Making the Desert Bloom

"[They spent less than 40 days on their mission, but their work radically changed the course of history for the Jewish nation and for the Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Palestine."

"He [Judge Ivan C. Rand] deeply felt the plight of the Jewish. Rand signed on to the entire Zionist narrative." 

"The committee arrived in Palestine evenly split between supporters of the Zionists and the Palestinians, giving each side] equal potential for tipping the committee in their direction."

"[Rand was an] intolerant bigot [about French-Canadians, Catholics, Jews and other non-Anglos]."

Elad Ben-Dror, Israeli historian

"He went there as a fiercely independent judge of the Supreme Court of Canada to find a solution to this intractable problem."

Willian Kaplan, lawyer, author of Canadian Maverick, biography

David Ben Gurion, State of Israel

When Britain left Palestine in May of 1948, Israel declared its independence. A day afterward, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq launched a joint attack on the Jewish state; the first of no fewer than three Arab-Israeli wars to take place over the following 25 years. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in the area called Palestine were displaced by the fighting in 1948, either voluntarily, planning on a swift return once the conflict was concluded and the Jewish state was no more, or claiming that they were pushed out, their properties taken by Jews. 

When a committee appointed by the United Nations, named UNSCOP, comprised of Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, Holland, India, Iran, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia, each of which appointed a representative to sit on the special committee struck to investigate how to solve the problem of both Jewish and Arab claims to the contested area of Palestine, it was with the expectation that once the decision and its formula were declared it would be to the satisfaction of both parties

In the event, after deliberations, the committee comprised of nine European countries whose representatives travelled throughout the area to assess the claims of both the Jews and the Arabs, they took their impressions back with them to Geneva with a month to formulate recommendations. A consensus seemed elusive. Iran, India and Yugoslavia issued a minority report with their proposal being for a single federal state partitioned with part Arab, part Jewish enclaves.

The resulting majority report however, was spearheaded by a Canadian jurist and another from Sweden, calling for Palestine to be split into two states; one Jewish, one Arab. The Jewish state was to be the larger piece of the territory with an economic link between both. In their formula, Jerusalem would fall under international control. While at that time the Jewish population was half that of the Arab community, the report reasoned that room was needed in the Jewish state to accommodate Holocaust survivors, at the time anxiously awaiting release from refugee camps.

The man recognized as the most influential and determined among the assigned committee members who made their recommendations in 1947 for the United Nations to follow, was a Canadian, Justice Ivan Rand, an Anglo-Saxon protestant who as dean of the law school at Western University rejected a candidate for the faculty on the basis that London, Ontario had no use for "too many Jews". Yet his rulings in the 1940s and 50s defended the rights of Japanese-Canadians who had been interned during the Second World War; he refuted Quebec's persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses, and supported the right of Communists in Canada to free speech.

After study, the 11-man investigative group led by Justice Rand called for the partition of the contested territory into Jewish and Arab states, viewed as a victory for Zionism and still reflecting the sentiments of a number of countries including the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. But the salient point is that the UN General Assembly of the time adopted the advice of the panel. Never imagining, one suspects, that what would follow would be one of the world's bloodiest, most intractable conflicts.

 

Jubilant Jews celebrating the re-emerged State of Israel

 

According to Uri Milstein, an Israeli historian, Justice Rand was by most accounts key to the two-state solution that was recommended to the United Nations: "The one who tipped the scales was the Canadian representative", he wrote. Opponents of Israel, however, have never stopped questioning the wisdom and the justice behind the UN's Partition plan, and that questioning has now been renewed in the wake of the Hamas bloody incursion into Israel, and the Israeli response, hammering Gaza to destroy the terrorist group.

The British government was disenchanted with its role, overseeing Palestine under the awarded "mandate" following the First World War. It approached the fledgling United Nations that had emerged from the old League of Nations to arrive at an alternate solution. The promise of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. specified it must be accomplished without impinging on the rights of existing occupants, endorsed in 1922 by the League of Nations.

After which hundreds of thousands of Jews anxious to escape European persecution migrated to the region, linked to the Zionist movement. By the end of the Second World War, British forces severely limited Jewish immigration acceding to the Arabs whose anger opposed any further entrance of Jews to Palestine. The UNSCOP special commission was created at that juncture, to weigh the merits of two discordant points of view.

 

1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight

 

Jews considered Palestine in the context of their ancient ancestral heritage, where a renewed homeland was urgently required  to settle Holocaust survivors languishing in miserable conditions in displaced persons camps in Europe. Many countries including Canada and the United States, driven by antisemitism refused to accept Jewish refugees and a solution was seen to be elusive. The mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis certianly played a role in the final determination of the issue in offering a state to the Jews alongside one for the Arabs.

Justice Rand, as the committee travelled across Palestine grew to admire Jewish development of an arid land, often referred to as "making the desert bloom", and empathized with Holocaust survivors. On the other hand, he was less than impressed by the  underdeveloped, less-progressive Arab communities visited by the committee. In a 1921 paper, Queen's University law professor Ardi Imseis argues that the domination of the committee by nine European, "settler-colonial" countries made it friendly toward the Jewish cause; a sign of a "lingering imperialism".

The same source and line of thought along with an alternate heritage shared by millions of Muslims who have since the war years immigrated to Canada, been accepted in huge numbers as refugees, have become a Jew-unfriendly demographic in Canada whose collective venom has been unleashed in the wake of the Israeli response to the Hamas terrorism perpetrated on October 7 in southern Israel. The atrocities deeply shocking in the depth of their sadistic brutality.

 

Despite which the hatred of Jews and of Israel within the Arab/Muslim diaspora across the world of the West has erupted in a show of unity and strength with antisemitism coming to the fore in a manner both shocking and terrorizing in and of itself. Accusations of ongoing victimization on the part of the Arab/Muslim world which continues to attack Jews in Israel and abroad, yet referring to themselves as the victims, and the Jews as the aggressors abound. A tired old tale of rancid hatred that refuses to die.

 

New Voices Magazine