I like to see how different writers depict what happened in and around 1948. Tony Karon had this one:

Recognizing that the Palestinian Arabs would not agree to more than half of British-ruled Palestine, in which they were the majority, being carved off for a separate Jewish state, the U.N. nonetheless voted to prescribe such a partition in 1947. That didn’t settle matters, of course; the two sides fought a war first (involving troops from all of Israel’s Arab neighbors), which saw Israel grow its share of the partition from 55% to 78%, and which turned half the Palestinian population into refugees.

This is a clever shift of the argument (to be clear, clever is not always the same as accurate). So it is not that the Palestinians rejected the UN plan, as some of Israel’s defenders like to argue the point. Rather, it is that the United Nations and UNSCOP ignored the parameters the Palestinians had made clear to them as to what was unacceptable (not more than half).

I wonder if there is any documentary evidence to back up the claim that the Palestinians made that clear or that the UN officials even thought of an upper limit on the Jewish state’s land as a way to try to win Arab support.

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