Israel, Palestine and peaceful coexistence.
In 1919 and in the immediate aftermath of WW1, a US President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘King and Crane Commission’ jointly recommended: “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. This was in era when Wilson himself, as President, was heavily engaged in struggles with oppositional forces within the US House of Congress – forces fiercely oppositional to ‘International Accord’ and to all formalised US association with the nascent internationalist ‘League of Nations Organisation’.
On Nov. 29, 1947 and some two years after WW2 – the United Nations Organisation Palestine partition resolution 181 was passed – along with a request “the Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its implementation” (which the Security Council never did).
Within months Militant Zionists displaced 413,794 indigenous Palestinians. Zionist military units had stealthily been preparing for war before the U.N. vote (acquiring massive weaponry, some of it through a widespread network of illicit gunrunning operations in the U.S. under a number of front groups). The U.N. eventually managed to create a temporary and very partial cease-fire; through UN Resolution 186. A Swedish U.N. mediator Count Bernadotte (who had previously rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis) was dispatched to negotiate an end to the violence. Israeli assassins killed him, and Israel continued what it has come to call its “war of independence” – whereby at least 33 massacres of Palestinian civilians were perpetrated (half of them before a single Arab army had entered the conflict) and hundreds of villages were depopulated.
Israel exists today, as it began – as a military garrison state with no democratic mandate, for factional US led interests in the strategically critical Eastern Mediterranean. Buoyed and heavily dependent upon continued US and US allied diplomatic, military and financial support. For in December 2023, Palestine’s ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour reminded how Israel’s aim has unerringly disavowed peace as it has sought to end forever all prospect for Palestinian independence and self-respect.
Without naming the US president, Joe Biden, Mansour accused America of being taken for a ride by Israel’s promise to behave with restraint (in Gaza and in the West Bank territories). Saying: “You can keep calling on Israel to protect civilians, to uphold the laws of war, to allow humanitarian aid in. It will keep toying with you, fooling you, forcing you to discuss the number of trucks while people still cannot get food, water, medicine. It will keep telling you if people only heeded its calls to head south they would have been saved while bombing them in the south.”
“It will explain to you that all of Gaza is a military target, that everyone in Gaza can be killed since they are either terrorists or human shields. Enough is enough. They are playing games with you and they’re taking you for a ride. And you will need to wake up and see reality as it is. If two months of dehumanisation and lies and massacres are not enough to make you understand the Israelis’ plan, what will?”
Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 predictions? Have come to pass.
UNRWA? Exists to serve Historic Palestine’s dire need – in an era of ongoing UN Organisation and US ally disfunction, disarray and failure.