Palestine presented a monumental challenge to the fledgling United Nations. Three Zionist paramilitary groups were waging a war of terrorism against the Mandate British to drive them out and the British, eager to oblige, announced that they would withdraw in May 1948 and turn the problem over to the UN. A UN committee convened in 1947 to decide on a plan. Only a third of the Palestinian population was Jewish, most were landless recent immigrants and refugees, and 94% of Palestinian land was Arab-owned. The Arab nations challenged UN authority to make decisions about predominantly Arab land, citing the UN Charter principle of self-determination, and refused to participate in the proceedings. This left the political game in the hands of the Zionist players.
In November 1947 under heavy Zionist pressure the UN General Assembly upon recommendation by this committee issued UNGA Resolution 181, proposing a division of Palestine into two states, one Jewish on 55% of the land and one Arab on the remaining 45%. The Arabs naturally refused this offer, the British declined to implement it on this account, and massive Arab/Jewish conflict erupted.
In March 1948 the partition plan was referred for approval to the UN Security Council, which declined approval and instead returned it to the General Assembly for further consideration. By then it was too late and the resolution was never enacted. Despite this inconvenient truth, and the fact that the land was not the UN's to give, Zionists and their supporters typically claim that "the UN gave Israel the land."
Since the British forces were committed to withdraw in five months they did nothing to stop the well-organized, well-armed, well-funded and ruthless Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing that ensued. "Plan Dalet" was launched by Zionist militias in March 1948 and by the time the British departed two months later, this brutal campaign was in full operation and had already committed 16 massacres and driven over 300,000 almost entirely helpless Palestinians from their homes into hastily constructed UN (UNRWA) refugee camps.
After British withdrawal in May 1948 external Arab forces intervened with too little too late, and the only Arab military possibly capable of stopping the Zionists - the Arab Legion of Transjordan - had been co-opted by the Zionists in an agreement to let Transjordan keep Judea and Samaria (the present West Bank) in exchange for non-intervention with Zionist seizure of the rest. In short, they divided the spoils, the first in a six-decade series of betrayals by Arab states suffered by the Palestinians right up to Egypt's 2006 closure of the Rafah crossing into Gaza, collaborating with Israel in the illegal collective imprisonment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza behind a suffocating blockade.
The UN had no intervention force and was rendered impotent in the situation, but established the right of all refugees to return to their homes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, applied explicitly to the Palestinian refugees in UN Resolution 194 that same month.
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