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.........

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