Glick: The world incorrectly attributes Israel’s founding to the ‘47 Partition vote

By coincidence the Annapolis meeting took place a couple of days before the sixtieth anniversary of the passage of the UN partition resolution on Palestine. Caroline Glick writing in the Jerusalem Post brings out a new and controversial angle on this: Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign state, she argues, does not derive from the 1947 UN vote, as everyone believes, but from the 1922 League of Nations Mandate. Further, by treating the 1947 Resolution as the basis for Israel’s existence, Israel empowers the UN, which is, of course, profoundly anti-Israel. She writes:

ON NOVEMBER 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 181. As a General Assembly resolution, 181 had no force of international law. The international legal basis for the Jewish state was the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine which charged the British government with administering the area earmarked as the future Jewish state.

Indeed, if anything, resolution 181 sought to legitimize illegal moves taken by Britain throughout the term of its mandate. As the League of Nations mandate made clear, Britain was supposed to preside over the territory of the Mandatory Palestine and to foster the establishment of a Jewish state which would eventually replace the British mandatory government. Yet almost from the get-go the British did just the opposite. They established the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan on the majority of the land slated for the Jewish state. Moreover, they took all possible steps to prevent the Jews from establishing a state on the remainder of the land. They blocked Jewish immigration and limited the right of Jews to purchase and settle the land to a tiny portion of the territory—which they believed would be too small to sustain a sovereign state.

It was due to the British failure to destroy Zionism and block the Jewish people from establishing their state that the UN partition plan was brought into being. That is, far from establishing a Jewish state, 181 simply accepted an already existing national entity. Despite the best efforts of Britain, the Jews had already established their state in 1947. It would have existed even if the resolution had not passed.

Unfortunately, rather than recognize the actual legal foundation of Israel and though it, its own rights to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, Israel acts as though its legitimate boundaries were determined by the UN Security Council. Its misplaced gratitude to the UN has caused successive Israeli government’s to ignore and downplay the UN’s mistreatment of Israel.

For the past 40 years, far from living up to Israel’s high opinion of it, the UN has been the primary engine behind the campaign to deny Israel’s right to exist. The UN has relegated Israel to the status of second class citizen that suffers from systematic discrimination throughout the UN system. The UN’s unfair treatment of Israel places the UN in violation of its own charter’s assertion that all states must be treated equally. And indeed, it has corrupted the organization beyond repair.

Glick then surveys the various ways in which the UN undermines Israel, and concludes with this:

The problem that Israel’s supporters face in contending with the Olmert government is the same as that experienced by Israelis who understand just how dangerous and self-defeating the government’s foreign policy is. In both cases, the same blind officials who think they have accomplished something when Arab and Islamic states agree to sit at the same table as Israelis and condemn the Jewish state to their faces, and who view a legally insignificant failed UN resolution as a great diplomatic achievement, are calling the shots.

Until Israel gets leaders who run a foreign policy based on a recognition of reality and a celebration of the Jewish people’s accomplishments in building and securing the state, Israel’s supporters will continue to be confounded by the Israeli government, and the Israeli people will continue to be attacked and humiliated.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 28, 2007 12:59 PM | Send