Misplaced Pages

Talk:United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Selfstudier (talk | contribs) at 13:22, 29 September 2024 (→Edit request: Proposed partition). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 13:22, 29 September 2024 by Selfstudier (talk | contribs) (→Edit request: Proposed partition)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
A fact from this article was featured on Misplaced Pages's Main Page in the On this day section on November 29, 2005, November 29, 2006, November 29, 2007, November 29, 2008, November 29, 2010, November 29, 2014, November 29, 2015, and November 29, 2017.
This article is rated B-class on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:
WikiProject iconPalestine High‑importance
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject Palestine, a team effort dedicated to building and maintaining comprehensive, informative and balanced articles related to the geographic Palestine region, the Palestinian people and the State of Palestine on Misplaced Pages. Join us by visiting the project page, where you can add your name to the list of members where you can contribute to the discussions.PalestineWikipedia:WikiProject PalestineTemplate:WikiProject PalestinePalestine-related
HighThis article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.
WikiProject iconIsrael Top‑importance
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject Israel, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Israel on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.IsraelWikipedia:WikiProject IsraelTemplate:WikiProject IsraelIsrael-related
TopThis article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.
Project Israel To Do:

 Here are some tasks awaiting attention:
WikiProject iconInternational relations: United Nations / Law High‑importance
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject International relations, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of International relations on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.International relationsWikipedia:WikiProject International relationsTemplate:WikiProject International relationsInternational relations
HighThis article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.
Taskforce icon
This article is supported by WikiProject United Nations.
Taskforce icon
This article is supported by WikiProject International law (assessed as Mid-importance).
WikiProject iconBritish Empire
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject British Empire, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of British Empire on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.British EmpireWikipedia:WikiProject British EmpireTemplate:WikiProject British EmpireBritish Empire
???This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
Warning: active arbitration remedies

The contentious topics procedure applies to this article. This article is related to the Arab–Israeli conflict, which is a contentious topic. Furthermore, the following rules apply when editing this article:

  • You must be logged-in and extended-confirmed to edit or discuss this topic on any page (except for making edit requests, provided they are not disruptive)
  • You may not make more than 1 revert within 24 hours on any edits related to this topic

Editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Misplaced Pages, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process may be blocked or restricted by an administrator. Editors are advised to familiarise themselves with the contentious topics procedures before editing this page.

Further information
The exceptions to the extended confirmed restriction are:
  1. Non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace only to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided they are not disruptive.
  2. Non-extended-confirmed editors may not create new articles, but administrators may exercise discretion when deciding how to enforce this remedy on article creations. Deletion of new articles created by non-extended-confirmed editors is permitted but not required.

With respect to the WP:1RR restriction:

  • Clear vandalism of whatever origin may be reverted without restriction. Also, reverts made solely to enforce the extended confirmed restriction are not considered edit warring.
  • Editors who violate this restriction may be blocked by any uninvolved administrator, even on a first offence.

After being warned, contentious topics procedure can be used against any editor who repeatedly or seriously fails to adhere to the purpose of Misplaced Pages, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process. Contentious topic sanctions can include blocks, topic-bans, or other restrictions.
Editors may report violations of these restrictions to the Arbitration enforcement noticeboard.

If you are unsure if your edit is appropriate, discuss it here on this talk page first. When in doubt, don't revert!



Archives
Index
Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3
Archive 4Archive 5Archive 6
Archive 7Archive 8Archive 9
Archive 10

This page has archives. Sections older than 30 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present.


Add India Partition to See Also

I currently don't have >500 edits, so I cannot edit this article due to it being locked with Extended Confirmed Protection. Instead, can someone with >500 edits please add the Partition of India to the "See Also" section? India/Pakistan was partitioned the year before this was voted-on, and this article states that both India and Pakistan voted against the Partition Plan for Palestine. I think the reader may want to read about what happened in India/Pakistan from their recent partition after reading this article. -- 03:21, 16 December 2022 Maltfield

I support this addition because the violence and ethnic cleansing accompanying the partition of India & Pakistan really ought to have informed and forewarned the architects of the partition of Palestine. If anyone agrees or disagrees, please say so. MathewMunro (talk) 23:38, 27 September 2024 (UTC)
Done. But you shouldn't be editing this talk page except to make edit requests, @MathewMunro. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 00:02, 28 September 2024 (UTC) (Mistaken comment stricken. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 03:41, 28 September 2024 (UTC))

