November 29, 1947 -- it is well known that on this date the UN General Assembly of then only 57 states (today nearly 200) voted by a majority a plan to partition the then British colony Palestine. Less well known is that there was a democratic minority which presented a different course. It showed that such a decision over the head of and against the will of the concerned people is illegal and even against the charter of the UNO, that proposed "Arab state" would not be viable, that even the proposed "Jewish state" would have an Arab majority. It presented three draft resolutions to the General Assembly, the first callin for the International Court to consider the legality of the UN as an outside force to decide such grave matters as dividing Palestine against the majority will of its population, the second that the problem of the Jewish "displaced persons" in the post-war Europe should be solved by the countries responsible for that refugee crisis and the richer states, and not on the back of the small country Palestine which had nothing to do with it. The third draft resolution proposing some core points of a democratic constitution of a unitary republic Palestine. In the Appendix, Sub-Committee 2 provides serveral statistical tables showing the real situation of Palestine.
We have added two supplements. In the 1st supplement you will find a chronology of how the UN got involved in the Palestine question, of the UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine), and of the ad hoc Commitee formed by the UN General Assembly in September 1947, with the voting record and several quotes from remarkable statements. The 2nd supplement contains documents highlighting the political framework of the 1st World War, how the Jews were exploited for the war in Europe, and the Arabs for the conquest of the "Land Route to India". This includes a longer quote from Maxime Rodinson on the Balfour Declaration and the chapters of the 1937 Peel Commissions report on the Balfour Declaration and the McMahon Pledge. The originally planned articles drawing the balance sheet of the partition resolution after seven decades and how the Zionist colonisation adventure created an unvolvable dilemma for the British colonial rule, howt they finally lost the "Middle East" to the USA in the 2nd World War and its aftermath, which led the British to hand their unsolvable dilemma over to the United Nations are being postponed to a later day. It is planned to make the whole available for download both as PDF and as eBook (EPUB).
February 2015
mlwerke.de editor Lüko Willms
