Introduction

Background The United Nations was founded in the summer of 1945, in the wake of the trauma of the Second World War. The organization emblazoned on its banner the goal of an international effort to bring global peace and aspired to shape the political image of the postwar world.1 Ralph Johnson Bunche was affiliated with the UN from its establishment, thanks to his expertise in the colonialist aspects of Africa. The talented and idealist African Amer ican wanted to be part of Africa’s release from the colonialist yoke. His temporary position in the U.S. State Department paved the way for his recruitment by the Secretariat of the young UN. It was in early 1947 that Bunche’s path first led him to Palestine. After the British announced that they were referring the Palestine issue to the UN, Bunche was assigned a junior position that pulled him away from his work on Africa and took him to a new and unfamiliar territory and national conflict. In hindsight, this chance encounter with Palestine was not a passing episode, but the beginning of a journey that plunged Bunche into the vast maelstrom that beset Palestine in 1948 and soon turned him into a mediator of international renown. From 1947 to 1949, the UN dealt with the Palestine question intensively and continuously; its activities had a decisive impact on the land’s history and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Bunche was an active participant and played a significant role in the organization’s involvement in the Palestine issue. He was a special advisor to the UN inquiry committee that recommended partition; he headed the secretariat of the committee that was supposed to have implemented the Partition Plan; he served as senior aide to UN mediator Folke Bernadotte; and he brought the war in Palestine to an official end, getting the State of Israel and its Arab neighbors to sign armistice agreements. His successful diplomacy won him international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. The Palestine issue was only the beginning of Bunche’s career. From then on, almost until his death in 1971, Bunche served as UN mediator in various conflicts; in 1955, he was appointed under-secretary-general of the UN, the highest position an Amer ican citizen could hold in the organization. But his mediation between Israel and the Arabs and the armistice agreements between them were

always deemed the peak of his career, and the historical perspective has reaffirmed this. The armistice agreements, which were never converted into peace treaties, made the lines drawn by Bunche into the borders of Israel until 1967. The Green Line he created continues to play an important role in the ArabIsraeli conflict to this very day. All agree that the UN played a central role in the establishment of Israel and in the first Arab-Israeli war, which raged in Palestine in 1948. The UN inquiry commission came up with the idea of the Jewish state (and the Arab state) and helped end the British Mandate in Palestine. The General Assembly decided to partition Palestine, thereby creating a broad international consensus for the establishment of Israel, but also sparking the military hostilities on the ground. The UN failed in its attempts to implement its plan, but nevertheless intervened in the fighting and influenced its course: The Security Council decreed an arms embargo, which had a major impact on the war. UN mediator Bernadotte imposed a first and then a second truce, but also managed to feed the fires with his political proposals to resolve the conflict. Bunche, who succeeded Bernadotte, managed to put an official end to the fighting and helped determine the borders of Israel. Much has been written about the various aspects of the war, but there is nothing that describes and examines every stage of the UN’s involvement in it. Although there are studies that look at certain parts of this involvement,2 there is no single work that investigates the topic starting from when the British referred the issue to the UN, proceeding through the organization’s intentions and plans, its fluctuating successes and failures in the war that broke out, through the official close of the hostilities-the armistice agreements. Ralph Bunche was the connecting link throughout the initial chapters of the UN’s involvement in the Palestine issue. In recent years, a number of works have been published about Bunche. Brian Urquhart, his closest aide at the UN and the author of the most important and comprehensive biography of Bunche,3 claimed that he was the victim of a historical injustice and that he received less attention than he merited in part because of the allegations by African-Amer ican leaders that Bunche focused on his international career and turned his back on the campaign for Black civil rights. Urquhart showed that, in fact, Bunche was actively engaged in that battle and that his exclusion from the place he deserves in the public mind was cruel and unjustified. The injustice has since been rectified. Several subsequent volumes have examined Bunche’s self-identity, his contribution to the African-Amer ican community, and his unique stature as an intellectual who was also a diplomat.4 But the most important chapter of Bunche’s activity in Palestine, that which won him accolades as an international mediator, has never been addressed in the appropriate scope. Moreover, articles published in recent years on Bunche’s involvement in some of the armistice talks made light of his mediation efforts and denied them the importance assigned them in the past.5 My research refutes their conclusions. My goal in this book is to tell Bunche’s important story and integrate it into the general framework of the beginning of the UN’s involvement in the

Palestine affair, and thereby to try and fill in the lacunae, both in Bunche’s biography and in the description of the key role played by the UN in the period under discussion.