liberal pretence of a jewish state123 community.3 Here they argue that the rationale of the parties proposing the partition of Palestine, the members of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), was three-pronged. It was held that an independent state was to be established for the Jewish people and not for the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine alone; that the “historic connection” of the Jewish people and the “need to reconstitute their national home” in Palestine was recognized; and that the international community actually decided to create a Jewish state (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 12–15).4 With this, the authors argue that questioning whether Israel (the name chosen by the Zionist movement) can exist as a Jewish state is paradoxical. The Committee also acknowledged that “the opening of the gates of the country to massive Jewish immigration will be a major goal of the Jewish state after its establishment” (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 18). And, to this end, the 1947 Partition Plan allotted the proposed Jewish state 3 Implemented on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 called for the partition of Mandate Palestine into two separate bodies: a separate state for the Jewish minority at the time on around 57 percent of the land, and a state for the large Palestinian-Arab majority on around 43 percent of the land with Jerusalem and Bethlehem marked as a separate area managed by a ‘special international regime’. As was to be expected, this resolution, considered fundamentally illegitimate and unjust both in practice and in principle, was rejected by the Palestinian leadership and vast segments of the population, with a hesitant adoption by the leadership of the Zionist movement as a first step in their continued project of settler-colonial expansion. Soon after it was adopted, however, organized Zionist forces commenced their intense military interventions and campaign to seize territory far exceeding that which was mandated by the UN sponsored Partition Plan. Indeed, Resolution 181 was never actually implemented and the lands considered today to be part of the State of Israel, part of ‘Israel Proper,’ were, at its inception, never actually endorsed by the UN Resolution. Signed first with Egypt on February 24, 1949, and later with Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, the Rhodes-Armistice Agreements officially ended the military hostilities of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and formed Armistice Demarcation Lines between Israeli military forces and those forces in the Jordaniancontrolled West Bank. These demarcation lines became known as the ‘Green Line’. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 181 (II) Future government of Palestine, (A/RES/181/ II), November 29, 1947, http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/7f0af2bd897689b785256c3300 61d253. For more on Resolution 181, see Kamrava (2005, 79–81). 4 For the last point, the authors cite acceptance by Iran, India and Yugoslavia of the term ‘ Jewish state’ in a 1947 report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to illustrate the legitimacy of the term given it was upheld even by these states. This is rather peculiar. Students of the histories of the three states will point out the limitations of Yakobson and Rubinstein’s argument as each of these cited states were either undergoing intensive internal political transformations in the form of major territorial upheavals, were struggling to overcome colonialism or were dominated by British imperialist forces in and around 1947. As a result, it is not only extremely doubtful that these states were politically established enough to be able to reflect the wishes of their own populations during this time, but also that particularly Iran and India were able to convey a position independent from intense British political interference.