UNSCOP: The United Nations Special Committee On Palestine
Following the British example, but not learning from it, the Security Council decided to establish the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to be made up of 11 members, none of them permanent members of the Council, and many of them having very little knowledge of the Middle East, let alone of Palestine. The Committee members represented the following nations: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, The Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, Yugoslavia.
Before UNSCOP reached the shores of Palestine, the British, in a desperate attempt to ease Jewish immigration into Palestine, asked the US government to take up an initiative by Congressman William Stratton in April 1947 to allow a one-off immigration, from Europe to USA, of some 400,000 Jews. This was categorically rejected by the US Administration.
UNSCOP’s arrival in Palestine coincided with the arrival of the Jewish refugee ship The Exodus. The British decision to capture and return it to Germany reinforced the link in the minds of UNSCOP Committee members of the survival of European Jews with their eventual settlement in the land of Palestine.
It is in this emotional atmosphere that UNSCOP was conducting its enquiries and discussing the fate of the Palestinians. The Arab Higher Committee was becoming convinced that the independence of Palestine was not UNSCOP’s main priority. Interestingly, we now know that the Jewish Agency provided UNSCOP in May 1947 with a map of Palestine which showed a future Jewish state in over 80% of Palestine. This is equivalent to the land Israel has so far claimed today.
Jewish Agency Proposal - August 1946 (copyright George Kirk)
It took UNSCOP exactly two and a half months to complete its task. It met in Geneva in the conference room on the first floor of the Palais des Nations where they signed the official Report on the last hour of the last day of August 1947, just minutes before its term of office expired.
Its Report was presented to the UN General Assembly on 1 September 1947. The fate of Palestine was formally sealed.