Elizabeth MacCallum and the Global South Confront Partition

John Price

This is the second post in a two-part series based on a recently published article in the International Journal, “Resisting Palestine’s Partition: Elizabeth MacCallum, the Arab World and UN Resolution 181(II).”Part One is available here.

The balance of evidence does suggest that Canada contributed more than any other country, including the USA, to the establishment of Israel. As such, Canada has considerable responsibility for the several million Palestinian Arabs who were forcibly displaced to make way for the new state of Israel, or incorporated into it as second class citizens.”

Global Affairs Canada official Peyton Lyon (Behind the Headlines, 1998)

Lester Pearson led the drive for the United Nations to partition Palestine, a feat seemingly accomplished with the passage of UN Resolution 181(II) on November 29, 1947, recommending the creation of a Jewish state, a Palestinian state, and international control over Jerusalem. Pearson would forever defend his actions as the “best of all solutions.” and “the only solution that might bring peace and order to Palestine.” 

As shall become evident, Pearson’s predictions proved widely off the mark, but a liberal narrative about Pearson (winner of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize, foreign affairs minister, and then prime minister of Canada) as an honest broker persists. This, and Zionism’s continuing influence has tethered Canadian foreign policy to support for Israel.

Within Canada’s foreign affairs department, however, dissent has existed as the quote from Peyton Lyon cited above illustrates. And recent studies such as Ardi Imseis’s The United Nations and the Question of Palestine have helped unearth a different appreciation of what happened at the UN in 1947. Building on these insights, a close reading of the archive reveals an anti-racist story of resistance that generated real alternatives to partition – alternatives that demand careful attention in light of the current atrocities taking place in Palestine.

This story of resistance at the UN includes Palestinian representatives, Arab states, and much of what is now called the Global South. It also includes people such as Elizabeth Pauline MacCallum, a newly minted officer in Pearson’s team at the UN who fought Pearson’s partition plan tooth and nail. She was, according to Peyton Lyon, “the government’s solitary Middle East expert, admired by both Arabs and Jews.”^[1] Other members of the Canadian delegation, including James Ilsley, the minister of justice, and parliamentarian Walter Harris, also challenged Pearson. 

In light of this opposition, how did the proposal for partition ever pass? 

A thorough review of the 1947 events reveals a chaotic process in which Pearson’s steady, skilful, and strategic advocacy in support of Zionism would overcome most objections and result in a positive vote for partition – but one that had no legal authority and whose moral authority was undermined by a vote-rigging campaign on the part of US president Harry Truman.

A first step for Pearson was to get the Canadian delegation onside – no easy feat. He and principal advisor to the delegation, Gerry Riddell, prepared a statement supporting partition that justice minister James Ilsley, the spokesperson for the Canadian delegation, was to present at the UN the following day.

Parliamentarian Walter Harris, who attended the preparatory meeting that evening recorded that James Ilsley was “extremely vehement that he did not want to make a speech on the subject without knowing the right and wrong.” He demanded that Elizabeth MacCallum be consulted. MacCallum had not been invited to the evening meeting. 

Pearson reported to Canada’s minister of foreign affairs that Ilsley was upset because the draft position did not make “any effort to meet the very strong moral and political claims which the Arabs have made, in spite of the fact that we are making a decision essentially against their interests.” Having been expressly invited to express her views on the draft statement, MacCallum quickly chimed in, warning that questions might be raised in parliament “whether Canada has any right to insist on the partition of Palestine against the wishes of practically the whole Arab population and of at least a substantial minority of the Jews.”^[2]

She called for a policy that provided Jewish equality around the world; the clearing of refugee centres in Europe; a reasonable Jewish immigration quota for Palestine; and equality in procedures for Jewish emigration. This would allow, she wrote, for “an undivided Palestine enjoying a democratic form of Government under a United Nations Trusteeship”.

Pearson and foreign minister Louis St. Laurent ignored MacCallum and Ilsley, arranging for cabinet to pass a resolution endorsing partition. Pearson had won round one.

But new challenges quickly appeared. The government’s legal advisors told Pearson that the UN Charter did not authorize the UN to create new states, arguing that the only option was the creation of a UN trusteeship over Palestine. Pearson rejected this option because the guidelines for UN trusteeships specified that Palestine’s neighbouring states, in this case Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, would have a major say in any trusteeship over Palestine.

Rejecting the trusteeship option, Pearson instead came up with the idea of creating a Palestine Commission composed of five UN states that would, with supposed Security Council backing, oversee partition. Within the Canadian delegation, MacCallum argued that the plan would not work. Again, Pearson ignored her advice but because his plan had the support of both the US and Soviet delegations, it appeared as a viable option. In the end it would prove to be a dead letter, as MacCallum had predicted. 

