The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created on 15 May 1947 in response to a United Kingdom government request that the General Assembly "make recommendations under article 10 of the Charter, concerning the future government of Palestine". The British government had also recommended the establishment of a special committee to prepare a report for the General Assembly. The General Assembly adopted the recommendation to set up the UNSCOP to investigate the cause of the conflict in Palestine, and, if possible, devise a solution. UNSCOP was made up of representatives of 11 nations. UNSCOP visited Palestine and gathered testimony from Zionist organisations in Palestine and in the US. The Arab Higher Committee boycotted the Commission, explaining that the Palestinian Arabs' natural rights were self-evident and could not continue to be subject to investigation, but rather deserved to be recognized on the basis of the principles of the United Nations Charter.
The Committee actively followed the unravelling of the SS Exodus, carrying 4554 Jewish Holocaust refugees seeking to illegally immigrate to Palestine. Some Committee members were present at the port of Haifa when the Jewish immigrants were forcefully removed from the ship and deported back to Europe. The eyewitness testimony of the Reverend John Stanley Grauel, who was on the Exodus, convinced UNSCOP to reverse an earlier decision. The Committee decided to hear the testimony of the Jewish refugees in British detention camps in Palestine and in European Displaced Persons camps trying to gain admittance to Palestine. Golda Meir, a later Prime Minister of Israel, observed that Reverend Grauel's testimony and advocacy for the creation of the Jewish state fundamentally and positively changed the United Nations to support the creation of Israel.
The plan proposed by the majority in Chapter VI of the report of 3 September 1947,with only slight modifications to the proposed recommendations, became the Plan of Partition with Economic Union attached to General Assembly Resolution 181(II) adopted on 29 November 1947.
Read more about United Nations Special Committee On Palestine: Members of UNSCOP, Creation of The Special Committee, Report of The Special Committee, Ad Hoc Committee Deliberations, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words united, nations, special, committee and/or palestine:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“I have a special grudge against those who have the same faults as I do.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Like other cities created overnight in the Outlet, Woodward acquired between noon and sunset of September 16, 1893, a population of five thousand; and that night a voluntary committee on law and order sent around the warning, “if you must shoot, shoot straight up!””
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
—A.J. (Arthur James)