Why didnt Palestinians accept the United Nations original partition plan 1 ?
The 1947 UN GA proposed partition was outside the competence of the Assembly under the Charter of the United Nations. Nowhere in the UN’s charter was there the power to partition any country, especially based on racial or religious grounds. According to its Charter, the General Assembly of the United Nations can only make recommendations. It is not authorized to pass binding laws or create new states. Article 1 of the U.N. Charter also calls on the members of the United Nations “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self -determination of peoples.” Thus the partition resolution violates fundamental principles of the U.N. Charter. Even if the UN had the power, the resolution to partition Palestine was not binding ,since it was endorsed by the General Assembly rather than the Security Council.
At the time of the UN Partition Plan, which was recommended by the General Assembly as a non-binding resolution in November 1947 and not by the security council, the European Zionist movement owned just less than 7 percent of the land of Palestine in comparison with indigenous Palestinians who owned more than 93% of historic Palestine. Jewish people constituted only one-third of the total population, the vast majority being newly arriving European immigrants, and a large proportion of them were in fact illegal immigrants. Despite this, the partition plan called for the establishment of a Jewish State in more than 55 percent of Palestine. Even within the proposed borders of the Jewish State, there would have been only a tiny majority of Jewish residents (498,000 to 497,000 Palestinians).
Illegal Immigration to Palestine before 1948 (Nakba), British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume I - Page 208. Chapter VII: Immigration: Section 3: Acquisition of Palestinian Citizenship: Section 4: (a) Manner of Volume
Palestinian political bodies, led by the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), rejected the partition plan as a violation of the principle of self-determination and majority rights. Instead, the AHC proposed that Palestine remain a unitary, democratic state with strong minority rights, including proportional representation for Palestine’s Jewish citizens in the legislature, and Jewish communal autonomy in some spheres.
Even though the United States voted in support of the partition plan, the Truman administration quickly realized that the partition plan could not be implemented and instead threw itself behind a proposal to place Palestine under a UN trusteeship until a political resolution could be found. The Truman administration reversed itself again by recognizing Israel.
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