Jim Harb writes:
Phil, the United Nations did not create Israel. I've noticed that you mention this from time to time, but it's simply, historically, and factually inaccurate. This is not only a misstatement of historical fact, it is an important and misleading one in the continuing discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The reality of the matter is this: The United Nations does not appropriate to itself the authority to create states. The United Nations only authorizes itself to recognize states for membership, states that are formed or proclaimed by the people of said state. The State of Israel was created by the Jewish leaders of the area that became Israel. Period. The United Nations recognized that creation and subsequently admitted Israel to UN membership. While this may seem to be a small distinction, it is salient.
Yes, it's true that prior to the formation of the state by the local Jewish leaders then living in Palestine that the United Nations had recommended that the former British Mandate of Palestine be bifurcated into two distinct areas, but this was only a recommendation, and did not carry the weight of international law, and certainly did not create the State of Israel.
The reality of the matter is this: The United Nations does not appropriate to itself the authority to create states. The United Nations only authorizes itself to recognize states for membership, states that are formed or proclaimed by the people of said state. The State of Israel was created by the Jewish leaders of the area that became Israel. Period. The United Nations recognized that creation and subsequently admitted Israel to UN membership. While this may seem to be a small distinction, it is salient.
Yes, it's true that prior to the formation of the state by the local Jewish leaders then living in Palestine that the United Nations had recommended that the former British Mandate of Palestine be bifurcated into two distinct areas, but this was only a recommendation, and did not carry the weight of international law, and certainly did not create the State of Israel.
You may think that I am splitting hairs, or parsing words. While that may be true, this distinction that I am making is considered to be an important one for many people of the world, not the least of whom are the Palestinians. As you can readily see, this changes the situation from one that implies that the State of Israel enjoys the blessing and moral authority of the United Nations for its creation to one in which the Jewish leaders of then-Palestine were the locus of the authority in the creation of the state. Many people, particularly in the U.S., are misled to think that the UN created Israel, and this misunderstanding helps to confuse and cloud the issue, but of course heaven knows that there is so much confusion over this conflict that we'll never make it all clear anyway. We do what we can.
Israel is. It exists as a state. Recognizing that the United Nations did not create Israel does not change the current reality, or diminish the standing of Israel. However, when we talk about this continuingly vexing conflict, it is important to put the situation in its accurate historical and factual context. Otherwise, people -- including your readers -- continue to be somewhat misled about the current situation and how it all came to be.
Israel is. It exists as a state. Recognizing that the United Nations did not create Israel does not change the current reality, or diminish the standing of Israel. However, when we talk about this continuingly vexing conflict, it is important to put the situation in its accurate historical and factual context. Otherwise, people -- including your readers -- continue to be somewhat misled about the current situation and how it all came to be.
Uh-oh. I asked my resident Chomsky, Jeff Blankfort, for some backup here:
Harb is correct. The UN General Assembly which did not and still doesn't have the power to make decisions, that power being reserved to the Security Council, voted to partition the remaining area of the British Mandate into two states on November 29, 1947, one Jewish and one Arab, but that did not create the state. That was done unilaterally by David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948 after the British speeded up their scheduled August departure and pulled their troops out of Palestine. The newly declared state was recognized by Truman, de facto right away but not de jure until January 31, 1949. The USSR was the first to recognize it de jure. UN membership came later. What is rarely mentioned is that the Security Council chose not to act on the General Assembly vote. November 29, 1947, is memorialized by Palestinians and their supporters because of the UN partition vote but, in fact, it had no legal standing and the Jews in Palestine would have done what they did to the Palestinians if the UN had not existed. They had already begun the ethnic cleansing before that with the massacre at Deir Yassin on April 8, being just one example.
I'm no international law scholar. It sure looks like I'm wrong, and these guys are much better informed than me. I'll watch myself in future. But I will say that the Partition resolution is not meaningless, was not meaningless as a motion of international will (lobbied though it was), and has resonance for me because Israel derives some sustenance from it to this day even as it has flouted countless subsequent resolutions of the same body.
Was it already clear in 1947 that the recently created General Assembly did not have the power to make international law?
Doesn't really matter for the purpose of arguing with people who will use any means to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (all the while feverishly denying that ethnic cleansing is being committed). If you invoke the UN's partition plan, they will use the British Mandate as having greater weight because the "Arabs" "rejected" the partition. If you point out that according to the mandate, the Jewish homeland was supposed to be found within Mandate Palestine, and that they would have a right to call it their home, but they were not supposed to create a Jewish state there, they will bring up treaties with the Ottomans. It's astonishing the sort of arguments people will resort to (and expect the rest of us to believe) when they are trying to defend the indefensible.
