The Pittsburgh Press (August 7, 1946)
Background of news –
Settlement by partition
By Buel W. Patch
The British government has approved conditionally a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish zone, an Arab zone, and two zones to be administered by a British-controlled central government. It has been intimated that the plan, proposed by a joint British-American group, is not satisfactory to President Truman, partly because it might delay admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine.
The American members of the group, representing a special Cabinet committee on Palestine, have returned to Washington from London, on summons of the president, for consultations preliminary to announcement of the United States government’s official position.
Poland is the country best known for partitions. The famous partitions of Poland divided a united nation among its conquerors – the last time, in 1939, between Germany and Russia.
Partition now seems to be coming into vague, not as a device for distributing war conquests, but as a way to settle conflicts between irreconcilable elements in disunited countries thus used, partition provides a means of applying the principle of self-determination and of bringing self-government to subject peoples.
Not a final solution
Federalization, rather than outright partition, is the objective of the Palestine plan. However, creation of largely autonomous Jewish and Arab provinces would amount to virtually the same thing as partition, for it would place bounds on the ambitions of each race to dominate the whole country.
But partition hardly offers a final solution of the Palestine problem. Although one of the proposed British zones covers mostly uninhabited desert, the other – Jerusalem and surrounding territory – has a mixed population and contains holy places of Christians, Jews and Arabs. Inevitably it would remain an object of rivalry.
Current British plans to grant freedom to India involve a prospect that that country will be partitioned into two, perhaps three, self-governing or fully independent units. A federal scheme was once proposed there, too. But Moslem leaders, fearful of domination by the large overall Hindu majority, have been insisting on their Pakistan plan to set up a separate independent state composed of two non-contiguous areas in which Moslems predominate. Present British proposals allow for that development.
It worked in Ireland
Partition as a remedy for national disunity was applied in Ireland 25 years ago. The long struggle of Irish nationalists against Britain had been complicated by the division between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants, concentrated in Ulster, were prepared to resist by force any home-rule proposal that would subject them to domination by the country’s Catholic majority.
The difficulty finally was resolved by the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1921-22, which formally gave dominion status to Ireland as a whole but allowed the six northern counties to vote themselves out of the Free State and retain the separate parliament of Northern Ireland that had been set up under a home-rule act of 1920.
From then on, Southern Ireland advanced to a position of virtual independence, while Northern Ireland regulated its own affairs subject to the overriding power of Britain on certain questions. Tension between the two sections, though not entirely eliminated, was no longer a serious problem.
Although partition proved relatively successful in solving the Irish question, it maybe regarded today as an anachronistic method of dealing with racial or religious conflicts. At a time when nations are becoming increasingly interdependent, and when many people are talking about world government, it seems incongruous to create more nations.