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The discussion on Apartheid, one state vs two states, sends us back to the question of partition and its origins. Why was partition originally proposed and by whom?
2/ There's been some fascinating recent historical work on this, including Sinangolou's book "Partitioning Palestine", Dubnov and Robson's edited volume "Partitions: A Transnational History", and Laila Parsons' "The Secret Testimony of the Peel Commission" (two part article)
3/ A major debate is on the 1937 partition plan, which laid the ground to the 47 UN plan. Sinangolou sees it as a British-Zionist proposal; Motti Golani (Weizmann's biographer) as a Zionist proposal, and Parsons as a British initiative and plan. I agree with Parsons.
4/ Most of this work, crucially, places partition within larger contexts - imperial and international. This is a welcome correction to decades in which scholars focussed on local factors and missed the bigger context and the links to other partitions.
5/ The debate is important for many reasons. I'll mention three. Firstly, how do we understand the Palestine conflict? the architects of Partition understood the problem as an ethnic/national conflict, not as settlers-natives one - downplaying the settler impetus of Zionism.
6/ Secondly, how to understand the aims of the Zionist movement, its priorities - and whether a "Jewish State" of the kind established in 1948 was predetermined or not, whether it was the most logical, inevitable outcome of Zionism.
7/ And finally, why did partition repeatedly fail? Was it about the different parties? Or perhaps it was a solution of the historical moment, that lost its relevance? Or perhaps was never right?
Works mentioned above:
Penny Sinanoglou - Partitioning Palestine https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo44520970.html
Penny Sinanoglou - Partitioning Palestine https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo44520970.html
Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson's - Transnational History of Partitions in the 20th century : https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24680
Laila Parsons on the secret testimony of the Peel Commission - (paywall) https://online.ucpress.edu/jps/article-abstract/49/1/7/109676/The-Secret-Testimony-of-the-Peel-Commission-Part-I?redirectedFrom=fulltext
