflict of narratives in this tragic dispute is such that, the Jews also claimed the “right of return” to ensure their right to immigrate to Palestine.British attempts to reign in the Arab and Jewish communities and to stabilize Palestine had little or no lasting effect. With Britain’s economy drained by the war, and its presence in Palestine becoming more and more unpopular at home, the government no longer wanted to assume the responsibility for Palestine by itself. In November 1947, thirty years after taking control of Palestine and after making no headway toward the creation of an independent state in Palestine as the Mandate for Palestine had required, Britain announced its decision to withdraw from Palestine and to leave the “Question of Palestine” to the United Nations Trusteeship Council.
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