[Sydney Morning Herald-Australia] Barry Cohen - On November 29, 1947, the UN accepted the recommendation of its Special Committee on Palestine, by 33 votes to 13, to divide the territory into two states, one Arab, one Jewish. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, made it clear that it was far from what he wanted, but on behalf of the Jewish people he accepted. Had the Arab nations agreed, the bitterness and acrimony of the previous years would have ended and tens of thousands of lives would not have been lost during the ensuing 60 years. Instead, the Arabs set out to strangle Israel at its birth. The terrible tragedy of the last 60 years is that no one need have died, and that the infusion of some of the brightest from around the world has created an expanding, thriving, pulsating Israeli economy and culture that could have been shared by the Arab world, instead of them wallowing in the squalor and misery experienced by all but the oil-rich states. The writer was a federal Labor MP (1969-1990).
2008-05-16 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive