Who was to administer Jerusalem under the 1947 UN plan?

March 25, 2019 8:51 AM

Under the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine, the city of Jerusalem was to become an "international city" placed under the trusteeship of the UN. In practice, had the plan been agreed to, who specifically would have been responsible for administering Jerusalem and guaranteeing its status (for instance, that it be demilitarized)? Would it have been some sort of international force? How would it have been constituted?
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell to Law & Government (3 answers total)

The UN would have been responsible. See the Wikipedia article on "Corpus separatum" for (much) more information.
posted by ubiquity at 11:26 AM on March 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'd already read that Wikipedia article before coming here. Unfortunately, it does not answer my question. As I noted in the OP, Jerusalem would have been placed under the trusteeship of the UN. Saying "the UN would have been responsible" doesn't address the details. In practice, what would that have meant? Which countries' literal troops would have enforced the trusteeship? If either side had sought to violate the demilitarized nature of the city, who would have stopped them? etc.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 1:28 PM on March 25, 2019

The UN has been administering the Demilitarized Zone in Cyprus since the 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Peacekeeping_Force_in_Cyprus

Administering includes guaranteeing the zone is demilitarized and putting blue helmets in harm's way so that local issues can auto-escalate into international ones.

Alas, I don't know enough to opine on how an alt-timeline Jerusalem deployment would have differed from the Cyprus one, but I think it's a decent starting point for understanding how the UN puts boots on the ground.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:50 PM on March 25, 2019