Edit request: Proposed partition

  • What I think should be changed and added (format using {{textdiff}}):
−The proposed Arab State would include the central and part of western ], with the town of ], the hill country of ] and ], an enclave at ], and the southern coast stretching from north of Isdud (now ]) and encompassing what is now the ], with a section of desert along the Egyptian border. +The proposed Arab State would include the central and part of western ], with the town of ], the hill country of ] and ], and the southern coast stretching from north of Isdud (now ]) and encompassing what is now the ].
  • Why it should be changed: This is not accurate. The Jaffa section was only added later, following the comments of later members of Sub-committee 2. The same is true for the desert section, which was added at the request of the USA. This is already stated in the Misplaced Pages article further below. UNSCOP instead proposed:
    • About Jaffa: "Jaffa, which has an Arab population of about 70,000, is entirely Arab except for two Jewish quarters. It is contiguous with Tel Aviv and would either have to be treated as an enclave or else be included in the Jewish State. On balance, and having in mind the difficulties which an enclave involves, not least from the economic point at view, it was thought better to suggest that Jaffa be included in the Jewish State, on the assumption that it would have a large measure of local autonomy and that the port would be under the administration of the Economic Union."
    • About the southern coastal plain and the Negev: "The proposed Arab State will include Western Galilee, the hill country of Samaria and Judea with the exclusion of the City of Jerusalem, and the coastal plain from Isdud to the Egyptian frontier. The proposed Jewish State will include Eastern Galilee, the Esdraelon plain, most of the coastal plain, and the whole of the Beersheba subdistrict, which includes the Negeb."

  1. Cf. e.g. Ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question of the 2nd UN General Assembly 1947 (10 November 1947). "Tenth meeting, held at Lake Success, New York, on Friday, 10 October 1947". p. 59. Retrieved 10 June 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link): "With regard to the population of the future States as a whole, the Pakistan representative had said that there would be as many Arabs as Jews in the proposed Jewish State. The delegation of Guatemala was ready to reconsider the position of Jaffa and to support any proposal which would give the Arab State possession of that city, to which it had an undeniable right. In that case, there would not be more than 337,000 Arabs in the Jewish State, according to the estimates ."

DaWalda (talk) 09:19, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi, you're right, thanks for noticing the error. I was about to make the change but then I wondered whether the statistics in the last paragraphs of the Proposed partition section refer to the initial plan or to the amended one (the part starting from The Plan would have had the following demographics (data based on 1945) and ending with The Jewish State allocated to the Jews, who constituted a third of the population and owned about 7% of the land, was to receive 56% of Mandatory Palestine, a slightly larger area to accommodate the increasing numbers of Jews who would immigrate there.) Alaexis¿question? 20:56, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
You are right. The population statistics are from the UNSCOP report, the land statistics refer to the final partition (55,5% Jewish state, 43,8% Arab State, 0,7% Jerusalem. See Abu-Sitta 2010, p. 7). I've done a very rough measurement: the area along the border with Egypt (the largest change) is just ~7-8% of Palestine. According to the UNSCOP plan, therefore, roughly 62-63% would have been allocated to the Jewish state. But this would need a source. I can't find any calculations on how the areas of the Jewish and Arab states compared to each other before the adjustments. DaWalda (talk) 08:17, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
God, I'm such an airhead. On the page itself, there are two quotes that mention 62%: Morris: 1948, p. 47; Ben-Dror: Arab Struggle, p. 259 f. Tom Segev: 1949. The First Israelis. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-8050-5896-6. p. 21 has also the Arab figure:
", which had prepared the Partition Resolution of 1947, had allotted 62 percent of the territory of Palestine to the Jewish state and 38 percent to the Arab one. The November 29 Resolution itself altered this ratio in favor of the Arabs, giving them 45 percent as opposed to 55 percent to the Jews. Following the conclusion of hte armistice agreements, Israel retained nearly 80 percent of the territory and the Arabs about 20 percent." DaWalda (talk) 13:19, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
In that case we need to fix the article in a few places
  1. Proposed partition - your proposed changes (removing Jaffa) and also probably it would make sense to rename it to "Initial partition plan" to make it clear that it was *proposed* but the UN voted on a different plan
  2. Proposed partition - the table and the percentages should be removed and replaced by the numbers that you've found (62% and 38%).
  3. Boundary changes - the tables and percentages describing the finalised partition plan should be moved here. Again, I'd suggest renaming it to something like "Final partition plan"
WDYT? Alaexis¿question? 20:39, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
Sounds good to me. I would also move
State Department advice critical of the controversial UNSCOP recommendation to give the overwhelmingly Arab town of Jaffa, and the Negev, to the Jews was overturned by an urgent and secret late meeting organized for Chaim Weizman with Truman, which immediately countermanded the recommendation.
to "Boundary changes". The background is this:
The dominant USA had already planned to reallocate Jaffa and the Negev to the Arab state to gain favor with Arab states and secure their support for the partition plan. However, when the Zionists learned of these plans, President Truman's advisor David Niles arranged a meeting with Chaim Weizmann, who persuaded the President with the vision of a canal running through Jewish territory from the Gulf of Aqaba to Tel Aviv. Following Truman’s direct orders, the Americans abandoned their earlier tactic and only introduced a modification proposal (which was accepted) to slightly enlarge the Palestinian area with the city of Beersheba and a section on the border with Egypt. DaWalda (talk) 17:30, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

