Sean Lee takes a hard look at a conversation many people are talking about, between Matthew Yglesias and Jeffrey Goldberg, in which the two bloggers lament that the Arabs did not accept 1947 Partition, that was their big mistake and the root of the problem. This is a highly-dubious train of thought. 1, you can’t really say that the Israelis accepted Partition; they wanted the whole pie, and lo they have got it (see Joel Suarez, below). 2, This kind of thinking is indulgent and idle. You can’t reverse history, you must deal with it. 3, Most important, Arab public opinion was completely opposed to Zionism. It would be like urging Jews to accept the presidency of Charles Lindbergh.
That is the core issue here: the political principle of self-determination. Lee quotes from the King-Crane commission of 1919 (emphasis his)
In his address of July 4, 1918, President Wilson laid down the following principle as one of the four great “ends for which the associated peoples of the world were fighting”; “The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.” If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine-nearly nine tenths of the whole-are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people’s rights, though it kept within the forms of law
It is to be noted also that the feeling against the Zionist program is not confined to Palestine, but shared very generally by the people throughout Syria as our conferences clearly showed.
Arab opinion was not much different 30 years later. And all the Arab members of the United Nations voted against Partition. They got rolled. You could say that the world’s big mistake was not respecting Arab opinion. Even Richard Cohen has said that the creation of Israel was a "mistake."
The question is how to deal with all these errors now. And the main response I had to the Goldberg-Yglesias conversation is that This issue cannot be decided by two empowered Jews sitting around talking. There must be Palestinians represented fairly, or we’re going to have no end of violence. Goldberg-Yglesias’s complacency about the ’48 mistake caused me to imagine two Anglo American sitting around after the Indian wars and saying, Their big mistake was that they didn’t all act like Squanto. But the big difference between the two situations, realistically speaking, is that the Native Americans were a defeated people. The Palestinians are not a defeated people. They recapitulate some of the Jewish experience: they have an active educated Diaspora and an active national life even inside their ghettoes. And they are supported by a huge swath of the Middle East that is strategically vital to the U.S. That’s a problem!
The outcome of all this may be that Arabs accept the existence of a Jewish state. What do I know? But the only way to get there is to engage them and respect Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination that we have rubbished again and again. And hey, while you are invoking ’47 Partition, let’s invoke the General Assembly’s other resolution of that era, 194, the Right of Return. Partition created a Jewish state. It exists. The refugees have never been allowed to return. Talk about a festering, living grievance…
Joel Suarez, a PhD candidate at Georgetown, added the following:
In a recent argument with Center for American Progress fellow Matthew Yglesias, Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg identifies the culprits of the Arab-Israeli conflict:
Well, it seems to me Goldberg is either embarrassingly ignorant or wildly dishonest (though I’m open to the possibility that he is both). Goldberg serves up the Leon Uris version of history, ignoring nearly three decades of scholarship based on Israeli archives (not nationalist mythology). Goldberg might conveniently ignore what we now know, but Yglesias hardly shows he’s familiar with the history by accepting Goldberg’s fantastically simple (and thoroughly incorrect) understanding of the partition proposal of 1947.
Some basic facts about the partition plan and Palestine are in order. First, in 1947 Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population of mandate Palestine while Jews owned less than seven percent of the land. What exactly did UN 181 propose? Despite Palestine’s overwhelmingly Arab population, UN 181 allocated 55 percent of Palestine to the Jewish state while Arabs were granted only about 43 percent of the land for a Palestinian state (Jerusalem would be under international administration, a corpus separatum). The areas allocated to Israel contained the best land, including virtually all the coastal and interior plains, while Arabs were given the least valuable land. Moreover, including native Bedouins, Arabs constituted roughly half of the population of the land allocated for the Jewish state. Given these facts, how could anyone expect any native population to willingly dispossess themselves of more than half of their land to mostly recent immigrants?
A few words should also be said about Goldberg’s claim of Jewish acceptance of UN 181. Thanks to the opening of Israeli archives and access to David Ben-Gurion’s diaries and personal papers, we now know that the Yishuv’s leadership understood UN 181 to be merely the first step in a long process of conquering all of Palestine (the Revisionist Zionists had even more grandiose plans). Thanks to Avi Shlaim’s meticulous scholarship, we now know that before the vote on UN 181 the Yishuv’s leadership made a tacit agreement with King Abdullah of Transjordan to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state by dividing Palestine between them. Lastly, when it came down to the 1947-1948 war, of the five regular Arab armies, Lebanon never crossed into mandate Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan never crossed into the territory allocated to Israel, while Syria made only minor incursions into Jewish-allocated territory. The only army that conducted a serious invasion of Israel was that of Egypt, but the most intense fighting came from Israeli offensives against Transjordan in its successful attempts to acquire more territory. The fact is that Israel was allocated 55 percent of mandate Palestine under UN 181 and ended up taking nearly 80 percent of the land, drove out more than half of the native population, and, according to staunchly Zionist and resolutely anti-Palestinian historian Benny Morris, committed the overwhelming majority of atrocities during the fighting of 1947-1949.
It seems to me Jeffrey Goldberg should read some of the real scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
