Arab Rejection of ’47 Partition Plan Was Error, Palestinian Leader Says

The Palestinian president said Friday that the Arab world had erred in rejecting the United Nations’ 1947 plan to partition Palestine into a Palestinian and a Jewish state. The Palestinian and Arab refusal set off widespread fighting, then Arab militaries attacked Israel after it declared independence the following year, a war the Arab states lost. “It was our mistake,” the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, above, said in a rare interview on Israeli television. “It was an Arab mistake as a whole.” Referring to Israel, he added, “But do they punish us for this mistake for 64 years?”