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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Déjà View | The minority plan
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Déjà View | The minority plan

Making sense of the Israel-Palestine conflict

This conflict is a particularly difficult topic to read about if you wish to understand it with any sense of balance. Photo: APPremium
This conflict is a particularly difficult topic to read about if you wish to understand it with any sense of balance. Photo: AP

All this week I’ve been reading up on the Israel-Palestine conflict, trying to make sense of the appalling bloodshed.

I understand that there are some readers capable of rationalizing the corpse of a shattered child as the inevitable by-product of some brutal-yet-necessary solution to a geo-political polynomial equation. I am not one of those people. The prisms of my morality are flexible, of course, but I can only self-delude myself so much. A dead child, for me, is still a dead child.

So I began reading. Why are people dying in Gaza and why are rockets being fired into Israel, I wanted to know.

This conflict is a particularly difficult topic to read about if you wish to understand it with any sense of balance. Partisan views are much easier to find. So I’ve very much enjoyed reading Martin Bunton’s The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction. It is particularly illuminating if your knowledge about the conflict is limited to print or TV news and commentary.

Later I began to add to my reading by picking up bits and pieces from various online archives, especially old United Nations (UN) documents. Which is when I came across details of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, better known as UNSCOP.

The history and divisive legacies of the UNSCOP are well-known to experts. But I will assume that most readers will need a refresher.

The UNSCOP was formed on 15 May 1947. It was asked to study the Palestine problem and suggest a long-term political plan for Jewish and Palestinian co-existence that extended beyond the controversial British mandate.

The committee would be formed of eleven member countries who were seen as being “neutral": Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, Yugoslavia and, interestingly, India.

Note that India, at the time, is yet to achieve independence. That would happen, oddly enough, during the course of the UNSCOP’s functioning.

“The Special Committee," the UN General Assembly resolved, “shall have the widest powers to ascertain and record facts, and to investigate all questions and issues relevant to the problem of Palestine." It would then submit a report no later than 1 September 1947.

Between 15 June and 31 August 1947, according to an old UN press release, the committee carried out “a 2,200 mile 15 day tour of Palestine, a five day trip to the Lebanon and Syria, a one day visit to the King of Transjordan in Amman, a 2,700 mile 7 day tour of DP (displaced persons) camps in Germany and Austria, the holding of 13 public hearings in the course of which 37 persons representing 6 Arab states and 17 Jewish organizations gave evidence, and the holding of 4 private hearings." The three Indian members of the group—Sir Abdur Rehman, Venkata Viswanathan and H. Dayal—split the workload between them in a rush to meet the deadline.

The UNSCOP suggested a plan for Palestine that later became the basis for the UN General Assembly resolution 181. This plan involved partitioning Palestine into “an Arab State, a Jewish State and the city of Jerusalem… The city of Jerusalem was to be placed under the International Trusteeship System."

However, this was not the committee’s unanimous recommendation. Only eight of them voted for this ‘majority plan’. India, Iran and Yugoslavia, instead, proposed a minority plan that would avoid partition: “An independent federal State of Palestine shall be created following a transitional period not exceeding three years. The independent Federal State of Palestine shall comprise an Arab state and a Jewish state."

The proposal goes on to describe how this structure—at first glance somewhat similar to the Indian Centre-State system—would work.

The overarching idea, according to the three countries, was to unite the two communities instead of dividing them. “It is important to avoid an acceleration of the separatism which now characterizes the relations of Arabs and Jews in the Near East," the minority group wrote in the report, “and to avoid laying the foundations of a dangerous irredentism there, which would be the inevitable consequences of partition in whatever form. A Federal State solution, therefore, which in the very nature of the case must emphasize unity and co-operation, will best serve the interests of peace."

The somewhat noble minority proposal was later viewed suspiciously by the General Assembly and ignored. The majority plan for partition was adopted—India voted against it—but before it could be implemented civil war broke out in Mandated Palestine. What has since followed is relentless violence, acrimony and distrust.

Would the minority plan—one that India heavily pushed in the General Assembly—have made a difference to the crisis? Would Federalism somehow have glued Jewish refugees and Arabs together? Who knows? It surely couldn’t have led to a worse state of affairs.

The great irony in all this is that the Indian UNSCOP team itself was partitioned afterwards. Viswanathan and Dayal stayed in India while Abdur Rehman later went on to become a Supreme Court Justice in Pakistan.

I like to think that with their minority plan these men were trying to save Palestine from the chaotic partition and acrimony they were themselves witnessing back home. Alas.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.

Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com. To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/dejaview

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Published: 25 Jul 2014, 09:54 PM IST
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