About the UN's Recognition of Israel

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Arielle Reid and I'm going to discuss today the U.N. recognition of Israel. Now the U.N. recognition of Israel was part of a longer more drawn out process. And discussion of the details of the process are still very much contentious. So what I've done here is outline generally some of the highlights that you should look for in your research or in your re-dates that might help clarify the situation a little bit. So after the end of world war one and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations gave the British a mandate for Palestine in nineteen twenty two and told them essentially to take care of the territory. Now under the British mandate, Arab communities and Jewish communities had their own freedom, had their own customs, were allowed to administer their own affairs but there was still a lot of violence due to diverging nationalist, nationalist tendencies. And you can see this violence in nineteen twenty, nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty seven to nineteen thirty nine. So things were not all well under the British mandate. Now the Peel Commission in nineteen thirty seven that was designed to look at why the violence was continuing and there was so much tension within Palestine, basically came up with a solution to divide Palestine in to two states, a Jewish state and and Arab state; and the details of which displeased both sides and the Peel Commission was generally tabled. After the Peel Commission came what is known as the Anglo American Commission of Inquiry. Now that had the same idea as the Peel Commission which was essentially the partitioning of the states, the details were a little bit different but the results of the Peel Commission are reflected in the U.N. Resolution of the General Assembly one hundred and eighty one that happened in nineteen forty seven. And it was adopted with a majority and parties were more or less, parties in Palestine were more or less pleased with the resolution. In nineteen forty seven as the British mandate for Palestine ended, Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion declared independence which was then acknowledge d' facto by the U.S. government and then by the U.S.S.R. That sparked the first Arab Israeli war. We won't get in to that now but it's important to know that in nineteen forty nine almost a year exactly to the day, Israel was accepted in to the United Nations as a member."