This uncomfortable realization of the enormity of American and European society's complicity in the Holocaust formed a backdrop for more basic business considerations that U.S. politicians entertained in acceding to the plans of Zionist leaders among the wave of European Jewish immigrants pouring into the British governed "Protectorate' of predominately Arab populated Palestine - a Palestine, which three millennium earlier had been predominantly Jewish.
The colonial powers, along with the Soviet Army, had conquered Germany again. (Germany had ceased to be a colonial power after WW I) Only the U.S. emerged with its industrial plants intact making it the single superpower. The American government with its European allies created and controlled the sixty member small United Nations that would deliberate the fate of inhabitants of the British Protectorate of Palestine.
U.S. business saw the possibility of making inroads into British control over most of the Middle East's oil fields through a client European Jewish state. Stalin, in a last minute switch left the Arabs in the lurch, seeking, as well, to diminish British power and hegemony, hoping to have influence in the Jewish state for the substantial in numbers socialist wing of Zionism. By the time of the UN vote, there was no significantly powerful nation to protect the rights of a long occupied Arab Palestinian majority, a population of three to one over the Jews, that didn't want to be partitioned.
The partition barely carried the necessary 2/3rd majority vote in a United Nations that had no representation for nearly half the people on earth. Twenty-three of the thirty-eight non-industrialized nations were unwilling to vote for partition.
Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke with anger and contempt for the way the UN vote had been lined up. He said the Zionists had tried to bribe India with millions and at the same time his sister, Vijayalalshmi Pandit, had received daily warnings that her life was in danger "unless she voted right". [7] Three countries -- Haiti, Liberia and the Philippines -- were persuaded to change their positions, which enabled the required 2/3rds majority to be reached. Liberia's Ambassador to the United States complained that the US delegation threatened aid cuts to several countries. [8]
The distributions of the patch quilt partition was pure insanity, not something unusual for the colonial powers to arrange for an occupied colony. Who did not expect terrible bloodshed? "It will thus be seen that the proposed Jewish State will contain a total population of 1,008,800, consisting of 509,780 Arabs and 499,020 Jews. In other words, at the outset, the Arabs will have a majority in the proposed Jewish State." How could it not have been a recipe for war? Arabs in Palestine could not agree to this, unless at the point of a gun.
The Arabs had not been consulted, nor their agreement sought. They were, in effect, British colonial subjects about to be divided up and half ruled by a new set of European colonizers. The Arab leadership, in and out of Palestine, opposed the partition plan.[8] The Arabs argued that ' it violated the rights of the majority of the people in Palestine, which at the time was 67% non-Jewish (1,237,000) and 33% Jewish (608,000).' [9]
"The Arab state was to receive about 43% of Mandatory Palestine consisting of all of the highlands, except for Jerusalem, plus one third of the coastline. The highlands contain the major aquifers of Palestine, which supplied water to the coastal cities of central Palestine, including Tel Aviv. The Jewish state was to receive 56% of Mandatory Palestine, a slightly larger area to accommodate the increasing numbers of Jews who would immigrate there." [10] The Arabs had pointed out that 56 percent of the land was to go to the Jews, who at that stage legally owned only 7 percent of it.
Hostilities broke out almost immediately upon the announcement of the UN vote. From 1947 through 2011 - almost constant bloodshed!
Seems almost like the same nations complicit in the Holocaust, whose investors indeed made the Holocaust possible and whose governments had closed their doors while observing the destruction of European Jewry, had afterwards arranged, through their UN tool, a new trap for Jews, by throwing them into yet another fire. By putting them in a no win situation with certain great violence about to happen along with perhaps a necessity to cause other people the kind of intense suffering so many Jewish arrivals had themselves so recently escaped from, what other conclusion should we draw?
Sixty-three years of tragic loss of so many lives, the great majority of which Palestinian, but of no consolation for the families of Jewish victims of war. Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber, before he died in 1965, wrote what must be still even more valid today, "Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred...It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed we put up houses of education, charity, and prayer, while we babble and rave about being the "People of the Book" and the "light of the nations"
Israelis recently celebrated their 63rd independence day anniversary ("Yom Ha'atzmaut') a day after its 63rd observance of Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) and the lives lost. Arab Palestinians observing the day as "Nakba,' the Palestinian catastrophe or upheaval, violence and cataclysmic loss, the terror, which drove almost one million of them out of their homeland into perpetual suffering in exile, displaced, dispossessed, stateless, lost, forbidden to return and living under a multiplying injustice of collective persecution.
It coincided with what looks like the beginning of the Palestinian participation in what is being called "Arab Spring' with the usual result we've seen elsewhere of unarmed protesters being shot dead.
Israel officially shrugs off the anger in the formerly European occupied third world for its treatment of Arab Palestinians, but even the nations of the first world do not vote against UN resolutions condemning Israeli policies. Over these sixty three years, the U.S. is more times than not the only nation voting with Israel.
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