Had Palestinians accepted the UN partition plan, they would have a state today.

No people in the world would be expected to accept the partition of their homeland and the transfer of most of it to a settler-colonial movement. Palestinians were not rejecting "peace," but rejecting partition, dispossession, and a future in which their right to self-determination would be denied through colonization, a reality they still endure eight decades on.

Palestine is not the UN's, or any colonial power's, to partition and hand over to a settler colony. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration supporting a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Under British colonial rule, Palestinians were denied the self-determination granted elsewhere in the Arab world in order to facilitate the Zionist settler-colonial project. The UN itself later acknowledged that Palestinian self-determination "was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there," and that the Mandate system itself "ran counter to that principle." Rather than resolving this colonial injustice, the UN institutionalized it.

Even within the unjust premise of partition itself, the plan proposed giving 56% of Palestine to the Zionist movement, even though Jews made up around one-third of the population and owned less than 7% of the land. Palestinians, who formed the overwhelming majority of the population and landowners, were expected to surrender most of their homeland to recently arrived European settlers. This was not a good-faith offer, but a colonial partition imposed against the will of the Palestinian people.

With or without the UN Partition Plan, the Zionist movement already had its colonial strategy in motion to establish a Jewish-majority state through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Leading Zionist figures viewed partition as a temporary step toward further colonial expansion. In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency, stated: "After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine." This is exactly what followed: Israel violated the partition plan during the 1948 Nakba by taking over 77% of Palestine, then occupying the rest in 1967. To this day, Israel has refused to define its final borders, while expansionist ideologies such as "Greater Israel" continue to shape its colonial ambitions.

This narrative blames the colonized for rejecting and resisting colonization, while portraying the colonizer as the generous actor seeking "peace." Palestinians are expected to accept the dispossession and partition of their homeland, only to be blamed when they refuse. Similar arguments were used against anti-colonial struggles in Ireland, Algeria, and South Africa, where colonized peoples resisting partition and colonial domination were portrayed as obstacles to peace.