Let's not suggest that in 1947 the U.N. partitioned Palestine

Submitted by Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld (United States), Apr 7, 2013 at 03:00

My comment somehow got attached to the wrong article. It was a comment submitted in response to a March 26 article by Daniel Pipes entitled, "Obama to Palestinians: Accept the Jewish State" (http://www.danielpipes.org/12666/obama-to-palestinians-accept-the-jewish-state).

In that article, Mr. Pipes wrote, "U.N. General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947, partitioning Palestine into two, mentions the term Jewish state 30 times." Mr. Pipes' idea that Britain accepted the UNGA partition resolution as binding seems to me to be beside the point. Wasn't this the same Britain that illegally inserted Article 25 into the Palestine Mandate, violating Article 5? And wasn't this the same Britain that lopped off part of Palestine designated for the Jews east of the Jordan River and gave this to an Arab ruler instead?

This was also the same Britain which, in 1939, issued a White Paper limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine to 15,000 a year during all the years of the Holocaust. And this was the same Britain that allowed unrestricted Arab immigration into Palestine and armed the Arabs while taking arms away from the Jews. What does it matter what Britain thought? Britain was violating U.N. Policy also! Britain was violating the 1920 San Remo Resolution, the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, and the U.N. Charter's Article 80, preserving the rights of peoples given them by all previous legal instruments! As well as attempting to violate the U.N. rules that make all but Security Council resolutions made under Chapter VII non-binding. There was no way in which any attempt to make a non-binding UNGA resolution binding could have accomplished that or altered Jewish rights in Palestine given the Jews by previous legal instruments.

After all, too, Britain wasn't the only state that ratified these legal instruments. How could Britain alter what the Great Allied Powers had devised in the San Remo Resolution or the 52 nations of the League of Nations had done in devising the Palestine Mandate (which was also ratified by the U.S. in 1924 via the Anglo-American Treaty)?

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