United Nations Partition Plan of Palestine
Updated 2024-07-30
2022-05-05 The Nakba and Palestine Refugees | IMEU Questions and Answers From an original estimated population of 750,000 in 1948, today there are more than 7 million Palestinian refugees worldwide, 5.7 million of whom are refugees registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a specialized UN agency established in 1949 to provide social services to refugees.
Nakba is an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” and refers to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, its exiling of Palestinians and making them into refugees, its dispossession of Palestinian property, its destruction of Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, and its attempt to erase the existence of the Palestinian people from its homeland in 1948.
Why Did Palestinians Not Accept the UN Partition Plan?
At the time of the UN Partition Plan, which was recommended by the General Assembly in November 1947, the Zionist movement owned just 7 percent of the land of Palestine and Jewish people constituted only one-third of the total population. Despite this, the partition plan called for the establishment of a Jewish State in more than 55 percent of Palestine. Even within the proposed borders of the Jewish State, there would have been only a tiny majority of Jewish residents (498,000 to 497,000 Palestinians).
Palestinian political bodies, led by the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), rejected the partition plan as a violation of the principle of self-determination and majority rights. Instead, the AHC proposed that Palestine remain a unitary, democratic state with strong minority rights, including proportional representation for Palestine’s Jewish citizens in the legislature, and Jewish communal autonomy in some spheres.
Even though the United States voted in support of the partition plan, the Truman administration quickly realized that the partition plan could not be implemented and instead threw itself behind a proposal to place Palestine under a UN trusteeship until a political resolution could be found. The Truman administration reversed itself again by recognizing Israel. https://imeu.org/article/the-nakba-and-palestine-refugees-imeu-questions-and-answers
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