Steven Bonnell (Destiny)
speaker
516 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Steven Bonnell (Destiny)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah. UNSCOPE, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, recommended that partition, the majority of UNESCO recommended partition, which was accepted by the UN General Assembly in November 1947, essentially looking back to the Peel Commission in 1937.
Ten years earlier, a British commission had looked at the problem of Palestine, the two warring national groups who refused to live together, if you like, or consolidate a unitary state between them. And Peel said there should be two states. That's the principle. The country must be partitioned into two states.
This would give a modicum of justice to both sides, if not all their demands, of course. And the United Nations followed suit. The United Nations, UNSCOP, and then the UN General Assembly, representing the will of the international community, said two states is the just solution in this complex situation.
The problem was that immediately with the passage of the resolution, the Arab states and the Arabs of Palestine said no, as Norman Finkelstein said. They said no, they rejected the partition idea, the principle of partition, not just the idea of what percentage which side should get, but the principle of partition.
They said no to the Jews should not have any part of Palestine for their sovereign territory. Maybe Jews could live as a minority in Palestine. That also was problematic in the eyes of the Palestinian Arab leadership. Husseini had said only Jews who were there before 1917 could actually get citizenship and continue to live there.
But the Arabs rejected partition and the Arabs of Palestine launched, in a very disorganized fashion, war against the resolution, against the implementation of the resolution, against the Jewish community in Palestine.
Their defeat in that civil war between the two communities while the British were withdrawing from Palestine led to the Arab invasion, the invasion by the Arab states in May 1948 of the country. Again, basically with the idea of eradicating or preventing the emergence of a Jewish state in line with the United Nations decision and the will of the international community.
Norman said that the Zionist enterprise, and he quoted me, meant from the beginning to transfer or expel the Arabs of Palestine or some of the Arabs of Palestine. And I think he's sort of quoting out of context. The context in which the statements were made that the Jewish state could only emerge if there was a transfer of Arab population was interesting.
preceded in the way I wrote it and the way it actually happened by Arab resistance and hostilities towards the Jewish community. Had the Arabs accepted partition, there would have been a large Arab minority in the Jewish state, which emerged in 47. And in fact, Jewish economists and state builders took into account that there would be a large Arab minority and its needs would be cared for, etc.
And had they not attacked, perhaps a Jewish state with a large Arab minority could have emerged. But this didn't happen. They went to war. The Jews resisted. And in the course of that war, Arab populations were devastated. driven out, some were expelled, some left because Arab leaders advised them to leave or ordered them to leave.
And at the end of the war, Israel said they can't return because they just tried to destroy the Jewish state. And that's the basic reality of what happened in 1948. The Jews created a state. The Palestinian Arabs never bothered to even try to create a state before 1948 and in the course of the 1948 war. And for that reason, they have no state to this day.
The Jews do have a state because they prepared to establish a state, fought for it, and established it, hopefully, lastingly.
Let me just add, to clarify, the war had two parts to it. The first part was the Arab community in Palestine, its militiamen, attacked the Jews from November 1947. In other words, from the day after the UN partition resolution It was passed, Arab gunmen were busy shooting up Jews, and that snowballed into a full-scale civil war between the two communities in Palestine.
In May 1948, a second stage began in the war in which the Arab states invaded the new state, attacked the new state. and they too were defeated, and thus a state of Israel emerged. In the course of this two-stage war, a vast Palestinian refugee problem occurred.
Yeah, I think it's interesting where people choose to start the history. I noticed a lot of people like to start at either 47 or 48 because it's the first time where they can clearly point to a catastrophe that occurs on the Arab side that they want to ascribe 100% of the blame to the newly emergent Israeli state to.
But I feel like when you have this type of reading of history, it feels like the goal is to moralize everything first and then to pick and choose facts that kind of support the statements of your initial moral statement afterwards. Whenever people are talking about 48 or the establishment of the Arab state, I never hear about the fact that a civil war started in 47.
That was largely instigated because of the Arab rejectionism of the 47 partition plan. I never hear about the fact that the majority of the land that was acquired happened by purchases from Jewish organizations of Palestinian Arabs of the Ottoman Empire before the mandatory period in 1920 even started.
Funnily enough, King Abdullah of Jordan was quoted as saying, the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in weeping about it. I never hear about the multiple times that Arabs rejected partition, rejected living with Jews, rejected any sort of state that would have even had any sort of Jewish exclusivity.
It's funny because it was brought up before that the partition plan was unfair, and that's why the Arabs rejected it, as though they rejected it because it was unfair, because of the amount of land that Jews were given and not just due to the fact that Jews were given land at all, as though a 30% partition or a 25% partition would have been accepted.
when I don't think that was the reality of the circumstances. I feel like most of the other stuff has been said, but I noticed that whenever people talk about 48 or the years preceding 48, I think the worst thing that happens is there's a cherry picking of the facts where basically all of the blame is ascribed to this
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