322 DESTINY DISRUPTED
In 1946, the underground Jewish militant group Haganah bombed the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one ordinary civilians, the most de-
structive single act of terrorism until 1988, when Libyan terrorists brought
down a civilian airliner, Pan Am Flight 103, over Scotland, killing 270.
The horrors of Nazism proved the Jewish need for a secure place of refuge,
but Jews did not come to Palestine pleading for refuge so much as claiming
entitlement. They insisted they were not begging for a favor but coming home
to land that was theirs by right. They based their claim on the fact that their
ancestors had lived there until the year 135 CE and that even in diaspora they
had never abandoned hope of returning. "Next year in Jerusalem" was part of
the Passover service, a key cultural and religious rite in Judaism. According to
Jewish doctrine, God had given the disputed land to the Hebrews and their
descendants as part of His covenant with Abraham. Arabs, of course, were not
persuaded by a religious doctrine that assigned the land they inhabited to an-
other people, especially since the religion was not theirs.
In the aftermath ofWorld War II, the United States led efforts to create
new political mechanisms for keeping the peace, one of which was the United
Nations. Palestine was just the sort of issue the United Nations was designed
to resolve. In 1947, therefore, the United Nations crafted a proposal to end
the quarrel by dividing the disputed territory and creating two new nations.
Each competing party would get three patches of curiously interlocking land,
and Jerusalem would be a separate international city belonging to neither side.
The total territories of the proposed new nations, Israel and Palestine, would
be roughly equal. Essentially, the United Nations was saying, "It doesn't mat-
ter who's right or wrong; let's just divide the land and move on." This is the
sort of solution that adults typically impose on quarreling children.
But Arabs could not agree that both sides had a point and that the truth
lay somewhere in the middle: they felt that a European solution was being
imposed on them for a European problem, or more precisely that Arabs were
being asked to sacrifice their land as compensation for a crime visited by Eu-
ropeans on Europeans. The Arabs of surrounding lands sympathized with
their fellows in Palestine and saw their point; the world at large did not.
When the matter was put to a vote in the General Assembly of the United
Nations, the vast majority of non-Muslim countries voted yes to partition.
Most Arabs had no personal stake in the actual issue: the birth oflsrael
would not strip an Iraqi farmer of his land or keep some Moroccan shop-