United Nations Fabricated Arab Narrative Deceives Academics

[Published 3 May 2017]

The United Nations publication “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988” (“Study”) has deliberately misrepresented the actual wording of General Assembly Resolution 181 passed on 29 November 1947 - deceiving many academics who have disseminated the Study’s false message.

The Study has been published by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

The offending statement in the Study misleadingly declares:

“After investigating various alternatives the United Nations proposed the partitioning of Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized.”

The actual wording of Resolution 181 stated:

“Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine…."

The Study omits to mention that 78% of Palestine had already become an independent Arab State in 1946 and been renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan

The Study’s claim that Resolution 181 called for an "independent Palestinian Arab State” was not accidental but deliberately done to deceive and mislead.

Resolution 181 had denied the existence of any distinctly identifiable Palestinian people in 1947.

The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine had also only spoken of the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” in 1922.

“Palestinians” were first defined in the 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter to mean Arab citizens normally resident in Palestine in 1947 and their descendants. Jewish and non-Arab Christian residents were excluded under this racist and apartheid definition.

The PLO also claimed that Palestine was the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people - even though Resolution 181 clearly did not.

That the Study deliberately changed the actual wording of Resolution 181 to advance these fictitious PLO claims — or perhaps others unknown - for spurious reasons - is scandalous.

This false rendition of Resolution 181 has been repeated verbatim in many books including:

1. Handbook of Ethnic Conflict: International Perspectives - Dan Landis and Rosita D Albert

2. Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging - Madeleine Arnot and Sharlene Swartz

3. Bridges Over Troubled Waters - Dahlia Moore and Salem Aweiss

Richard Cummings PhD propagated this false statement during a lecture to the Arab Society of Princeton University on 21 February 2002.

This falsehood again appears in “Shaping Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis: The Role of International Law and the State Department Legal Adviser written by Michael Scharf and Paul Williams.

Their book grew out of a series of meetings with all ten of the living former U.S. State Department legal advisers from the Carter administration to that of George W. Bush.

Both authors are law professors and formerly served in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the US Department of State.

That two such eminent lawyers apparently accepted this official United Nations document as being unerringly accurate speaks volumes for those who have been similarly deceived because they didn’t take the time to verify what they were disseminating.

Many other academics have swallowed this duplicitous Study hook line and sinker to form hostile anti-Israel views - especially regarding Israel’s claims in Judea and Samaria - geographical place names actually used in Resolution 181 and for 3000 years continuously until the Arabs renamed those areas the “West Bank” in 1950.

The Roman Empire used the same ploy in 135 AD — changing the name of its conquered province from “Syria Judaea” to “Syria Palestina”.

Change the name - change the game.

Correcting this fabricated United Nations Arab narrative is urgently required.