We’re now approaching the 70th anniversary of UN General Assembly Resolution 181, what is also known as the Partition Plan which was adopted on November 29, 1947. It is often incorrectly asserted that the United Nations created the State of Israel by means of Resolution 181. That is completely untrue.
UN Resolution 181 took the idea that first began to emerge around the 1917 Balfour Declaration, emerged also with the League of Nations Mandate from 1922, but now called explicitly for an independent Jewish state alongside of an Arab state. What Resolution 181 did 70 years ago was it provided international legitimacy for the Jewish claim to statehood. It was a morally significant action, but like all UN General Assembly resolutions, it was not legally binding.
But what established Israel were not the actions of the United Nations. What actually established Israel was the Declaration of Independence by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, on May 15, 1948. To this day, what establishes states are not actions in the UN, despite what Mahmoud Abbas might hope. If you look at recently established countries – East Timor, Kosovo, South Sudan – all of them were established by a declaration of independence of their leaders. Even more recently in Kurdistan there was no declaration of independence. They don’t have an independent state.
Resolution 181 has a very important section that calls for the internationalization of Jerusalem by creating a separate entity known in Latin as a corpus separatum. This is not just an issue for historians because the internationalization proposal contained in Resolution 181 kept resurfacing over the years. For example, on March 1, 1999, the German ambassador to Israel wrote a note verbal to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel which stated that the basis for any resolution of the issue of Jerusalem would be the corpus separatum from 1947 from Resolution 181. Germany at the time had the presidency of the European Union so it wasn’t just the opinion of one country; it conceivably could have represented all European states. READ MORE
