Hafez Afifi Pasha, Delegate from Egypt to the United Nations

Originally a physician, Pasha became one of the most highly regarded specialists on the Arab world. As Egyptian delegate and chairman of the United Nations Security Council, he questioned the partitioning of Palestine as proposed by the Anglo-American committee, writing in 1946 in the London Sunday Times, “It is a great and important humanitarian task to save the surviving Jews in Europe. . . . Therefore we Arabs do not object to the efforts of the Anglo-American investigation, but when the Committee decides to recommend the sending of 100,000 Jews into Palestine and perhaps more later on without even suggesting that other countries share this burden, then the Committee’s recommendation becomes a political move. . . . One cannot but feel that this mass immigration into Palestine is designed to build Palestine into a buffer state within the Arab world to impede Arab unity.”

In November 1947, the United Nations approved Resolution 181, requiring the partitioning of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, but Arab nations rejected it. In May 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was proclaimed.