Joint List head Odeh: Arabs erred in rejecting 1947 partition

"I have no doubt that the Palestinian Arab leadership made a mistake when it did not accept the partition plan in 1947, but I want to try to understand it," said Odeh.

By ARIEL BEN SOLOMON
Jews celebrate in the streets of Tel Aviv moments after the United Nations voted on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine (photo credit: REUTERS)
Jews celebrate in the streets of Tel Aviv moments after the United Nations voted on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Joint List head Ayman Odeh said in an interview on the Knesset Channel to be broadcast on Tuesday that the Arab leadership erred in rejecting the United Nations 1947 partition plan that recommended the creation of two states: one Jewish, and one Arab.
“I have no doubt that the Palestinian Arab leadership made a mistake when it did not accept the partition plan in 1947, but I want to try to understand it,” said Odeh in the preview clip released on Monday.
He tried to understand the Arabs’ decision within the context that they were “the natives of this place, and suddenly came the Jews with the Zionist idea of a Jewish home - a Jewish home, not a home of all its citizens, but a Jewish home with a story of two thousand years.”
This is not a new position for the Israeli Communist party, Maki, a part of the Hadash party that Odeh heads.
A Hadash spokesperson confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the party accepted the partition plan at the time.
Prof. Elie Rekhess, a top scholar about Arabs in Israel, said that Maki backed partition because that was the position of the Communist patron, the Soviet Union, which “supported the partition plan and later recognized the State of Israel.”
“At a time when the Arab world was uniting for the joint political and military struggle against the Jewish state, the Arab communist parties followed the Soviet line. This obedience to Moscow led to their being branded as traitors,” Rekhess, the Crown Visiting Professor in Israel Studies at Northwestern University and associate director for Israel studies wrote in an article entitled “The Arab nationalist Challenge to the Israeli Communist Party (1970- 1985).”
The article was published in the journal of Studies in Comparative Communism published in 1989.