Segev: With every settler who moves to the territories and with every Palestinian child who is killed by Israel Defense Forces fire, Israel loses some of the moral justification that led to the decision on the 29th of November 60 years ago

November 29, 2007 8:34 am henrymunsonjr Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Tom Segev, The 29th of November, then and now - Haaretz, November 29, 2007

On Saturday night, November 29, 1947, many of the Jews in the Land of Israel went out to dance in the streets of the cities. They were celebrating the United Nations decision to establish a Jewish state in part of the country. The Arabs were also supposed to get a state, but they went to war.

In his new book, Yoav Gelber, a professor of history at the University of Haifa, ponders what would have happened had the Arabs agreed to the Partition Plan adopted by the UN 60 years ago today. “We can only guess,” writes Gelber cautiously.

Such guessing fires the imagination: It is possible that everything would have happened as it did, from one war to the next. The Zionist movement invested great efforts into attaining a majority in favor of partition, but the borders proposed by the UN were far from being an answer to its yearnings. Had the Arabs agreed to those lines, the Zionists might have rejected them.

In any case, everyone knew that it was not the UN that would determine the borders of the country, but rather the outcome of the war. Israel today controls an area about twice the size of the area it was allotted on November 29, 1947. The partition resolution can therefore be seen as the mother of all the ensuing diplomatic fictions, from Security Council Resolution 242 to the “road map.”

In recent months, we have marked a number of significant dates that offered an opportunity for similar pondering: the 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the 70th anniversary of Lord Peel’s partition plan, the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War, the 30th anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s visit.There is no point in asking who is to blame, the questions which usually dominate such discussions. There is a point to trying to understand why it is so difficult for the two sides to end the conflict, and where they erred.

It is not easy to understand why so many Israelis still believe that a large Israel without peace is better than a small Israel with peace, and why Israeli patriotism is usually identified with expanding borders rather than with the desire for Jewish and democratic borders. But the really important question is this: Who has more to lose in the present situation? The answer is clear: Israel. Not only because of Iran, Hamas and the weakness that was revealed in the Second Lebanon War. With every settler who moves to the territories and with every Palestinian child who is killed by Israel Defense Forces fire, Israel loses some of the moral justification that led to the decision on the 29th of November 60 years ago. The Palestinians have already lost almost everything they had.

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