By Latheef Farook
At the turn of the last century Palestine was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. About 95 percent of the population in 1896 were Arabs who owned ninety percent of the land. Palestine was brought under British power after World War 11. Both British mandatory power and Zionist Jews decided to kill and kick out Palestinians and establish in Palestinian lands a state for Jews brought from outside.
Once sufficient Jews were brought in, US and Zionists turned to United Nations to partition Palestine and create a separate state for Jews. There was fierce opposition in the United States for partitioning Palestine.
Zionists resorted to deception, bribery, and blackmail and brought pressure on United Nations General Assembly to pass the resolution to partition Palestine. Haiti, Liberia, Philippines, China, Ethiopia and Greece opposed the partition. Zionists used intense pressure, through American channels, to force these countries to vote in favor,
Robert Nathan, a Zionist who had worked for the US government and who was particularly active in the Jewish Agency wrote, “We used any tools at hand,” such as telling certain delegations that the Zionists would use their influence to block economic aid to any country that did not vote the right way.
Financier and longtime presidential advisor Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition. Top White House executive assistant David Niles organized pressure on Liberia; rubber magnate Harvey Firestone pressured Liberia.
Latin American delegates were told that the Pan-American Highway construction project would be more likely if they voted yes. Delegates’ wives received mink coats (the wife of the Cuban delegate returned hers); Costa Rica’s President Jose Figueres reportedly received a blank checkbook. Haiti was promised economic aid if it would change its original vote opposing partition.
Longtime Zionist Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with ten senators and Truman domestic advisor Clark Clifford, threatened the Philippines (seven bills were pending on the Philippines in Congress).
Before the vote on the plan, the Philippine delegate had given a passionate speech against partition, defending the inviolable “primordial rights of a people to determine their political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of their native land…”
He went on to say that he could not believe that the General Assembly would sanction a move that would place the world “back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic documents of theocratic governments.”
Twenty-four hours later, after intense Zionist pressure, the delegate voted in favor of partition.
The U.S. delegation to the U.N. was so outraged when US President Truman insisted that they support partition that the State Department director of U.N. Affairs was sent to New York to prevent the delegates from resigning en masse.
Despite fierce opposition on November 29, 1947 the partition resolution, 181, was passed. USA voted for Zionist State in Palestine and paved the way for the creation of Israel which turned the region into a killing field.Israel came into being on 78 per cent of Palestinian lands. Palestinians were thrown into refugee camps including Gaza where they are slaughtered now.
According to the Chicago Daily Tribune of 9 February 1948, “President Truman cracked down harder on his State Department than ever before to swing the United Nation’s vote for the partition of Palestine. Truman called Acting Secretary Lovett to the White House warning him he would demand a full explanation from nations which usually line up with the US, who failed to do so on Palestine”.
At least 33 massacres of Palestinian civilians were perpetrated, half of them before a single Arab army had entered the conflict, hundreds of villages were depopulated and razed, and a team of cartographers was sent out to give every town, village, river, and hillock a new, Hebrew name. All vestiges of Palestinian habitation, history and culture were to be erased from history, an effort that almost succeeded.
However U.S. Officials fiercely Opposed Partition Plan.
The U.S. State Department opposed partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and US interests. Loy Henderson, Director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, wrote a memo to the Secretary of State warning: that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and emphasized that it was “not based on any principle.”
Henderson wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems. “Henderson wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism. “
President Harry Truman, ignored all advice and supported Zionists in the way President Joe Biden supporting Israel in its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza today.
Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall, the renowned World War II General and author of the Marshall Plan, condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes,” which would cause ” the great dignity of the office of President [to be] seriously diminished.”
Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. He was “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another Author, John Munhall, records Acheson’s warning: “…to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”
The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:
“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction. An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:
“…the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN…In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”
The ideologically divided United States and the Soviet Union stood together like comrades-in-arms in solidarity in creating the Zionist state in Palestine – showing to what extent the Jews had control over the two super powers and effectively the world at large. Thus, on November 29 1947, the UN voted in favour of a partition of Palestine violating its own charter. Of the total population of 1,008,900 in the proposed Jewish state, the Arab-Jew ratio was 509,780 to 499,020. In other words, at the outset, the Arabs had a majority in the proposed Jewish state too.
Palestinians rejected the UN resolution to partition their country into two halves because that would be tantamount to cleaving their own motherland. There was more widespread condemnation of this injustice from all right thinking people. Today Israel remains the most condemned country in the UN.
Latheef Farook is a journalist from Sri Lanka
16 September 2024
Source: countercurrents.org