References

  1. Cf. Chaim Weizmann: Trial and Error. Schocken Books, 1966. p. 457–459.
  2. Abba Eban: An Autobiography. Random House, 1977. p. 94.
  3. T. G. Fraser: The USA and the Middle East Since World War 2. Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. p. 30 f.
  4. Robert J. Donovan: Conflict and Crisis. The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948. W. W. Norton & Company, 1977. p. 327 f.
  5. John W. Mulhall: America and the Founding of Israel. An Investigation of the Morality of America's Role. Deshon Press, 1995. p. 140–142.
  6. Allis Radosh / Ronald Radosh: A Safe Haven. Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel. Harper Collins Publishers, 2009. p. 261–265.
  7. John B. Judis: Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Epub edition, section 13: "The most controversial of these amendments was giving most of the Negev to the Arabs. With the Negev included, an Arab state would be larger than the Jewish state, and it would have a direct link to the sea and a contiguous border with Egypt and Jordan. Such a plan might have at least brought the Arab League into negotiations. And it would have been a far fairer distribution of Palestine's assets. Truman approved the State Department's amendments, which fit his own sense of fairness. But the Jewish Agency was determined to defeat the proposal."
  8. Benny Morris (2008). 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-300-12696-9.

Background

  • What I think should be changed (format using {{textdiff}}):
−To address any economic problems, the Plan proposed avoiding interfering with Jewish immigration, since any interference would be liable to produce an "economic crisis", most of Palestine's wealth coming from the Jewish community.+ -
  • Why it should be changed: This is completely incorrect.
    • The phrase "economic crisis" does not appear anywhere in the Peel Commission Report.
    • Regarding Jewish immigration, it is rather recommended to limit it to a maximum of 12,000 per year:
Peel Commission Report, 1937, p. 306 s. 97: "In view of the foregoing considerations we advise that there should now be a definite limit to the annual volume of Jewish immigration. We recommend that Your Majesty's Government should lay down a 'political high level' of Jewish immigration to cover Jewish immigration of all categories. This high level should be fixed for the next five years at 12,000 per annum, and in no circumstances during that period should more than that number be allowed into the country in any one year."
    • Footnotes following this sentence seem to have been misplaced as well. The Peel Report on pages 389-391 and Morris's "Righteous Victims" on page 139 only discuss the idea of "transfer" and are therefore already cited before this sentence. "Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine 1929–1948" is an entire book; it's unclear what is meant to be substantiated with it.
    • Most importantly, in the report, it is not stated that Palestine's wealth "came from the Jewish community." This also does not at all correspond to the reality, which was quite outrageous: Instead, the report notes
      • that "the Jews contribute more per capita to the revenues of Palestine than the Arabs" (p. 386 s. 23), accounting for 37% in absolute terms (p. 320 s. 8). This is against a backdrop where Palestinian farmers had been "so over-taxed that they find great difficulty in paying the tithe" (Simpson Report, 1930, p. 65) and many had lost their fields to creditors (Peel Report, p. 239), rendering them unable to be taxed further. This excessive taxation occurred because the nascent Jewish industry was unprofitable and therefore required "protection" by the British through tax cuts and export subsidies (Peel Report, p. 209 s. 8). For example, Nesher Cement, highlighted as a "notable exception" as regards profitability (ibid.), was able to import raw materials duty-free, negotiated with the British an increase of tariffs on imported cement, because otherwise "the company risked collapse," and thanks to export subsidies, was able to sell its cement in Syria at a lower price than in Palestine, despite transportation costs (Cf. Ben Zeev 2019, p. 44-46). So, there wasn't any "wealth of Palestine," and most definitely no wealth "coming" from the Zionists "to Palestine."
