It never happened

A forgotten bit of history is no longer forgotten, thanks to an insightful article in Salon describing how the proposed UN 1948 Palestine partition never happened. 

68 years ago yesterday, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, with General Assembly Resolution 181. The deal was a bad one as Palestinians were 2/3rds of the population but offered 43% of land.

It get better

Seen above is the U.N.’s map of the proposed partition. The blue areas comprising roughly 57 percent of the land were to be allotted to Jews; orange areas were to be allotted to Palestinians. Jerusalem was to be left under the governance of the international community, because of its historical and religious importance for numerous religions and cultures.

The Partition Plan was never implemented, however. The very next day after it was voted on, the 1947-1948 war broke out.

In this war, Zionist militias systematically ethnically cleansed large portions of historic Palestine, sacking hundreds of Palestinian villages and expelling more than 750,000 people — around two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population. Prominent Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes that, in Israel’s Plan Dalet (also known simply as Plan D), “veteran Zionist leaders” created “a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” They dispatched military orders in March 1948, Pappé explains:

“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”

Plan D “spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go,” writes Pappé. “The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine,” he adds, and it “contain[ed] a repertoire of cleansing methods that one by one fit the means the U.N. describes in its definition of ethnic cleansing.”

Seems the cleansing continues ever onward as Israel continues to build illegal settlements (300+ and counting) while pushing out more Palestinians on land that is unquestionably theirs. 

What's even more interesting is this.

When they founded the country, Israel’s leaders purposefully did not declare official borders; they sought to continue expanding. (They did not write an official constitution either. Still today, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, admits that “Israel has no written constitution in the formal sense.”

Question, what are the odds this story shows up on mainline NOOZE in any way, shape or fashion given how biased the US is regarding this tragic state of affairs. For this rube, < then 0 sounds like a plan to me.