16 May 2024
Partition has long been used as a policy tool by colonial powers to control their colonies, and Palestine was no exception.
In 1917, the British colonial power supported the Zionist movement with the Balfour Declaration, which called for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, ignoring the collective rights of the Palestinian people, referred to as “non-Jewish communities”.
Three decades later, the United Nations institutionalized that pledge with the 1947 plan (Resolution 181), partitioning Palestine into two states, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish.
The UN partition plan of 1947 allocated 56% of the land to a Jewish state. Then, Jews owned about 7% of the private land in Palestine and made up about 33% of the population, most of them recent immigrants.
Jewish European immigrants fled Europe to Palestine with facilitation and support from British authorities starting in the early twenties.
The partition was imposed on the Palestinian people that were asked to green-light their own colonization. It partitioned their homeland to materialize the Zionist movement plan to take over land and settle Jewish immigrants, which they had resisted from the onset.
All of Palestine’s neighboring countries that had achieved independence from their colonial rulers and joined the U.N., voted against the 1947 plan.
Zionist leader Jabotinsky was very conscious of the inevitable rejection by the people of Palestine of any attempts at accepting such a colonial plan.
In his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” he wrote: ‘Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised’.
The Zionist movement saw the partition plan of 1947 as an initial step towards colonizing the entire land.
Today, the colonial project continues through ethnic cleansing, genocide, ghettoizing and destroying Gaza and annexing the West Bank.
“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” – Ben Gurion (1937)