A new powerful ally, President Harry Truman, began filling the gap left open, as the British were keen on ending their mandate in Palestine. In "Before Their Diaspora," Walid Khalidi writes, "(U.S. President Harry Truman) went a step further in his support of Zionism by endorsing a Jewish Agency plan for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The plan envisaged the incorporation into the Jewish state about 60 percent of Palestine at a time when the Jewish land ownership in the country did not exceed 7 percent."
To strengthen its position, the Zionist leadership changed course. In May 1942, David Ben-Gurion, then the representative of the Jewish Agency, attended a New York conference which brought together leading American Zionists. In his speech, he demanded that all of Palestine become a "Jewish Commonwealth."
On Nov. 29, 1947, the 33-member U.N. General Assembly, under intense pressure from the U.S. administration of Truman, voted in favor of Resolution 181 (II) calling for the partition of Palestine into three entities: a Jewish state, a Palestinian state and an international regime to govern Jerusalem.
If the British partition proposal of 1937 was bad enough, the U.N. resolution was a reason for total dismay, as it allocated 5,500 square miles to the proposed Jewish state and only 4,500 square miles to Palestinians -- who owned 94.2 percent of the land and represented over two-thirds of the population.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in earnest after the Partition Plan was adopted. In December 1947, organized Zionist attacks on Palestinian areas resulted in the exodus of 75,000 people. In fact, the Palestinian Nakba -- Catastrophe -- did not begin in 1948, but 1947.
That forced exodus of the Palestinians was engineered through Plan Dalet, which was implemented in stages and altered to accommodate political necessities. The final stage of that plan, launched in April of 1948, included six major operations. Two of them, Operation Nachshon and Harel, aimed at destroying the Palestinian villages in and around the Jaffa-Jerusalem border. By cutting off the two-main central mass that composed the proposed Palestinian Arab state, the Zionist leadership wanted to break up any possibility of Palestinian geographical cohesion. This continues to be the aim to this day.
The Israeli achievement after the war was hardly guided by the Partition Plan. The disjointed Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem made up 22 percent of the historic size of Palestine.
The rest is painful history. The carrot of the Palestinian state is dangled from time to time, by the very forces that partitioned Palestine 70 years ago, yet worked diligently with Israel to ensure the demise of the political aspirations of the Palestinian people.
Eventually, the partitioned discourse was remolded into that of "two-state solution," championed in recent decades by various US administrations, who exhibited little sincerity of ever making such a state a reality.
And now, 70 years after the partition of Palestine, there is only one state, although governed by two different sets laws, one that privileges Jews and discriminates against Palestinians.
"A single state has already existed for a long time," wrote Israeli columnist Gideon Levy in a recent Haaretz column. "The time has come to launch a battle over the nature of its regime."
Many Palestinians already have.
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