The Partition Plan
And its consequences
Today is the anniversary of the Partition Plan for Palestine, which was proposed by the UN after Transjordan had already been allocated to the Arabs. It gave a slightly larger area to the Jews, in anticipation of the millions of refugees from Europe, but most of that land was deserts and swamps.
Jews celebrated, even though it was much less than they hoped for and would be difficult to defend, and formally accepted partition.
Arabs mostly rejected any form of partition; the General Secretary of the Arab League warned that there would be a war of elimination, and the Mufti said that the Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but "would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated."
Accordingly, the Arabs launched a war, which they ended up losing, causing many Arab lives to be lost and hundreds of thousands to flee. Had they won, the deaths on the side of the Jews would doubtless have been far greater, especially since the Jews had nowhere to which to flee.
Today, Palestinians have been encouraged by their leadership and others to believe that they had a right to violently resist partition. They further believe that they should not be responsible for the consequences of their decisions. Accordingly, they believe that their losses in the 1948 war are entirely the fault of the Jews, and Israel is obligated to make up for the terrible crimes that it committed with the Naqba. This means, among other things, that the descendants of the Palestinian refugees should all be allowed to return.
The Jewish perspective is that if you declare a war and you lose, then there are consequences, just as the Jews suffered immensely from their failed revolt against the Romans. And if it's a war in which you intend to annihilate the other side, this is all the more true. Israel has nothing to atone for.
At various stages Israel was open to a Palestinian State alongside it, including all the way from 1947 through after the '67 war, and again for several years in the 1990s. And there are still many people in Israel who would still be open to it - IF it could be relied upon to be a safe and secure solution.
But what has become increasingly clear is that most Palestinians want "justice," and "justice" in their minds means that they get to undo the results of the 1948 conflict (which they started). This is the core of the conflict and one of the reasons why it is so difficult and perhaps impossible to solve.
There are currently 20 Arab states. The Arabs control about 99.8% of the land mass in the middle east. Jews have all been ethnically cleansed from these areas. There is only one tiny Jewish state which is shared with Arabs. If we need another state in the ME it should be a second Jewish state, and one or two Christian states.
It is a miracle that the new State of Israel survived.
Someone whose contribution has been largely forgotten is Jan Masaryk, the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia in the immediate years after WW2. He was the Czechoslovak Ambassador to the UK during much of the 1930s where he had spent much of his time trying to awaken Britain to the danger of Nazi Germany. The only politician he seems to have convinced was Winston Churchill, who may not have needed convincing but was considered politically toxic. Masaryk did not return to Czechoslovakia after Munich.
After the war Masaryk became Foreign Minister in the Communist dominated, but still democratic government. The betrayal by the UK and France had soured public opinion against western democracies. He arranged for the transfer of large amounts of munitions from Czechoslovakia to the Zionists starting in January 1948. In February 1948 a coup gave the Communists total control in Czechoslovakia; Masaryk was the only non-Communist to remain in the government, and the munitions transfers continued. On March 10, 1948, he was pushed out of a window to his death, which was called a suicide by the Communists.
But the munitions transfers that he began continued, with the approval of Gottwald, Beria, and Stalin. I have never seen a good explanation as to why these three horrible Communists continued helping Zionists, but the transfers probably would not have started without Masaryk. I don't want to think about what would have happened to Israel without those Czech munitions, as no other country was willing to help the Zionists. Harry Truman is given credit for having given *de facto* diplomatic recognition to the new State of Israel over the objections of his Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, but he immediately slapped an arms embargo on Israel that would be continued for the entirety of Eisenhower's presidency.