Opinion: Israel Was Not Given on a Silver Platter

Jan Kapusnak

On the evening of Nov. 29, 1947, when the U.N. General Assembly voted for Resolution 181 and recommended partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, a tenacious myth was born: that “the U.N. gave the Jews a state on a silver platter.”

In contemporary anti-Zionist rhetoric — from parts of the far left and Arab nationalist movements to Islamists and conspiracy-minded voices on the far right — and in much casual commentary by people unfamiliar with the region, Israel is still portrayed as having been “conjured” in New York by a Zionist plot, by “Jewish influence” around the world, or by playing a supposed “Holocaust sympathy card” on a guilty international community.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The United Nations offe