For every bright moment there is a dark lining - opinion

The day of the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan of British Mandatory Palestine is celebrated as one of the happiest days of the Israeli and Zionist calendars. It was on this date that the international community formally recognized the Jewish right to its historic land, the land of Israel.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to divide the land of Israel into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone that would encompass Jerusalem and its surrounding areas.

For the first time in 2,000 years, the Jewish people would be able to establish their own independent state. Millions of Jews, exiles from the Roman times and two millennia of their descendants, were prevented by Christian and Arab nations from returning and governing their ancestors’ homeland.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in attempts to return and settle their land over those years. For 2,000 years, Jews prayed every day to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their homeland.

In the late 1800s, a movement was started by Theodor Herzl to return the Jewish people to the land of Israel and establish their own state. This movement was called Zionism and took its name from another name for the land of Israel, Zion.

Herzl and the activists who took his mission after his young passing worked every day in the halls of governments around the world to convince the world’s powers to favor the return of the Jews to the land of Israel.

Jewish farmers began returning to the land and farming it, establishing a larger and larger Jewish footprint. Jewish warriors took defensive positions against local Arab attacks and British high-handedness against the fledging Jewish population. The United Nations’ vote validated these efforts and gave them concrete achievement.

From a religious perspective, the international legitimacy granted by the United Nations vote hearkened back to the days of the first Jewish exile by the Babylonians. Jewish scholars viewed the Persian ruler Cyrus’s granting the Jewish people permission to return to their land, govern it, and rebuild their Temple to be the international validation that gave the Jewish leaders of the time the Jewish legal (according to Halacha) authority to sanctify the land.

For many contemporary Jewish scholars, the Jewish people’s return to the land along with international validation was a theocratic moment of significance in Jewish history.

It is no wonder that in many cities throughout Israel there are streets named “The 29th of November.” In the dark cloud of the Holocaust that set over the Jewish people in the 1940s, the United Nations vote on partition of Mandatory Palestine was a silver lining. It didn’t alleviate the suffering of the survivors and their mourning, but it allowed the Jewish people to see a brighter future ahead.

Darkening clouds

AS SIGNIFICANT as the United Nations vote granting the Jewish people the international legitimacy to return, settle, and govern their historic land was, there is a dark lining to the bright cloud of November 29, 1947.

The Jewish people were granted less than half of their historic homeland on that day. They were not given rights to the eternal Jewish capital of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the entire Jordan Valley.

Over 75 years after the establishment of Israel, when Israel controls Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights, and, to some extent, Gaza, many will discount the limited partition plan as “water under the bridge.”

They argue that the Arabs made significant errors of refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, going to war against Israel multiple times, and turning down repeated peace offers, and those errors led to Israel retaining control over most of its historic land – even if the United Nations never granted it to them.

This wasn’t the reaction of the Zionist leaders at the time. While the leaders accepted the partition plan and the restrictions that came with it, they did so begrudgingly, and with ambitions to take more land after the establishment of the state.

The governing and representative body of the Jewish people in the late 1940s was the Jewish Agency. It responded to the partition plan by criticizing the proposed boundaries and agreed to accept the plan if “it would make possible the immediate re-establishment of the Jewish State with sovereign control of its own immigration.”

In a speech he delivered about the idea of partitioning the land, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion said, “The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”

In an address to the Israeli cabinet after the founding of the state, Ben-Gurion said, “Why should we obligate ourselves to accept boundaries that in any case the Arabs don’t accept?” In a letter to his son, Ben-Gurion wrote, “My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning.”

EVEN THOUGH Israel controls more than the limited borders of the 1947 partition plan over 75 years later, it still matters. The international community has not accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s return, settling, and governing of lands not granted to it by the 1947 vote. It largely considers Israel occupiers of the heartland of its own homeland, including Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights.

Many advocate boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning Israel over its occupation of these lands. Some have gone so far as to legitimize terrorism against Israeli civilians because Israel controls more than the land the United Nations granted it.

While November 29, 1947, stands as a day of celebration on the Israeli calendar, it is important for Zionists to be cognizant of the long-standing repercussions of the partition plan. There is a dark lining that continues to delegitimize today’s Jewish state in the eyes of millions of people around the world.

This delegitimization has lent support, voice, and power to the violent enemies of Israel who have murdered thousands of Jews over the past six decades since Israel has taken control of Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria. The Jewish people’s celebrations are not yet complete.

The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world. He recently published his book, Zionism Today.