This is an interesting question from an Israeli perspective, since the UN voted on a partition plan for Palestine the same year, 1947. That plan was met by acceptance and even celebration by the Jews and immediately rejected by the Arab world. As our readers surely know, when the British Mandate ended a few months later, five Arab armies invaded in order to wipe the just-declared Jewish state off the map.

Now that the international community and even Israel has decided that creating a Palestinian state is central to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is interesting to think how history would have been different if two states were created back then, as India and Pakistan were. It is tempting, and even natural, to imagine that further wars could have been avoided, since the Palestinians would have had the state they ostensibly have been fighting for.

In truth, however, a "successful" partition in 1947 would not have ended the conflict. There is no reason to believe that the Arab world of that time, even if it had tactically accepted the partition plan, would have accepted Israel's right to exist, so an attempt to destroy Israel around its vulnerable birth was inevitable even if Palestine had been created then. The difference would be, if Israel had survived such an onslaught, that an independent Palestine might have emerged west of the Jordan river, rather than Egypt and Jordan occupying such territories, as was the case between 1948 and 1967.

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