Final Vote on Palestine Partition Before General Assembly

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26629, 27 November 1947, Page 5

Final Vote on Palestine Partition Before General Assembly

Rec. 9 p.m. NEW YORK, Nov. 25. The Palestine Committee to-day approved by 25 votes to 13, with 17 abstentions, the SovietAmerican supported partition plan for the Holy Land. The proposal goes to the assembly to-morrow for the final vote with the two-thirds majority needed for its adoption. Mahmoud Bey Fawzi (Egypt) immediately challenged the legality of the committee’s action. “ I here reserve the right to consider this decision null and void,” he declared. The partition plan calls for Britain to withdraw from Palestine by August 1, 1948, and the establishment of Arab and Jewish States by October 1, 1948. A five-nation United Nations Commission would be entrusted with the administration during the transition period and the Security Council would be responsible for implementing the plan. During the day the committee rejected a Pakistan amendment to have the whole question of boundaries reconsidered by experts so that neither of the two States would have more than 10 per cent, of its area, exclusive of State and waste lands, owned by residents of the other State. This would have reduced the area of the Jewish State by thousands of square miles.

The committee approved without a vote the United States amendment giving the Arabs the Beersheba district and a section of the Negeb desert near the Egyptian border. It was claimed this would make the division jf the country more equitable. Sir Zaerullah Khan said the cession of a “ useless piece of desert in the Negeb desert ” was sham and irony. “ The United States is apparently trying to convince this committee of the General Assembly and the world that it has done a noble thing in giving :his strip,” he said. Among the ■ nations voting for the oartition werfe the United States, Russia, Australia, Canada and South Africa. The opponents were Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, :he Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Siam, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. The abstainers were New Zealand, Argentina, Belgium, China, Colombia, Elsali/ador, Ethiopia. France, Greece, Haiti, Honduras, Liberia, Luxemburg, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia. After the committee adjourned the chairman, Dr H. V. Evatt, said Britain had acted with complete propriety as a member of the United Nations in bringing the Palestine issue before the Assembly. Britain had been unjustly criticised for the conduct or her mandate. How difficult and, in fact, impossible a task the mandate proved to be has been well shown by the United Nations Special Committee's investigations and the course of the debates in. the Palestine Committee itself. “It remains a fact that under the mandate a great development has been brbught about in Palestine for both the Jews and Arabs and the mandatory power is entitled to every credit for what it accomplished. The fact that this is recognised is shown by the objections now raised to the British withdrawal by some who have previously been vocal in their criticism of the British handling of the mandate,” he concluded. Reuter states the Partition Plan, which is now virtually certain to obtain assembly approval, still leaves some problems in the delegates’ minds, the most disturbing of which is the question of what will happen if civil war breaks out in Palestine. The feeling of many of the delegates was expressed by Sir Carl Berendsen when he solemnly warned the United Nations for enforcing its plan against certain Arab opposition. The plan provides for Security Council intervention if there is widespread disorder, but few people in the United Nations now have confidence in the council’s power to act quickly and effectively. As several delegates pointed out in the debate—where is the council's striking force? A message from Jerusalem says that crowds in Tel-Aviv sang and danced in the streets at the news that the Palestine Committee had voted for partition^