In May 1947, the General Assembly named a Special Committee on Palestine to study the issue of a Jewish state and make recommendations. Secretary-General Trygve Lie appointed Assistant Secretary-General Victor Hoo of China as his representative to the committee and Ralph Bunche as Hoo's special assistant. Bunche was impressed neither by Hoo nor by the ambassadors. He described them as petty, vain, and "not infrequently either vicious or stupid." They were "just about the worst group I have ever had to work with," Bunche said. "If they do a good job it will be a real miracle." The problem was so complex and the frustrations so inevitable that he told a friend, "I am now a Near East expert, completely befuddled."
The Special Committee presented its report to the General Assembly three months later. A majority of seven ambassadors (representing Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden and Uruguay) proposed that "Palestine within its present borders, following a transitional period of two years from 1 September 1947, shall be constituted into an independent Arab state, an independent Jewish state, and the (international) City of Jerusalem." The three political entities would remain within an economic union. In a minority report, three ambassadors (representing India, Iran and Yugoslavia) instead proposed a single federal state. The Australian ambassador would not sign either report.
Bunche was cynical about the motivation of the majority. He described most of them as anti-Semites looking for "a means of dumping world Jewry on the Arabs." Yet their conclusions paralleled the views of the governments of the world's two most powerful countries. Both the United States and the Soviet Union supported the creation of a Jewish state through partition. The Soviet Union, in fact, hoped that the Socialist leaders of the Jewish state might serve as a kind of opening wedge for Marxism in the Middle East. President Truman often endorsed the idea of a Jewish state and resented the condescending memorandums from the State Department that warned him about the adverse reaction from Arab governments if the United States ever recognized one.
Despite the Balfour Declaration, the British, with their imperial ties to the Arab lands of the Middle East, were worried about the consequences of a Jewish state and resented Truman's endorsements, accusing him of pandering for votes. "There's no Arab vote in America," wrote Prime Minister Clement Attlee later, "but there's a very heavy Jewish vote and the Americans are always having elections." British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin even adopted Bunche's cynicism about the motives of those who wanted masses of Jews to settle in Palestine. "I hope it will not be misunderstood in America," he told a Labour Party meeting in 1946, "if I say, with the purest of motives, that (US policy toward Jewish immigration into Palestine) was because they did not want too many of them in New York."
In November 1947, the General Assembly, by a vote of 33 to 13 (with ten abstentions), approved the majority report, thus accepting partition and a Jewish state. American lobbying assured the Jewish victory. The Jewish state would have 498,000 Jews and 468,000 Arabs on fifty-five hundred square miles of land while the Arab state would have 800,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews on forty-five hundred square miles. Unlimited Jewish immigration, of course, would dramatically increase the proportion of Jews in the Jewish state. The vote was the legal foundation for the creation of the state of Israel. When the vote was announced in the General Assembly in Flushing Meadow, Zionists in the lobby were jubilant. "This is the day the Lord hath made," a rabbi shouted. Abba Eban, a witness who later became an Israeli foreign minister, wrote, "There were Jews in tears, and non-Jews moved by the nobility of the occasion. Nobody who ever lived that moment will ever lose its memory from his heart."
But Arab governments decried the General Assembly vote and refused to accept the carving of a Jewish state out of what they insisted was their land. They vowed war if partition took place.
Nonetheless, on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was established. Recognition of Israel soon followed by the United States and the Soviet Union.
From United Nations: The First Fifty Years, by Stanley Meisler. Copyright ⌐ 1995 by Stanley Meisler. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
