I've Been Reminded of Partition

Hugh Eakin has a short interview with Robert Malley in the NY Review of Books.

And that reminded me of a letter I wrote last year that never got published:

Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's article on a possible Israel-Arab peace arrangement ("Into the Lion's Den", May 1) asserts that the Palestinians rejected the 1947 UN partition plan "because at the time they formed a majority in and controlled most of Mandatory Palestine". That is a misleading statement.

The essence of partition was meant, as it had been back in 1937 when first promoted by the British as official policy, to separate territorially the Arab and Jewish communities. It was intended to resolve the violence that the Arabs initiated as early as 1920 and coninued in several waves in 1921, 1929 and in an especially murderous period between 1936-1939. Partition symbolized the British slide into a reneging on their obligations as outlined in the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations decision of 1923 to promote a Jewish National Home, originally in an area on both sides of the Jordan River. Their treachery was accomplished in 1939 when, in a White Paper, which Lloyd George described as an act of perfidy and against which Winston Churchill voted, despite he being a minister in the government, it was declared "His Majesty's Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State". The closing of the gates to immigration doomed millions of Jews to the Hitlerarian Holocaust.

The Arabs rejected partition because they assumed they could roll back the previous twenty years. They did not want the Jews to live as a sovereign and politically independent entity anywhere in the area they called "Palestine", a Latin name for a supposedly Arab country which had never existed and was envisioned by Christian Arabs. Muslim Arabs had first insisted on the idea of a Greater Syria, a concept Bashir Assad currently supports.

Malley's proposals revive those feelings that Jewish rights and the past twenty years can be ignored and rolled back again.