Ruth King

Post-Holocaust Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish return to biblical Israel culminated with United Nations Resolution 181 in November of 1947, recognizing the Jewish claim to Palestine. It was the first and only time the United Nations created a state by way of a General Assembly vote. (In fact, the partition gave Israel only 51% of the 23% of the original Mandate for Palestine, 77% of which had been lopped off by the British to create Transjordan.)

At the UN meeting on November 27, Thor Thors, the delegate from Iceland, demanded an up or down vote rejecting more unending hearings. There had been intensive lobbying for partition most notably by three members of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP):

Ivan Rand, the Canadian representative who later became a distinguished judge on the Supreme Court of Canada, played a pivotal role in persuading the hesitant Swedish, Czech and Peruvian delegates to support partition.

Jorge Garcia-Granados of Guatemala and Uruguay's Enrique Rodriguez Fabregat were also tireless champions of the Jewish cause. Granados wrote a book The Birth of Israel—The Drama as I Saw It. He later became Guatemala’s first ambassador to Israel, and established its embassy in Jerusalem. Fabregat, a literature professor, was Uruguay's first ambassador to the United Nations, where he remained a stalwart supporter of Israel.

The Jews of Palestine accepted partition and declared independence on May 14th, 1948 with these brief but memorable words:

“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

"After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return. Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses.

“Pioneers and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

"We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel to be known as the State of Israel."

This month marks the 57th anniversary of this declaration. In spite of our dismay at the suicidal policies of Israel’s present government, the state, for its epic rescue of world Jewry, its stubborn adherence to the lofty principles upon which it was founded, and as the locus for the prayers and aspirations of the Jewish people, deserves our full support.

MAY 16TH, 1948 THE NEW YORK TIMES

Two days after Israel’s declaration of independence, New York Times correspondent Mallory Browne’s article, headlined “Jews in Grave Danger In All Moslem Lands: Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia Face the Wrath of Their Foes,” ran on the front page of The New York Times. Browne wrote: “There are indications that the stage is being set for a tragedy of incalculable proportions.”

Browne noted: “In Syria, a policy of economic discrimination is in effect against Jews. Virtually all Jewish civil servants in the employ of the Syrian government have been discharged. Freedom of movement has been virtually abolished.”

Browne reported that in Iraq, home to 130,000 Jews, no Jew was permitted to leave unless he deposited the equivalent of $20,000 with the government and no foreign Jew was permitted to enter.

He wrote that the situation of Jews was worst in Yemen, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt. In Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, then under French rule, conditions were better. (This of course was to change markedly after the French left their colonies in Africa.)

However, all Jews in Moslem nations —- 900,000, including 75,000 in Turkey and 30,000 in Libya — felt threatened and unsafe, according to Browne.

As subsequent events proved, the fears of the Jewish communities in Arab lands were fully warranted. In the end, the vast majority were forced out, most going to Israel, leaving behind billions in property and goods. These were the refugees for which Israel made no claims. They were absorbed as citizens in the epic rescue known as the “ingathering” that followed independence.

Instead the word “refugee” was applied to between 450,000 to 600,000 Arabs who left Israel and have remained for four generations in the “refugee camps” administered by the United Nations. There they remain squatters in squalid conditions, abandoned by their Arab “brothers,” exploited so as to foment hatred and terror against Israel.

The New York Times has long forgotten the saga of those Jews from Arab lands as it incessantly parrots and perpetuates the claims and libels of the so-called Arab refugees.