THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE BEFORE THE UNITED NATIONS




When the United Nations was founded in San Francisco on 26 June 1945, Palestine was a territory administered by the United Kingdom under a Mandate received in 1922 from the League of Nations.




Among the issues that had to be dealt with by the Mandatory Power was the question of a Jewish home in Palestine. Increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine was strongly opposed by the Arab inhabitants, who in the mid-1940s comprised about two-thirds of the territory's population of two million. Faced with escalating violence, the United Kingdom decided, in February 1947, to bring the question of Palestine before the United Nations.




Drawing attention to "the desirability of an early settlement in Palestine", the British Government asked that a special session of the General Assembly be called immediately in order to constitute and instruct a special committee to prepare a preliminary study on the question of Palestine for consideration by the Assembly at its next regular session.




At the first special session, convened by the General Assembly on 28 April 1947, a special committee on Palestine was established. Five Arab countries -Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria - tried unsuccessfully to include in the special session's agenda an item which would address "the termination of the Mandate over Palestine and the declaration of its independence". The Jewish case was presented by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, while the Arab Higher Committee spoke for the Palestinian Arabs.




At the special session, the Assembly established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), made up of 11 Member States, to investigate all questions relevant to the problem of Palestine and to recommend solutions to be considered by the regular session in September 1947. During the course of its three-month investigation, the Special Committee went to Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Trans-jordan, and also visited the displaced-persons camps in Europe, which had been ravaged by the Second World War and had experienced the tragedy of the European Jews under Nazism.




While Jewish organizations cooperated with UNSCOP in its deliberations, the Palestinian leadership in the Arab Higher Committee decided not to participate, on the grounds that the United Nations had refused to address the question of independence and failed to separate the issue of Jewish refugees of Europe from the question of Palestine. The natural rights of the Palestinian Arabs were self-evident and should be recognized, it said, and could not continue to be subject to investigation.




The Jewish leadership maintained before the Special Committee that the issues of a Jewish state in Palestine and unrestricted immigration were inextricably interwoven. The Arabs, represented by the League of Arab States, sought the immediate creation of an independent Palestine west of the Jordan River.




The Special Committee completed its work on 31 August 1947, with the members agreeing on the question of terminating the Mandate, the principle of independence and the United Nations role. But there was no consensus on a settlement of the question of Palestine. The majority of the Committee (Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, Netherlands, Peru, Sweden and Uruguay) recommended that Palestine be partitioned into an Arab State and a Jewish State, with a special international status for the city of Jerusalem under the administrative authority of the United Nations. The three entities were to be linked in an economic union. The minority plan, submitted by India, Iran and Yugoslavia, proposed an independent federal structure comprising an Arab State and a Jewish State, with Jerusalem as the capital of the federation. Australia, the remaining member of UNSCOP, abstained from voting on either plan because it maintained that the recommendations exceeded the Committee's terms of reference.