Is Jerusalem international or Palestinian? Rethinking UNGA Resolution 181
Anne Irfan
On 29 November 1947, the nascent UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted Resolution 181. This would go down in history as the infamous partition plan that proposed carving Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, with the latter taking more than half (55.5 percent) of the land.2 Resolution 181 would come to dominate the UN’s relationship with the Palestinian people, its significance so pronounced that the UNGA later commemorated 29 November as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.3 As the eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi has observed, partition subsequently became the paradigm around which much of the discourse on the so-called “Palestine problem” has been structured.4 UN Resolution 181 did not only propose partition, however.