RESISTING PALESTINE’S PARTITION: Elizabeth MacCallum, the Arab World, and UN Resolution 181(II)

• In-person event
• C264, Loeb Building, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

This talk focuses on the extensive resistance to the partition of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly of 1947. Having just broken the glass ceiling in External Affairs, Elizabeth Pauline MacCallum was part of the Canadian UN delegation and led the fight to stop Lester Pearson from pushing through Resolution 181(II), partitioning Palestine. Tracking the resistance on the part of MacCallum and others in the Canadian delegation, as well as that of the Global South, reveals that Resolution 181 imparted no legal authority to partition Palestine, and the moral authority it derived from global empathy with the Jewish victims of Nazi Germany was undermined by American manipulation of the final vote. Canada’s responsibility for the ensuing devastation and trauma demands our attention.

Bio

John Price is the author of Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (UBC Press, 2011), short-listed for the Canadian Political History Book Prize and cited as the first major study of Canadian foreign policy to focus on race. Emeritus professor of history at the University of Victoria, he is an anti-racist educator, author of The BC Government and the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, 1941-1949 (2020), co-author of Challenging Racist “British Columbia”: 150 years and Counting (2021), and 1923: Challenging Racisms Past and Present (2023).

His commentaries have featured regularly in Rabble, Canadian Dimension, the Hill-Times, Victoria Times-Colonist, and The Tyee.