A Wall Street Journal letter rebuts the leading U.N. secretary-general candidate's claim that Israel rejected the two-state solution in 1948, citing the Jewish Agency's acceptance of partition against the Arab League's promised war of extermination.
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1948 peace record shows Israel accepted, Arabs rejected two-state plan
A dispute over who rejected the two-state solution in 1948 has resurfaced in the race for United Nations secretary-general, after the leading candidate claimed Israel "violently rejected" the partition plan — a characterization that contradicts the historical record, according to a letter published in the Wall Street Journal.
The rebuttal, written by Rick Richman of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, responds to an op-ed by Elliot Kaufman that ran Sept. 1 under the headline "They Forget Who Started the War." Richman notes the Jewish Agency for Palestine accepted the U.N.'s two-state resolution, while the secretary-general of the Arab League promised a "war of extermination and momentous massacre" if Israel established its state under that resolution. Five Arab states invaded Israel the day after it declared independence.
"The historical record is unambiguous about who rejected partition in 1948," Richman wrote. "Israel's U.N. representative, Abba Eban, noted that under the 1922 League of Nations Mandate and the 1947 U.N. resolution, two Arab states — Transjordan and Arab Palestine — were to be established on seven-eighths of the land originally set aside for the Jews under the Balfour Declaration."
Eban argued at the time that "many a Palestine Arab may come to compare this prospect, which was peacefully available, with the results of the 'holy war,'" and predicted that those who helped Arabs recognize Israel's permanence would be deemed "in the historic sense, a friend of the Arabs," because it would free them to focus on their own welfare rather than a genocidal war.
The letter traces the pattern forward through "multiple other Arab-initiated wars and rejections of two-state solutions" over 75 years, culminating in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack — an assault Richman describes as a war of extermination and massacre launched to draw Iran and its proxies into a "new final solution."
"A Palestinian state could have been created multiple times, over nearly a century, had the Arabs sought a second state instead of the destruction of Israel," Richman wrote.
The exchange carries weight beyond academic debate because it touches the credibility of the U.N.'s top job at a moment when the institution regularly vilifies the state that backed its own two-state resolution. The candidate's framing — that Israel rejected partition — inverts the documented positions of both sides in 1948, when the Arab League's leadership openly threatened annihilation while the Jewish Agency accepted the territorial compromise.
The dispute also echoes in current diplomacy. The U.N. has repeatedly advanced two-state frameworks, most recently in debates over Gaza's postwar governance, where the Palestinian Authority and international mediators have pressed for a renewed partition arrangement. Whether the historical narrative is corrected matters for how those negotiations are framed — and for whether the U.N. secretary-general's office is seen as an honest broker or an advocate for one side's account of the conflict's origins.
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