The myth says we compromised

an interview with Meron Benvenisti

bitterlemons: In retrospect, was UNGAR 181 a wise decision in your view?

Benvenisti: From my point of view it was an inevitable decision. It was in line with the solutions current in that period, the British tradition of partition to resolve ethnic conflicts in India, Ireland, etc. It was fashionable. It was inevitable because it was a legitimate way of declaring war. The British left, knowing partition would not be implemented, so UNGAR 181 legitimized the beginning of hostilities, enabling the Jews to profit and get more than their share of Palestine. Nothing of UNGAR 181 was implemented, not the borders, not the economic union, not the provisions that safeguarded the interests of Palestinian inhabitants on a par with Israelis; we tend to forget that within the 181 Jewish state there was an almost equal number of Arabs and Jews. There were provisions to forbid confiscation of land. So UNGAR 181 was a dead letter from the beginning. Later a myth developed that the Jews accepted it and the Arabs rejected it. But the Jews never accepted to honestly implement it. The main aspect of partition rejected by the Jews was the internationalization of Jerusalem.

bitterlemons: Still, the Arab states officially rejected UNGAR 181.

Benvenisti: This was their mistake. But this has become a myth to buttress the justice of the Israeli clause, like the myth that Barak offered the Palestinians everything at Camp David and they rejected it and caused a war. So UNGAR 181 is an example of historic compromise only in principle, not in reality.

bitterlemons: Are you arguing that the idea of partition into two states was a mistake?

Benvenisti: With hindsight the answer is no. Let's assume the United Nations enforced the federation solution, the minority recommendation, instead of partition. That would have been disastrous for the Jewish people, there would have been no Jewish state, there would have been one-man, one-vote.

Thinking about it today, with the failure of the idea of partition, now that the demographic/ethnic proportions are the opposite of then (at present Jews are a majority, then the Arabs were a majority), it's safer to think in terms of a federated state or at least to give it a try. The fashion is no longer partition. Then, after WWII, world borders were fluid. Now the international borders are rigid, and the international community is more prone to think in terms of soft internal boundaries and federated states. So today maybe we should reopen the dilemma of 1947 and adjust it to the present situation.

bitterlemons: Were the 1947 borders--the Bosnia-like partition map of interlocking cantons--viable?

Benvenisti: They were not meant to be implemented. Especially in Jerusalem, Jaffa, western Galilee--the triangles and points where the cantons merged. Bosnia is a good example of a successful decision to maintain old rigid international boundaries but with soft borders inside. Had UNGAR 181 been implemented like at Dayton by the international community after a terrible war it could have worked. But this did not happen. Instead, the Jews saw UNGAR 181 as an opening to legitimize their state and expand. Ben Gurion said as much: this is what we take now.

So if you think in terms of bi-zonal confederation as in Bosnia or Cyprus the answer is yes, the borders were viable. For this you need an atmosphere of cooperation and agreement to demographic status quo and this was not the case. Instead, one side (the Arabs) was weak and militarily aggressive, while the other was dynamic, wanting to bring millions of Jews to Israel, based on the UNGAR 181 foothold. The raison d'etre of the Jewish acceptance of the partition plan was a Zionist plan to expand. We should be proud that we strategically won that diplomatic battle and made it the foundation of a state. But we did not, as the myth says, accept a compromise while the other side rejected it. The objective of UNGAR 181 was not to solve the conflict from the Jews' point of view, but rather to create a Jewish state as a safe haven for victims of the Holocaust. The rest is commentary.

bitterlemons: UNGAR 181 has returned to Israeli parlance in the last few years, in the context of the peace process, because it provides the international legal foundation for Israel as a Jewish state. Suppose the Arabs had accepted it in 1947.

Benvenisti: If we suppose the Arabs embraced UNGAR 181, this would mean an internationalized Jerusalem, the 1947 borders, equal rights for Palestinians in the Jewish state, near demographic parity, and Jews forbidden to expropriate Arab lands. This is a typical ahistoric question, because it is trying to invoke something that was meant to deal with an entirely different situation of 57 years ago, so much so that in 1948 people like me were for partition, and now we support a federated state--just to show how things have changed.

- Published 13/9/2004 (c) bitterlemons.org. Used here with permission.

Meron Benvenisti is former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, an historian, and a columnist for Haaretz.