Good point, Sarah.
Hey, Phil, while you and Adam are overseas, why dont you have Jeff Blankfort hold down the fort — ~/ — for you here on Mondoweiss? I love his writing, which means I love the way he thinks.
I do think that the reminders of Harb and Blankfort are well worth remembering–especially as added context in Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel and renounce violence. While many make the excellent point that Israel is not obliged to recognize Palestine or renounce violence, this nevertheless injects a false equality into a radically lopsided conflict.
The Israel power elite and aipac would like us to forget these seemingly small but important details–indeed would like us to adopt its own practice of highly selective memory–e.g., remember the Holocaust but not the Naqbah. That selectivity extends to the actions of the U.N., e.g., remember all the "cruel" resolutions the U.N. (tried to) pass against po' defenseless Israel, but forget that the U.S. vetoed most of them.
The point about the U.N. "recommending" partition and "recognizing" Israel is extremely important if you're trying to construct an accurate argument against Zionism–at least, the form of Zionism that won out in the end. Zionism fuels the whole Israel project, which from beginning to end flies in the face of international law. Zionists will try to invoke (and reconstruct) UN decisions when it serves their interests, but will imply that the UN is just another antisemitic organization what that serves their purpose.
We forget accurate historical details at our peril.
Your commenters are correct. I believe the UNGA did, in fact, have the right to dispose of certain mandate property. But the partition resolution was a recommendation, not a binding decree. Israel's acceptance as a UN nation was only confirmed when the UN subsequently agreed to admit it to the UN after the war of independence.
The Arab's rejection of partition was not, in and of itself, a violation of anything. What was problematic was the decision to then resort to war to try and destroy the fledgling Jewish state, a decision that was indeed a "nakba" for the Palestinians.
"remember…the Naqbah"
Thanks for your great comment.
Please allow me to correct you on one small detail. The word is correctly transliterated as Nakba, not Naqbah or Naqba. In Arabic it is spelled نكبة from the root ن ك ب. Transliterating it as Naqba changes the middle letter of the root to ق, and turns it into a completely different word (a word that does not actually exist in formal Arabic) from a completely different root with a completely different set of meanings. Transliterating it as Naqbah adds a fourth root consonant, turning it into a root that as far as I know does not exist.
Phil,
You're not wrong about the terminology. Maybe if you shifted the term to the UN authorized the state of Israel, or recognized the state of Israel.
Its charter still has the authority of international law to the highest level that international law has (bi-cameral ratification).
Finkelstein's assertion that a UCJ recommendation carries as much weight is ludicrous. (He does recognize the authority of the UN ratification of the state of Israel.)
Your headline is actually more misrepresentative than your original statement.
"What was problematic was the decision to then resort to war to try and destroy the fledgling Jewish state"
The premise on which this statement is based is faulty in that it ignores the actual timeline of events, and distorts the intent of both parties.
A proclamation of its own existence as a sovereign state by a group of comparatively recently arrived jew on land tilled for generations by the locals arabs created the State of Israel only in the sense of that claim to recognition based on belligerency. The most analogous scenario of that time and place that I can think of is a scenario of a civil war in a temporary no man's land that yet held people. I can [pro]claim to be the king of my block, but if nobody or entity with power recognizes me as such, did I create my kingdom?
The creation of a state is not a one step process. Even the results of force need to be recognized unless you are a state on a self-sufficient island. The lapse of the Mandate
created the official no-man's land, the UN partition effort gave some uber-color to some rights
to the land by both jews and arabs on the mandate land, the self-proclamation of sovereignty timed to apply both ripely tossed the ball to the powers outside the land in question. Truman
picked it up and ran with it, the first head of a really major power to RECOGNIZE Israel.
Overriding objections from the Department of State, disregarding the wishes of Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, overlooking the nonrecognition of Israel by strategically located and oil-rich Arab states, the general fighting between Arabs and Jews throughout Palestine, and stating that he did so in keeping with the principle of self-determination and for humanitarian reasons, Truman extended de facto recognition when Israel was but eleven minutes old. His personal records and other records at the Truman Library show he did so to fund his whistle stop campaign, get NY votes, and good press by promptly giving the Zionists what they wanted. After Israel held its first elections, on 25 January 1949, Truman extended it de jure recognition six days later. War between Israel and its Arab neighbors has been intermittent ever since–and now the Pals want a state too, but there isn't many arabs (yet) in the USA presidential constituency, nor do they have a wealthy diaspora.
