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The Paradox of an International Police Force for the Partition of Palestine
Abstract by Francesca Freeman On Session III-12  ((Post)Colonial Violence)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Between October 1947 and June 1948, debates raged in the United Nations about how to enact Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine. From these debates among the elite members of the United Nations, the idea of an international police force emerged as an essential solution for peacefully implementing the partition. However, voices from the Arab League made it clear that the deployment of such a force would be seen as existentially violent. In this research, I ask what we can learn about the nature of both the UN and violence in historical Palestine by considering the discourses emerging from both the permanent members of the Security Council and the Arab community. I use Fanon’s concepts of zones of being and non-being and Edward Said’s concept of the permission to narrate in conversation with over 125 articles from The New York Times between 1947 and 1948. Across these articles, members of the Arab League consistently voiced opposition to the international police force. Even so, the idea of such a force persisted within the walls of the United Nations, without any substantive engagement with Arab voices. Thus, the international police force dwelled in an inescapable paradox, where the very force that the United Nations conceptualized as an essential tool for peace was, in fact, considered existentially violent by Arabs. Through the marginalization of Arab stances, we see that Arab voices dwelled in the zone of non-being, without the permission to narrate their own existence. Elite members of the United Nations, on the other hand, existed in the zone of being, where their debates and discourses shaped reality on the ground. In contrast to the institution's supposed founding ideals, I engage with marginalized voices to argue that the United Nations was never an institution that offered equal agency to all represented entities, in turn shedding light on the fraught dynamics of the United Nations’s engagement with violence in Israel/ Palestine since the institution's founding. This research reveals how marginalized local voices provide new insights into conversations surrounding the development of the United Nations and issues of global policing.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Arab States
Israel
Palestine
Sub Area
None