MacCallum, with others, had early on pointed out that the UN Charter did not allow the UN to create states. This view was also taken up by Arab and other delegations from the global south who proposed that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) be asked for an advisory opinion: “Whether the United Nations, or any of its Member States, is competent to enforce, or recommend the enforcement of, any proposal concerning the constitution and future government of Palestine, in particular, any plan of partition which is contrary to the wishes, or adopted without the consent, of the inhabitants of Palestine.”

The vote on referral to the ICJ was exceedingly close, rejected by the slimmest of all margins 21 to 20, with 13 abstentions. Canada voted against the referral. If it had voted for the referral, the motion would have passed 21-20. Pearson’s reasoning – there was no time for a referral.

In the final days of deliberation, the two-thirds majority necessary for the partition resolution to pass remained in doubt. The Philippines representative told the General Assembly, “The Philippines regrets its inability to approve of or to participate in a solution of the Palestine problem that would involve the encouragement of political disunion and the enforcement of measures that would amount to the territorial mutilation of the Holy Land.”  

Cuba, also closely allied to the US, declared that “partition of Palestine is neither legal nor just.” This ongoing opposition led the New York Times to report, “The fact that Greece, Haiti, and the Philippines announced on Wednesday that they would oppose partition, together with apparently reliable indications that Liberia also would do so, caused general bewilderment.”

A last-minute bid to pause the proceedings and engage in conciliation among the parties passed 25 votes to 15 – a final demonstration of the thirst for compromise. Arab states quickly caucused and came up with a conciliatory six-point plan for an independent Palestine based on a federal structure with “Arab and Jewish” cantons. The Iranian delegate made clear that the plan was serious and had the backing of all Arab states. Aware of this important development through her contacts with Iraq’s foreign minister, Elizabeth MacCallum made a final effort to convince Riddell to support conciliation: “He shrugged his shoulders,” saying the “Arabs were bluffing.” 

In the end, the UN chair ruled that the vote on partition had precedence over the Arab proposal. The final vote was 33 for, 13 against, with 10 abstentions. 

How had the partition vote passed? 

We now know that US president Harry Truman demanded that states reliant on US aid, including the Philippines, Haiti, Liberia, and France, switch their vote, or else. Most did, with the resolution finally being passed on the last day of the UN session, November 29.

Rather than bringing “peace and order” to Palestine, however, Resolution 181(II) immediately provoked conflict and war. The Palestinian leadership immediately called for a general strike, and Zionist forces mobilized to gain control of the land using Resolution 181(II) as justification even though Canadian, US, and UK legal opinions underscored that the “[UN] Charter does not authorize the Assembly to create new states in Palestine or elsewhere.” 

The UN tried to intervene to halt the conflict but with only limited results. Resolution 181 (II) unleashed a conflict that has continued now for over seventy-five years and the UN considers the Israel-Palestine clash “the most serious threat to peace with which the United Nations must contend.”

Conventional accounts would have us believe that Elizabeth MacCallum and the Arab states ‘lost’ the fight at the United Nations in 1947. Yet, the resistance on the part of MacCallum and the Arab world generated real alternatives to partition, including establishing a new UN trusteeship, referring the matter to the International Court of Justice, or engaging in conciliation based on the Arab states’ concessions of late November. 

That Lester Pearson with the representatives of the US and other settler colonial states made every effort to prevent UN consideration of these alternatives reflects a deep-seated anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism that, unfortunately, continues to permeate Canadian policy. The world and the UN were the real losers in 1947, with Palestinians paying the price. Much has changed since 1947 and today Israel today finds itself before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide. If Canada had voted to bring the issue before the ICJ in 1947, this global tragedy might have been avoided.

Today, the admonition of Peyton Lyon regarding Canada’s responsibility towards Palestinians rings louder than ever before.

John Price is a historian and anti-racist educator at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (UBC Press, 2011); The BC Government and the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, 1941-1949(2020); and co-author of both Challenging Racist “British Columbia”: 150 years and Counting (2021), and 1923: Challenging Racisms Past and Present (2023).

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Notes

^[1] Peyton Lyon, Behind the Headlines, 56.1 (October-December 1998).

^[2] Elizabeth MacCallum, “Comment on Draft Statement on Palestine, October 13, 1947 (LAC, RG25, V. 5745, 47-B-(S), Pt 2.). Elizabeth MacCallum became Canada’s first female head of mission when she was appointed chargé d’affaires of the new legation in Lebanon in 1954. She retired in 1960 and was awarded the Order of Canada in 1967. She assisted the hearing impaired in Ottawa until her death in 1985.