Correcto mundo, Citizen. The word in this context– "create"– is misleading as it ignores the political process macros needed to fully validate proclamations and implied conditions.
I think that's what Phil's driving at:
"But I will say that the Partition resolution is not meaningless, was not meaningless as a motion of international will (lobbied though it was), and has resonance for me because Israel derives some sustenance from it to this day even as it has flouted countless subsequent resolutions of the same body.'
Otherwise, what we have on our hands is known as a rogue state.
Quote Phil Weiss:But I will say that the Partition resolution is not meaningless, was not meaningless as a motion of international will
Right. The UN at that time had 56 member states, mostly the winners of WW2, a few neutrals and some friends. 33 voted for, 13 against and 10 abstained (including the UK). It was not at all representative of the worlds will. Today a vote in the same body (that now consist of close to 200 nations) about introducing Arab Majority Rule — and thereby effectively end the jewish colony 'Israel' — would produce an overwhelming majority. The argument that many of these states are authocratic and therefore not valid, do not hold. First of all there are other governing forms than democracy, and many of these countries have an established tradition of chieftains/rulers. and there can be little arguing that if such a country's representative at the UN are given instruction to vote in favour of Arab Majority Rule in all of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterannean, that this will in fact be in accordance with the majority of his peoples wish — peoples that very often themselves have grave experiences with colonialism.
Two observations:
First, UNGA (1947) proposed, but did not create either proposed state (or the also proposed separate entity of Jerusalem), and gave no-one any permission to create transfers of existing populations of the region. Ethnic Cleansing was chosen by Israel (when you make an omelette you have to break someone else's eggs) but not authorized, proposed, anticipated, etc., by UN. The region proposed for a Jewish state had a majority Jewish population, as the region proposed for a non-Jewish state had a majority of non-Jews, but each region was a mixed population. Israel's decision to expand its borders so as to include lands beyond those proposed by UNGA meant that the proper non-Jewish population of pre-1967 Israel was a greater proportion of the total than it would have been in the UN-proposed territory and the "need" for Ethnic Cleansing proportionately the greater.
Second, Israel made various promises in a letter to the UN and its admission by the UN was, I believe, made conditional on those promises (as also on its promise to abide by the UN Charter, which generally forbids the use or threat of force as an instrument of foreign policy). I suspect that we should resurrect that letter, for it seems likely that Israel has not fulfilled its promises made there.
Israel could not fulfill those promises because the Arabs nations refused to allow it. Once that occurred, israel was no longer obliged to make good.
Arabs seem to enjoy screwing themselves.
A proclamation of its own existence as a sovereign state by a group of comparatively recently arrived jew on land tilled for generations by the locals arabs created the State of Israel only in the sense of that claim to recognition based on belligerency.
@Citizen…
So there is no Jewish historical/biblical claim to the land at all, prior to the Arabs and the Islamic conquest?
The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began many months before Israel declared itself a state. Israel began the war with the Arab states with this act of ethnic cleansing, and only called it a war after the Arab states stepped in in order to prevent it from taking even more territory (beyond what it had been allotted in the partition plan) than it had already taken by that time. Many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed months before Israel declared its independence.
Its very clearly stated within the resolution itself that there was an explicit purpose to create an arab and a jewish state within the borders of palestine. It aslo states in Part 1 A 3 "…, shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948. Therefore your rational that the UN isnt responsible seems to be either incorrect or if as you say the founding principles of neither the un general assembly nor the secutrity council has no authority to create states then ILLEGAL. Whatever, the facts are that anti semitism was in effect concluded in europe by the un santioning the removal of the jewish question to a place far away from where it actually belongs and should have been dealt with. How many other minority groups have been afforded the luxury of statehood by the exclusion of the legal occupants of the terrotory. Every askenazi jew that circumvented the lawful rights held by the people within the mandate should be sent back to where they came from. All the jews that have arrived and continue to arrive, the material supply for the armed forces of israel should all be sent back to where they belong EUROPE. The actions of the UN and its culpable member states should be held accountable for this action that has fostered abuse and miseery on all apries for the last 60+ years. The rule of law should prevail this mistake should be corrected as the jewish population has shown that all it learnt for the holocaust was to emulate the worst of the worst behaviour humans have displayed towards one another. I would have hoped that the suffering of the jewish populations of europe over and over again through time would have dispensed awarded imparted understanding and empathy INSTEAD they have but learned to EMULATE the reprehensible unnacceptable distructive inhuman behaviour. Let them febd for themselves where they belong EUROPE