TEL AVIV ‹ Understanding last week¹s bizarre resolution granting the West Bank of Palestine status as a ³nonmember observer² of the United Nations requires a look at the past.
Sixty-five years ago, the same General Assembly of then-nascent UN offered the Palestinian people their best chance ever for a viable state of their own: the hotly debated 1947 Palestine Partition Plan. That historic scheme was conceived as a solution to the growing fight between Arabs and Jews over who would control Palestine when the British mandatory government left the region.
The UN¹s plan would divide the Holy Land into two independent states ‹ one Arab and one Jewish ‹ eventually linked by economic and other ties. It won a majority vote.
The Jews, for the most part, enthusiastically accepted the idea. The Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states who controlled them angrily turned it down. Instead they immediately launched a ³war of extermination,² in which they swore to throw their Zionist neighbors into the sea.