Thursday, April 26, 2007

Historical Ironies

Josh’s Weblog is interested in collecting a list of at least 10 Great Historical Ironies and leads with this one:
UN General Resolution 181, otherwise known as the 1947 UN Partition Plan, intended to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict by creating the State of Israel. Instead it has been a focal point for continual unrest in the middle east. It leads immediately to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and further conflicts ever since.
Okay, I could quibble with "intended to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict by creating the State of Israel"as the rational for the partition plan and think the Brits really wanted to diverse themselves of the responsibility and cost of administrating the Palestine Mandate thereby also effectively washing their hands of more than a few Maccabeen Jews types who refused to go back to the old pre-WW2 ghetto paradigm of what constitutes a good Jew but that would be petty...

I would comment directly at Josh’s site but there is some kind of hinky thing going on every time I tried and it posts as an error. Anyway, my two-bits of historical irony is:

In 1947, if you called an Arab a Palestinian he would have taken great offense to it - as you would have insinuated he was a “Jew”.

3 comments:

Michael said...

Great ironical liner, there.
Don't forget the other great irony of 1947:
Resolution 181 would aslo have created an Arab state of Palestine, except that someone rejected it...

Anonymous said...

I posted your comment, Kateland, sorry about the error message. I've gone to extreme measures to stop comment spammers and it makes my comment system pretty buggy.

K. Shoshana said...

No problem Josh, I really do understand