A "middle power" in action: Canada and the partition of Palestine.

AuthorHusseini, Hassan

INTRODUCTION

CANADA PLAYED A KEY ROLE in the drafting of the United Nation's Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. Supreme Court of Canada Justice, Ivan C. Rand, was a central figure in drafting the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) Majority Report which proposed partition, and in bringing the Committee to its final decision. Lester B. Pearson, then a senior Canadian diplomat and later the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, became the chairman of the UN sub-committee responsible for drawing up a detailed plan of partition. He played a pivotal role in securing a compromise in support of partition at the UN General Assembly in November 1947. Some historians have credited Pearson's efforts with securing the positive vote in favour of partition at the UN (Bercuson 1985). In fact, "Zionists so appreciated Pearson's and Rand's role that they called the Under-Secretary of State the 'Balfour of Canada' and they established the Ivan C. Rand Chair of Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem" (Hillmer 1981, 166).

Was Canada's support for the Partition Plan compatible with our own system of bi-national federalism? And was it compatible with our domestic as well as foreign policy objectives? On what grounds did Canada not support the one-state or bi-national state solution (federalism)? What factors contributed to Canada's position on partition? These are some of the questions that I will address in this paper as a way of trying to understand Canada's motivation on an issue that continues to be the source of much strife and conflict in the Middle East and internationally.

Canada's support for the Partition of Palestine in 1947 and the subsequent recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, is considered by many (in government as well as in academia) to have been made after much deliberation and with the best of intentions grounded in legal and practical considerations. will argue in this paper, however, that Canada's position on this issue was influenced by factors that go beyond the legality and the practicality of the matter. Close examinations of the facts reveal the legality and the practicality of the decision to partition Palestine are tenuous at best. I will investigate a number of internal, external and personal factors that made Canada opt for partition instead of federalism, and hence conclude that supporting partition and extending recognition to the Jewish state was inconsistent with Canada's own history of bi-national federalism, its professed goal of humanitarianism and the fostering of better relations between people and nations. I will further argue that Canada used its stature as a "middle power" not necessarily to secure a lasting solution to the Palestine question but to further the interests of the Western alliance in the face of perceived Soviet encroachment in the region and internationally.

The paper is divided into three sections: section one discusses Canada's place in the post-war period. Section two provides a brief outline of the history of Palestine and Canada's role. Section three investigates the internal, external and personal factors that shaped Canada's position on the Palestine problem in general and the Partition Resolution in particular.

CANADA IN THE POST-WWII PERIOD

After WWII Canada tried hard to assert and enhance the economic, military and, some would argue, the political position it occupied during the war period. Canadian politicians, diplomats and other bureaucrats coined the term of Middle Power status and worked to assert Canada's position as the ultimate middle power. Hence, the Middle Power concept has become closely associated with the position that Canada occupied in the international system after WWII. After the war, Canada found itself in a position of considerable strength stemming from its position as an important war time ally to the allied powers. Canada had the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force after the war. Over one million Canadians served in the Allied forces. More importantly, Canada supported the allied war effort (and reconstruction) from agricultural and industrial resources that like the US, were not directly affected by the war itself (Bercuson 1985, 32).

At a conceptual level, Middle Power is a concept that is based on the practice of middle power internationalism by certain states (Chapnick 1999). As J. L. Granatstein argued, after WWII, "Canada exercised a power disproportionate to her pre-war status" (Granatstein 1973, 2). The first enunciation of the Middle Power concept came with the "functionalism statement" of Mackenzie King in 1943 when he declared that "in areas where Canada and other middle-sized powers had the capability to play the part of a major power, they should be so treated" (Granatstein 1973, 2). Middle Power status is also associated with the tendency of certain countries to pursue multilateral solutions to international problems and disputes. Multilateral solutions, however, needed certain institutional frameworks and Canada had that much needed mechanism to enhance its middle power status and some would argue to "balance the incredible might and power of the post-war United States" in the United Nations (Bercuson 1985, 110) as well as to check Soviet influence on the diplomatic front.

It was in the above post-war context that Canada started to take an interest and to assert an active role at the international level, primarily through putting the emphasis on building such multilateral internationalist organizations such as the United Nations. Canada's role in the emerging post-war international system was conditioned as much by the emerging cold war rivalry (US-USSR) as it was by an Anglo-American discord on Palestine and other issues as well as the rising power of the US. According to the historian Robert Spenser, Canada's oldest tradition in external relations was one of using "what influence she possessed to secure her interests from Great Britain and the United States [...]" (Spenser 1959, 9). However, in the new world of the East-West conflict, "Canadian policies had to conform to those pursued by the United States" (Spenser 1959, 11). In other words, as important as the concept of Middle Power status is for our analysis, we must also recognize that in the context of the period under discussion, Canada was gaining more independence from the British Empire but becoming more tied down to the rising power of the United States.

Canada's public post-war foreign policy objectives were numerous but chief among them were: (1) To maintain the North Atlantic relationship between Britain and the US; (2) To contain increasing Soviet influence in Europe and the Third World; (3) To build international organizations such as the UN through which Canada's status as a Middle Power may be recognized and enhanced; (4) And to maintain and build post-war peace on the basis of humanitarian internationalism.

CANADA AND THE ROAD TO THE PARTITION OF PALESTINE

Plans to divide the Middle East region (as spoils of war) between major European powers were being designed even before World War I had been won. The Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, signed in 1916, divided the area into zones of influence which became officially part of the mandate granted to these powers by the League of Nations in 1922. According to this division, Britain was "granted" Iraq and Palestine and France was given Syria and Lebanon. Upon being made public, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration (discussed below) infuriated the Arabs as they saw them to be in contradiction with the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence (1915-1916) in which Britain promised the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, Arab independence and statehood in return for Arab support for Britain's war effort against the Ottoman and German armies in the region.

Before 1918 Palestine was a province within the Ottoman Empire and after 1918, it officially entered into Britain's sphere of influence through the form of Mandate. Britain made a commitment contained in a declaration from its Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothchild, head of the British Zionist Organization in which "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people...."

Throughout the period of the Mandate, Britain endeavored to facilitate the attainment of the objective of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine while at the same time trying to maintain good relations with the Arabs. Faced with this contradiction and its inability to reach an agreement that both Arabs and Jews would accept and to deal with the rising Jewish and Arab revolts against British rule, the UK decided in 1947 to hand the matter over to the United Nations for resolution.

In April 1947, the United Nations set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in order to deal with the question of Palestine through the investigation and the drawing up of recommendations for consideration by the UN. UNSCOP consisted of 11 "neutral" member states (1) including Canada which named Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ivan C...

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