Haderech lekaf-tet b'November

“The Road to Partition” examines the working process and conclusions drawn by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which was established in May 1947 and issued its findings and recommendations in September of that year.1 It was tasked with deciding the fate of Palestine, which fell under the authority of the British mandate. UNSCOP was created during the decisive juncture of World War II's aftermath: it was the beginning of the Cold War and the inception of the United Nations. Elad Ben-Dror states in the book's introduction that his main goal was to discover what ultimately led UNSCOP to support the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab-Palestinian states (8).According to the traditional Zionist historiography, UNSCOP was an objective body that sought to thoroughly study the question at hand.2 However, the Palestinians boycotted the Committee and the Arab states failed to form a united front in support of the Palestinians. The Zionists, on the other hand, eloquently and persuasively presented their case on the “Land of Israel.” The Committee was also deeply moved by various incidents they witnessed, such as the deportation of the Exodus passengers or the harrowing sights at the camps for the displaced Jews in Europe.3 Collectively, these circumstances led the Committee to favor the Zionist argument.The contrasting Palestinian narrative tends to dismiss UNSCOP's supposed neutrality. According to the Palestinian historiography, despite UNSCOP's impartial façade, it was no more than a fig leaf, designed by the superpowers to unlawfully hand Palestine to the Zionist movement.4 The Committee's supposedly neutral composition was questionable: ten out of its twelve members were Christian states. In addition, its mission contradicted international laws and norms formulated by the United Nations itself, such as the United Nation's Charter, which respects the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples. In the Palestinian historiography, UNSCOP's Zionist sympathies are what eventually led it to allocate the lion's share of the land to the Jewish minority, in a fashion that disregarded geographical, historical, and demographic data. UNSCOP's bias was a well-known fact among the Palestinian leadership, and that is why the Arab Higher Committee boycotted it to begin with.Despite their differences, the Zionist and Palestinian narratives surprisingly share two key assumptions. To begin with, both seem to agree that UNSCOP drew its conclusions based on its pro-Zionist tendencies, whether consciously or not. Second, the two historiographies attribute great significance to the same historical agents that exerted influence on UNSCOP during its work: The United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the local Zionists and Arabs in Palestine.Elad Ben-Dror offers a third approach, which deconstructs the shared assumptions of the Zionist and Palestinian histories of UNSCOP. Ben-Dror argues that UNSCOP did not adopt the partition method as a result of a pro-Zionist line. His main thesis is that the Committee's report was shaped by a long and convoluted chain of events (311). At no point did partition seem like an obvious solution, not even during the final deliberations (232). When partition finally was approved by vote, it was considered a pragmatic lesser evil and not an ideal choice (229).Ben-Dror also shifts the analytical emphasis from the external actors to UNSCOP itself. In terms of sources, he chooses not to emphasize Zionist, Arab/Palestinian, British, and American testimonies as most of the existing historiography does. Instead, his main corpus of materials includes United Nations archival documents, as well as personal memoirs and communiqués written by the Committee's delegates and administrative staff.Ben-Dror effectively uses these sources to provide a history of UNSCOP on two levels: the first deals with the Committee as a whole, while the other explores each of its delegates individually. Through a careful examination, he shows that UNSCOP was a heterogeneous group with conflicting visions. It was hard for any idea to secure a consensus in that environment, let alone for long. Moreover, by focusing on each individual delegate Ben-Dror shows that some delegates even had a change of heart during the process of carrying out the Committee's work. And herein lies the book's main contribution to the historiography. It connects the Committee's ever-changing collective train of thought to the personal experience of each individual delegate.The book's chapters can be roughly divided into four identifiable but nonsequential parts. The first part includes chapters 1 and 11 and revolves around UNSCOP's relations with the three leading powers of that time: Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Ben-Dror starts by explaining Great Britain's interests in transferring the question of Palestine to the United Nations “without recommendations.” At the time Great Britain's officials were divided among themselves about what to do in Palestine, and the British policy reflected that uncertainty. Great Britain's only clear agenda was to avoid any active role in the inquiry, lest it would become further entangled in a feud with either side. This strategy was employed by the British throughout the entire UNSCOP period.Nevertheless, the British and Americans did attempt to shape UNSCOP according to their perceived interests. They had hoped for a strictly advisory Committee, with limited maneuvering space and delegates that they could influence. Much to their surprise, once a consensus was reached at the UN General Assembly on May 15, 1947, regarding the need to solve the question of Palestine once and for all (including surprising support from the pro-Arab Soviet Union), it became clear that UNSCOP's work would be beyond their control. From this point on, Great Britain kept to its role as a neutral arbiter in Palestine, while the Americans stepped back to let the Committee do its work.As for the Soviet Union, some historians speculated that Moscow influenced UNSCOP's work through the two communist delegations: Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But according to Ben-Dror, the Soviets also generally kept their thoughts on UNSCOP to themselves. Moscow broke from its traditional pro-Arab policy when the Soviet Union's Permanent Representative to the UN, Andrei Gromyko, spoke in the UN General Assembly on May 14, 1947, and publicly endorsed the concept of partition if all else failed (thereby de facto showing support for Zionism). In chapter 9 (which will be discussed in greater detail below), Ben-Dror shows that neither the Yugoslav nor the Czechoslovak delegates received any instructions from Moscow. By choosing to sit back and wait, the United States and the Soviet Union were eventually influenced by UNSCOP, instead of the other way around.The second segment of the book includes chapters 3 to 7. This part discusses how UNSCOP did its work. Here Ben-Dror addresses