43

To sanction the de facto situation in Palestine would be tantamount to subscribing to aggression and the principles of the Charter would give way to the principle of the fait accompli. The third basic premise of the Mediator had been the acceptance of partition, but this meant the complete surrender of the Arab position. The Jewish State planned by the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine was to contain a Jewish minority (500,000 Jews against 560,000 Arabs), and the 29 November resolution and the Bernadotte proposals only complicated the situation by making adjustments here and there. The conflict in Palestine was the result of a Jewish desire to subjugate and dominate the Arabs. In such circumstances a defensive war was a sacred duty which the Arabs would carry on if necessary from generation to generation supported by millions of Moslems throughout the world. Representatives of the Arab States then made long statements in which they rejected the arguments of the Israeli representative and criticized the Mediator's conclusions. Faris El Khoury Bey of Syria, taking up Mr Shertok's point that the Arabs had failed to cultivate their deserts, stated that Jewish colonization had been made possible only by the pouring in of millions of dollars from the United States, and asked whether the Japanese would be justified in moving in to Northern Australia simply because there were deserts there. The Jews claimed that Israel needed Galilee for strategic reasons ; but would they not if they obtained it then ask for Lebanon for precisely the same reasons. The representative of Egypt said that he was prepared to accept any just and reasonable solution ; the partition plan, however, was not workable, and this was the basis of the Mediator's proposals. In addition, the division of Arab Palestine among the Arab States (as suggested by Count Bernadotte) was not in accordance with the intention of the Mandate, which contemplated an independent Palestine. Other Arab representatives also found themselves unable to support the Mediator's conclusions on the grounds that they were unjust, illegal, and unworkable. They were unjust because they supported the Jewish claim to a separate State although the Jews possessed no preliminary rights to such a State ; they were illegal because there was no provision in international law enabling invaders to establish a State by expelling lawful inhabitants ; they were unworkable because they provided for the rule of an Arab majority by a Jewish minority, a situation which the Arabs would not accept. Views of Other Delegations After the views of the two parties concerned had been thus presented at some length, other delegates felt themselves free to state their respective positions.