The Canadian Diplomat Who Tried to Stop the Partition of Palestine, and the One Who Pushed It Through

The Globe and Mail editorial board recently chastised Prime Minister Mark Carney for not openly supporting Zionism. There are good reasons that Carney dodged that bullet, and the Globe’s editorial board is out of line given what transpired at the United Nations in 1947.

When the United Nations General Assembly voted on 29 November 1947 to partition Palestine, Resolution 181 (II) carried thirty-three to thirteen with ten abstentions, barely clearing the two-thirds threshold. The vote came at the end of weeks of mounting opposition, last-minute switches engineered through American pressure on smaller states, and a series of choices by the Canadian delegation that closed off every avenue toward conciliation. The most senior figure on that delegation, Lester B. Pearson, would later describe the outcome as the only realistic option available to the UN at the time. The most knowledgeable person on the delegation, Elizabeth MacCallum, told him otherwise at every stage. He did not listen.

The October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza and the West Bank, and the International Court of Justice case on charges of genocide have renewed scrutiny of how the 1947 partition came about. The archival record at Library and Archives Canada, the United Nations, and David Bercuson’s research files tells a story the conventional Canadian account has buried.

Who Elizabeth MacCallum Was

MacCallum was born to missionary parents in what is today Türkiye in 1895. She learned Turkish and Arabic as a child, earned a Queen’s history degree in 1919, entered Columbia’s PhD program in 1921 to specialize in Arab history and politics, and was recruited by the New York Foreign Policy Association as a Middle East specialist in 1925. After health problems, including hearing loss, forced her out of high-pressure work, she joined Canada’s Department of External Affairs in 1942 as a clerk. By 1943 she was, in practice, the entire Middle East desk. In 1947 she became one of the first four women in the department to receive foreign service officer status. She was an adviser to the Canadian delegation at both UN sessions on Palestine that year and was the only person on that delegation with deep knowledge of the region.

The hierarchy ignored her. The deputy foreign minister, Pearson, had told the Zionist Organization of Canada in 1946 that he believed partition was the only just solution. R.G. Riddell, fast-tracked from a professorship in imperial history to head the department’s political division, agreed. When the Canadian delegation drafted its position in October 1947, MacCallum was excused from the key Monday-night meeting on the explicit pretext that two meetings in a day would be too much for her. Justice minister J.L. Ilsley, who was acting head of delegation, objected and demanded that her views be heard, but he did not get her drafting power.

The Case MacCallum Made

MacCallum opposed partition for reasons that were practical, legal, and moral, and she made the case in writing throughout the fall of 1947. She challenged the Canadian Palestine Committee’s claim that Canada had supported the UK’s 1922 Mandate over Palestine, pointing out that Canada was not a member of the League of Nations council that approved it, that the Assembly was not consulted, and that the Arabs certainly were not. She warned that a strain of Canadian support for Zionism was a way of pushing Jewish refugees away from Canada itself, what she called anti-Semitism preparing to clothe itself in the respectable garb of a philanthropic policy. She briefed Justice Ivan Rand, Canada’s UNSCOP representative, on the depth of Arab civilizational history and on the existence of Jewish anti-partition voices, including Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, whose proposals for a binational state were systematically marginalized.

When Pearson and Riddell drafted the Canadian position to endorse the UNSCOP majority report on partition, MacCallum filed a three-page rejoinder. She argued that democratic principles were being disregarded, that partition would proceed against the wishes of nearly the entire Arab population of Palestine and a substantial minority of Jews, and that an undivided Palestine under UN trusteeship would be the only workable alternative. Ilsley wired Louis St. Laurent, the foreign minister, for direction. St. Laurent took the question to cabinet without Ilsley present, secured authorization to support partition reluctantly because Washington and Moscow had already done so, and delivered the Canadian position on 14 October. MacCallum’s objections did not appear in the cabinet record.

The Legal Problem

Through October and November, the legal advisers to the Canadian delegation kept telling Pearson the same thing. The UN Charter did not authorize the General Assembly to administer territory or to create new states. The only existing UN mechanism that could plausibly cover the transition out of the Mandate was trusteeship under Chapter XII. MacCallum proposed exactly that: a new UN trusteeship to manage the period after the British withdrawal. Pearson rejected it, on the stated grounds that the trusteeship machinery would require consent from “states directly concerned” and the Arab states surrounding Palestine would qualify, giving them effective veto. The Canadian legal advisor E.R. Hopkins had argued, in language Pearson quoted, that Canada was as directly concerned with Palestine as Argentina or Mexico. That position was indefensible and Pearson knew it.

