Palestine 1936: the Great Revolt and the roots of the Middle East conflict

Zionists quickly endorsed the majority report, with its larger Jewish state. In the chapter on the roles and attitudes of the different committee members, Ben-Dror uses as a title the description by Guatemala’s representative Jorge García-Granados of the committee members’ personal views, ‘eleven committees of one man each’, and the author summarises each individual view and the proliferation of such incautious ideas as that for the establishment of two Jewish states, one in Palestine and the other in Italian Somalia. Ben-Dror concludes with a discussion of superpower behaviour in respect of UNSCOP. He remarks that ‘everyone involved in UNSCOP’ believed that the USSR ‘was pulling strings behind the scenes to influence the committee’s decisions’. The Americans, too, were certainly active. These attempted manipulations led to questions about the independence of even the most independent of the committee members, Swedish chairman Justice Emil Sandström, and demonstrates the representatives’ mindfulness of the different opinions and policies of their own governments and of the great powers. The author wrote that he hopes UNSCOP and the Arab–Israeli Conflict will ‘give UNSCOP the place it deserves, as the real engine of the UN partition resolution’ (6). Ben-Dror’s book eloquently accomplishes this task by showing how the inevitable partition of Palestine was formalised in the UNSCOP-influenced UN Resolution to create an Arab and a Jewish state, a resolution taken with the great powers' unrelenting interference.