the more commonly discussed episodes of UNSCOP. The first stage of its inquiry included the Committee's trip to Palestine. Here, the delegates held meetings, conducted visits, and heard testimonies from British, Palestinian, and Zionist representatives.In this section of the book, Ben-Dror's work appears to conform to the Zionist narrative: UNSCOP attempted to conduct a thorough and balanced inquiry, but this ideal was challenged from every direction. The British strictly maintained their neutrality, and sometimes even kept their information away from UNSCOP. The Palestinian Arab Higher Committee boycotted the proceedings and pressured other Arab actors to follow suit. The Zionists, on the other hand, lobbied excessively in a manner that threatened to overshadow other points of view.Despite similarities to the Zionist narrative in this part of the book, Ben-Dror refutes the Zionist argument that the delegates were swept away by what they saw. Not all of them reacted in the same manner to the deportation of the Exodus passengers or the execution of three Zionist militants by the British authorities during July 1947. In fact, Ben-Dror points out that major disagreements arose when the Committee contemplated the action it should take (if any) in light of these incidents. Significant debates erupted even within the supposed blocs in the Committee, such as the Latin American group (Guatemala, Peru, and Uruguay), the communist states (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), and the two Muslim representatives (India, whose representative, Sir Abdur Rahman, was a Muslim, and Iran).The second stage of the inquiry was UNSCOP's visit to Lebanon. In light of the Palestinian boycott, the Committee turned to the Arab League in order to study the Palestinian perspective. Although most of the Arab League states did send their delegates to attend a summit with UNSCOP in Beirut, they struggled to form a united front. The result was a joint Arab testimony that advocated an independent Arab state in all of Palestine.Some UNSCOP delegates doubted the supposed Arab consensus, in light of other voices that they heard. In Lebanon Christian figures privately expressed their support for a Zionist state to some UNSCOP delegates. In addition, King Abdallah of Jordan refused to attend the Lebanese summit and instead hosted some of the delegates in his Amman palace. There he endorsed the general Arab formula on the outside, but also signaled under the surface that Jordan shares various interests with the Zionists and therefore he would be open to a more pro-Zionist solution.The final stage of the inquiry was UNSCOP's subcommittee, which was sent to visit the camps for displaced Jews in Europe.5 Just like the former episode in Palestine, not every subcommittee member was convinced that a Jewish state could (or should) remedy the situation of every troubled Jew. The subcommittee nevertheless concluded that a vast majority of the displaced Jews would be unwilling to go anywhere else but to the “Land of Israel.” According to Ben-Dror, this insight affected UNSCOP's decision to allocate relatively major territories to the new Jewish state (so that it could accommodate as many Jewish refugees as possible) as part of the partition plan. However, it was stated in the concluding report that a Jewish state would not solve world Jewry's problems on its own.The two final sections of the book are where its greatest innovation lies. The third part consists of chapters 2 and 10. Here Ben-Dror offers his personal analysis of each of UNSCOP's delegates and thus reveals the group's heterogeneity. Every delegate came to UNSCOP with a unique predisposition that may have also affected his judgment. Each also enjoyed diverging levels of freedom: some operated relatively autonomously, while others were constrained by agendas dictated to them by their home countries. Additionally, Ben-Dror shows that the opinions of some delegates, like Emil Sandström of Sweden or Nicolaas Blom of the Netherlands, drastically changed throughout the inquiry for various reasons.The fourth part of the book consists of chapters 8 and 9, and addresses the Committee's final deliberations in Geneva, as well as the formulation of its final report. In the beginning of this stage, each delegate revealed his personal opinion. A consensus was quickly reached on the fact that the British mandate must end. But in every other respect, the views of the delegates varied greatly. It was so difficult to find a mutually agreed-upon course of action that some delegates contemplated recommending an additional ten-year long mandate, or submitting a purely factual final report devoid of any operational recommendations.Eventually, the Committee voted in favor of the inclusion of two different scenarios in their final report: partition as the majority proposal, and a federal state as the minority proposal. Ben-Dror argues that this decision was far from ideal. Some delegates saw it as the lesser evil, better than the prospect of UNSCOP simply concluding its work without any substantial resolution. Another factor that pushed the Committee in that direction was its deep commitment to end the British rule in Palestine by any means possible, regardless of the preferred form of government afterwards. The justification for ending British rule was manifold: anticolonialism, sympathy for the Zionist/Palestinian national aspirations, or simply a practical disappointment in the British treatment of the mandate and UNSCOP's inquiry.During its turbulent time in Geneva, the Committee enjoyed a great deal of unexpected assistance from the professional secretariat, a group often neglected in the relevant literature. The UN staff was eager to prove the nascent body's effectiveness. They assisted in developing the courses of action suggested by the Committee and urged the delegates to stick to the strict deadlines. By way of example, Ben-Dror pays special attention to Paul Mohn, whose drafts of the partition map greatly advanced the sluggish debate on the future borders between the two prospective states. As with the concept of partition, some delegates supported his models simply because there was no better alternative.In conclusion, Ben-Dror's work challenges the existing historiography and offers a new argument based on underexploited sources. His account of the inner workings of the heterogeneous UNSCOP also demonstrates the dangers of arguments that rest on historical determinism (since partition was far from obvious), and on historical generalizations (since it is quite difficult to make general statements about UNSCOP as a whole). The book also serves to advance the emerging and intriguing field of global history, which focuses not only on interstate affairs, but, in part, on the ever-growing importance of supranational bodies

Ancient history · Historiography · Mandate · Mandatory Palestine · Neutrality · Palestine · Palestinian refugees · Political science · Refugee · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law