History Memes

I forget the details, but weren't the Brits fucking it up too before they shoved everything off on the UN?

neutral arbitration

Everybody immediately picked a side and started pumping money and weapons into it

In the UN's defense, at that point, tensions were so high and everything so utterly fucked by the past ~25 years that there was probably no division they could've offered that would've gotten both parties to lay down their arms.

In the UN's not-defense, neither side wanted a division in the first place (the Zionist side was very clear they intended to take over all of Palestine no matter what the partition plan said) and both were pretty vocal about it. The Palestinians more so, but still.

If you would like to learn a more accurate representation of this period of history, this chapter which has been made freely available and is thoroughly sourced is something I would recommend reading. An extremely relevant excerpt:

In a 1938 diary entry, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and later Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, underlined the “necessity” of “removing the Arabs from our midst”. But he recognised that timing was critical. “What is inconceivable in normal times”, he wrote, “is possible in revolutionary times.” When the 1948 Arab-Israel War broke out, Zionist forces seized the opportunity to bring about what Ben-Gurion euphemistically referred to as “great changes in the composition of the population of the country”. During the war, some 700,000 Palestinians – two-thirds of the population – fled or were driven from their homes in what became Israel. Historians debate the extent to which this displacement unfolded according to a central plan. What cannot plausibly be denied is that Zionist massacres as well as expulsions were a major catalyst of Palestinian flight, that Zionist leaders welcomed the exodus, and that military commanders carried out evictions within an ideological context that had broadly legitimated population transfer as a strategic desideratum.

After the dust settled, Israeli authorities moved to consolidate Jewish domination within the new state whose expanded boundaries (established by armistice agreements in 1949 and known as the “Green Line”) encompassed 78 percent of historic Palestine. Israel refused to allow the return of Palestinians displaced during the war and killed thousands of unarmed refugees who made the attempt. Multiple Arab communities within Israel were expelled long after the war was over, while more than four hundred Palestinian villages, towns, and neighbourhoods inside Israel were destroyed to make way for Jewish settlement. Property owned by Palestinian refugees as well as Palestinians who remained to become citizens of Israel was systematically confiscated. This vast expropriation left the Israeli state in possession or control of fully 93 percent of the land within the Green Line, which authorities allocated almost exclusively for use by Jews. In the half-century after independence, the state established more than seven hundred Jewish localities and zero Arab localities, excepting several townships built to facilitate the concentration and dispossession of Bedouin Arabs. Even as Israeli administrators relentlessly promoted Jewish immigration, they directed Jewish settlement strategically to encircle Arab villages and restrict the Arab minority to “small enclaves”. The overarching policy was to “Judaize” the entire territory by “concentrating the Arabs and dispersing the Jews.”

and another, which illuminates what happened before even WW2.

As Jabotinsky prophesied, expanding Jewish settlement frequently provoked Palestinian opposition as well as resistance. Such opposition was typically overruled by means of discriminatory administration while resistance was suppressed by force. In the Mandate period, the Zionist leadership rejected the democratic principle of majority rule in Palestine so long as Jews comprised a minority, on the correct assumption that an Arab electoral majority would vote to end Jewish immigration and settlement. Between 1936 and 1939, British armed forces along with Jewish paramilitaries viciously crushed a Palestinian national revolt. After the 1948 War, Israel subjected some 90 percent of its Arab citizens to military rule. This emergency regime facilitated the destruction of Arab property and expropriation of Arab land until it was lifted in 1966, by which time the state’s demographic objectives within the Green Line had been substantially accomplished. The pattern repeated in the OPT from the following year. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967: three-quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a state. The occupation has been enforced through harsh repression including deportation, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and unlawful killings. By one estimate, Israel jailed more than 800,000 Palestinians from the OPT between 1967 and 2016; those detained were “routinely subjected to torture”.