Palestine... Partition and Solidarity with Its People

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

November 29 of every year marks the anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s issuance of the Partition Resolution on Palestine — the resolution that broke the Palestinian people’s back, leading to its displacement and the Zionists’ seizure of about 77% of the area of Mandatory Palestine, a territory the British themselves had carved out at the expense of the unity of the lands of Greater Syria. That partition was itself an offshoot of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, concluded between the two brutal colonial powers, France and Britain, which divided the Arab Fertile Crescent between them. Northern Syria was allotted to French colonialism, and southern Syria, together with the land of Iraq, to British colonialism.

The mandate instrument issued by the League of Nations in 1922 came to affirm the fragmentation of the land of Greater Syria, and Britain was entrusted with the mandate over Palestine, in its present form, on condition that it fulfill its international promises. The mandate instrument did not mention the ill-omened Balfour Declaration by name, but the “international promises” meant fulfilling the promise of turning Palestine into a national home for Zionist Jews, who later shifted their own rhetoric from a national home for Jews to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Britain pursued a systematic policy in Palestine to establish a state for the Jews on the ruins of the Palestinian people, working to strengthen the Jews militarily, in security, in construction, and economically, and allowing them to establish various institutions in preparation for establishing a state, while working, deliberately and contemptibly, to weaken the Palestinian people, pursuing their weapons, impoverishing their farmers, and encouraging the leaking of land to Jews. Britain is the criminal state that worked, with all its energies, to strip the Palestinian people of its homeland, casting it into exile and displacement camps.

When Britain found that the Zionist Jews had become capable of establishing their state, and that the Palestinian people had weakened sufficiently that it could no longer obstruct the establishment of the Jewish state, it turned to the international colonial institution — the United Nations — to lend international legitimacy to the establishment of the Zionist Jewish state.

The United States, which had, without justification, taken up hostility toward Palestinians and Arabs, seized upon the matter,

“The Partition Resolution has been implemented only partially, with the establishment of the Zionist Jewish state, while the Arab Palestinian state has never been established.”

and resolved to extract a resolution from this body to partition Palestine in a way that would give the Jews the lion’s share.

The United States put forward an idea that was not new — a British commission working in Palestine in 1937 had already recommended partitioning Palestine, but both Palestinians and Jews rejected the project, known as the Peel Commission plan, each for their own reasons. America began its partition activity, and found the UN General Assembly was not heading toward partition, since a partition resolution required the approval of two-thirds of the members to pass. America then resorted to pressuring vulnerable states to vote in favor of partition, offering generous material inducements to many states, and Cuba, before Fidel Castro, was the last state America offered money to in exchange for its vote — and indeed it did so.

America did manage to gather two-thirds of the votes of the UN General Assembly, and Partition Resolution 181 was issued on November 29, 1947, providing for the establishment of two states, one Jewish, on about 53% of the area of Palestine, and one Arab, on about 44%. It also decided to internationalize about 3% of the area, encompassing the Jerusalem area and part of the Bethlehem area. And so it was decided that those who owned nothing would strip ownership from those who owned everything, in favor of those who owned nothing and had no right to it whatsoever. The United Nations is a colonial institution established by the great powers that emerged victorious from the Second World War, the very states that now form the permanent members of the Security Council, and instead of this body establishing the scale of justice, it established the scale of injustice it still uses to this day.

Because of the cooperation of many states from Latin America, Asia, and Africa with the Arab bloc at the United Nations, the UN General Assembly decided, in 1977, to designate the day of Palestine’s partition, November 29 of every year, as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This day has since come to witness various activities every year, particularly from Palestinians and PLO representative offices around the world, to remind the world of the Palestinian people’s tragedy.

What matters is that the Partition Resolution has been implemented only partially, with the establishment of the Zionist Jewish state, while the Arab Palestinian state has never been established. Even though many UN General Assembly resolutions have been issued in favor of the Palestinian people and its right to self-determination, they have remained unimplemented, because the Western colonial states are concerned with strengthening Israel and weakening the Palestinian people, and it seems that right belongs to power, not to the scale of justice. The Palestinian people has not yet benefited, on the ground, from this solidarity, and all it has reaped is more unimplemented international resolutions, or resolutions that neither satisfy nor nourish. The Palestinian people must certainly gather its own strength if it wants to obtain its fixed national rights.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “فلسطين… التقسيم والتضامن مع شعبها” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.