Instead, Pearson assembled a Working Group of Four with the United States, the USSR, and Guatemala, and produced the proposal for a Palestine Commission to oversee implementation, with Security Council enforcement powers available if a threat to the peace arose. The legal advisers across multiple jurisdictions, including the British Foreign Office, concluded that Resolution 181 (II) provided no legal basis for the creation of a Jewish state. Pearson knew this too. Privately, the US delegation showed him their own legal opinion saying the resolution was a recommendation, not a binding obligation. He found ways around the restrictions.

On 24 November, France moved that the question be referred to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on whether the UN was even competent to enforce partition without the consent of Palestine’s inhabitants. The vote was twenty-one to twenty against referral, with thirteen abstentions. Canada voted against. Had Canada voted in favour, the question would have gone to the Court. The bloc opposing referral consisted overwhelmingly of settler colonial states: the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. France, Greece, and most of Europe abstained or voted in favour. The Global South largely supported referral.

How the Final Vote Was Won

By the time the General Assembly reconvened in late November, opposition was spreading. The Philippines, Haiti, and Greece announced they would vote against. China and Colombia signalled abstention or opposition. Cuba called the plan neither legal nor just. Colombia’s representative proposed postponing the vote and reopening conciliation. France endorsed the proposal with a twenty-four-hour limit; the motion to adjourn passed twenty-five to fifteen. The Lebanese representative used that window to put forward six principles for an independent federal Palestine, organized into Arab and Jewish cantons with proportional representation. The Iranian delegate observed that the Arab world was ready to abandon its previous position. MacCallum learned about this from her contacts with Iraq’s foreign minister and tried again with Riddell. He shrugged and said the Arabs were bluffing.

What happened in the twenty-four hours between adjournment and the final vote has been documented by historians since. American pressure on smaller states produced a series of switched votes. The Lebanese delegate spoke openly of the practice of tackling delegations in hotel rooms, in beds, in corridors, in anterooms, threatening sanctions or offering inducements. The Philippine delegate Carlos Romulo testified in his autobiography that he had threatened to resign when ordered by his president to switch the vote. Partition passed.

What this Record Actually Shows

The Canadian government continues to invoke Resolution 181 (II) as the foundation of its Israel-Palestine policy, most recently when Canada’s representative Bob Rae explained the May 2024 abstention on Palestinian observer state status by citing the resolution’s two-state vision. The pattern reveals how deep the institutional commitment to Pearson’s framing runs. Pearson himself, in his autobiography, acknowledged that Canada had been “prominent in the partition debate, often at the very centre of things.” He never reconsidered the costs.

MacCallum thought she understood what was driving him. She told David Bercuson in a 1980 interview that Pearson seemed to have a feeling of religious exaltation, a sense of giving real help to the Jewish “Return.” Pearson himself later acknowledged that he had got too personally and emotionally involved in a very special way, because the matter touched the Holy Land and his Sunday school stories. The framework that explains the rest is Christian Zionism overlaid with what Edward Said taught us to call Orientalism: a romanticization of political Zionism, an assumption that European Jews would bring “social dynamism” while Arabs offered “intuitive understanding,” and a confident dismissal of the standing of Arab and Palestinian voices. Pearson recalled the speeches of Arab delegates as having “the venom and fury” of nothing he had seen elsewhere at the UN.

This is not just a story about one man’s biases. It was institutional: Pearson and Riddell were the masculine vessels through which the department’s anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, its sexism toward MacCallum, and its alignment with Pax Americana found expression. The same department was simultaneously executing the genocidal residential school system, the dispossession of Japanese Canadians, and the racialized exclusion of immigrants. The institutional bias that placed Canadian foreign policy in 1947 was the same bias that ran through Canadian domestic policy in those years. The surprise is that it has taken this long to look at it.

The crisis of legitimacy now engulfing the post-1947 order in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and the ICJ proceedings is not an interruption of Pearsonian internationalism. It is the bill that Pearsonian internationalism has been running up since 1947. Twenty-five years ago, the department’s own Peyton Lyon reminded readers that Canada bears considerable responsibility for the Palestinian plight given its role at the UN in 1947. Today, that admonition rings louder than ever and demands Canadians take action to support Palestine.

His recent article, “Resisting Palestine’s Partition: Elizabeth MacCallum, the Arab world, and UN Resolution 181 (II),” is published in International Journal and available here.