      • (almost comically) that the "Jewish area" possessed "taxable capacity," as the revenue-generating ports, most Arab and all Zionist industries, and the majority of the citrus fruit plantations — the leading export commodity at the time, comprising 84% of total exports (p. 213 s. 18) with about 40-45% Arab ownership — were located there. The underlying and outrageous rationale was that, after nearly 20 years of redistributing "wealth," the British were prepared to implement another massive redistribution with their transfer idea. This plan would decimate the Palestinians' primary economic sector (citrus fruit export) and the bulk of their industry in one fell swoop, making these assets available to the Zionists. As the British faced the loss of the Jewish state, they aimed to create a mechanism that would redistribute this wealth back to the part that would remain under their influence as part of Transjordan. This is the reality which is obliquely stated as:
p. 386 s. 23: "Partition would mean, on the one hand, that the Arab Area would no longer profit from the taxable capacity of the Jewish Area. On the other hand, (1) the Jews would acquire a new right of sovereignty in the Jewish Area: (2) that Area, as we have defined it, would be larger than the existing area of Jewish land and settlement: (3) the Jews would be free from their present liability for helping to promote the welfare of Arabs outside that Area . It seems to us, therefore, not unreasonable to suggest that the Jewish State should pay a subvention ot the Arab State when Partition comes into effect."

DaWalda (talk) 08:37, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

More precise figures on the proposed division of land.

I found this article (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2307/2535720) by Fawzi Asadi (1976). The first page is free. It states that the size of the territories under the 1947 UN-approved partition plan was as follows: Jewish state: 5893 sq mi and 56.47% of the total area. Arab state: 4,476 sq mi and 42.88% of the total area.

Page 52 of http://132.248.9.195/ptd2019/junio/0789747/0789747.pdf, which quotes from the above paper, gives a figure of 68 'millas cuadradas' (Spanish for square miles), for the Jerusalem District. The article gives a figure of 0.68% for the Jerusalem District, but it needs to be 0.65% for the three districts to add up to 100%.

The Fawzi Asadi article quoted above is the earliest reference I could find to the figure of 42.88% for the area of the Palestinian territory as a proportion of the area of Palestine. The same figure has been used by several other authors, including: https://www.persee.fr/doc/geoas_1266-4618_2004_num_28_1_2294; https://www.un.org/unispal/document/the-economic-costs-of-the-israeli-occupation-for-the-palestinian-people-the-unrealized-oil-and-natural-gas-potential-unctad-report/; and https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/131/1555.pdf

The Misplaced Pages article figure of 2% for the internationally administered zone around Jerusalem is much higher than I've seen elsewhere, and so I've decided to alter the figures in the article which were Jewish State 56%, Arab State 42%, Jerusalem District 2%.

Adding up the areas in sq mi given in the Fawzi Asadi article gives 10,437 sq mi.

Due to rounding in the Fawzi Asadi article, the square kilometres of the states based on the figures given are in the following range (rounded to 0dp): Jewish State: 15,263 to 15,266 sq km Arab State: 11,591 to 11,594 sq km Jerusalem District: 175 to 177 sq km

The midpoint of the range of possible values for the territory area in sq km, rounded to 0dp is as follows: Jewish State: 15,264 sq km Arab State: 11,592 sq km Jerusalem District: 176 sq km

MathewMunro (talk) 23:27, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

 ——— 

References

Categories: