Full list of texts

This was the centerfold of the May 1–7, 1975 (we were a weekly then!) Fifth Estate, as part of a special Mayday supplement. The drawing is by Gilbert Shelton, of “Fabulous, Furry, Freak Brothers” fame.

Capitalist work is a slavemaster and a thief; it steals from us our time, our creativity, our health, our humanness. It forces us to work where we don’t want, when we don’t want, to create things we don’t want for people we don’t want. Wage labor is the root of the system that robs us all of our human potential and at the same time it cannot exist without our willful cooperation in it each day we work.

...

FE Note: What follows are thoughts on the revolutionary upsurge which shook France 20 years ago. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the message is that revolt is possible in modern society. In ours today, it is not the cops which prevent revolt, but the inertia of what is--the weight of the present.

The introductory section is from the fine new magazine, No Picnic, Spring 1988, Box 69393, Stn. K, Vancouver BC, Canada V5K 4W6; $1.50 per issue. The piece from Fredy Perlman, written from a participant’s viewpoint, appeared in Worker-Student Action Committees, co-authored by R. Gregoire, 1968, $2 from FE Books. The excerpt from Jacques Camatte appeared originally in FE #295, November 3, 1978 and is available at $1. Also recommended is Paris: May 1968, by Solidarity, available from FE Books for $3.

...

SAN FRANCISCO — On September 5, 1987, an event occurred which may signal a breakthrough for the North American anti-war movement. Forty yards of railroad track and ties serving the Concord Naval Weapons Station (CNWS) in Port Chicago, were torn up by hundreds of protesters during and after a rally at Clyde Park, adjacent to the CNWS.

...

YARGH! STOMP! GIGGLE...WOW!

SLAM! KILK! SIGH...POOT!

RRRRIP! THUD! SPOOOM! AHHHH. BONK! AAAGGHH! MUNCH! CHOFF! HEH, HEH, SPLUT! KLAT! ZZZZZZZZ, HAR, HAR, HEE, HAW, ZNIF! YUMPH!

Gothic Blimp Works is unbelievably good poetry and such (SLAM!)...I mean things is comin’ to life again.

Gothic Blimp Works is the world’s STOMP! STOMP! FLATTEN AND SMASH! And LOVE...ugh...ugh...UGH...UGH. AAAAHHHHHH!

...

In preparation for the fourth World Social Forum, held in Mumbai, India, January 16–21, a call went out around the world for people to come to Delhi to work out a program of protection for water and water access to be presented to the larger gathering.

Since 2001, the World Social Forum has met to challenge the rules of investment and governance dictated by the corporate World Economic Forum. It proposes democratic, people-centered alternatives to imperialist globalization. Except for this year, it has met in Porto Allegro, Brazil.

...

This issue’s sports roundup shows radical changes in fortune for many players.

Finishing last was Ali Bhutto, former prime minister of the “Islamic Republic” of Pakistan. Despite the pleas of other government leaders around the world, Ali just didn’t make the finals. Calling for leniency in his behalf were such ideological opponents as Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter, which proves once more that birds of a feather flock together. No matter what their line, politicians in general are not enthusiastic about such precedents being set. To All we can only say, you plays the game—you takes your chances.

...

“No war but the class war” was the expressed motto of many radicals who refused to enlist or otherwise contribute to any national war effort. At their tenth convention in 1914, the IWW passed a resolution stating, “We as members of the industrial army will refuse to fight for any purpose except the realization of industrial freedom.”

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FE note: A quarterly publication cannot hope to keep up with fast breaking events such as the actions that have taken place against capitalist rule over the last year. However, we think it is urgent to report these stories to encourage more such activity, and also, if even belatedly, to counteract the lies posing in the corporate media as news.

...

When an economic system produces 32 million unemployed in the industrialized nations, it would almost seem unnecessary to inveigh against its profound inadequacies. But several factors make it worthwhile to look at the present state of disarray in which world capitalism is currently mired.

Although some wag (either a queen, Marx or the Bible) once said that the poor have always been with us, most people know by now that this is a culture-bound observation and no more than a justification for the privilege of society’s wealthy. However, the saying is nonetheless true for the modern world.

...

You’ve heard it from the pundits, the malcontents, the radicals, even the competition.

Now we’d like to set the record straight.

We’ve made our share of mistakes. We’ve squandered more than our share of corporate dollars that go down the tubes each year. We’ve produced shabby products and covered up information about their poor quality that would hurt us in the market. We’ve overworked our employees in outmoded plants on dangerous, obsolete machinery and broken their walkout strikes when they got fed up with their conditions. And we’re willing to accept responsibility.

...

It must have been like watching one of his own underground movies.

There was Ralph Pickett, manager of the Detroit Repertory Theatre and a friend, Bob, running around in the back woods of Ft. Wayne, Indiana harvesting acres of grass with Sheriff’s deputies lurking down the road waiting to make a bust.

...

Not if you want to succeed in business today. In the modern international marketplace, competition is tough. If the corporations which have brought us the standard of living we have recently come to enjoy are to continue doing so against an increasing foreign challenge, the killing field must be made level. The only way to do that is to do business with the Peoples’ Republic of China.

...

Special to the Fifth Estate

Ann Arbor: Elise Boulding of Ann Arbor has begun a write-in campaign for Congress from the Second District of Michigan. The district, which consists of the counties of Washtenaw, Livingston, Lenawee and Monroe, is presently represented in the House of Representatives by Wes Vivian. Vivian has backed the administration’s policy in Vietnam and vacillated on HUAC. His Republican opponent, State Representative Esch, has an equally unimpressive record.

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FE Note: The anarchist novel that J.G. Eccarius wrote is The Last Days of Christ the Vampire, excerpts from which appear in the box below. It was first published in 1988 with a second edition featuring a new front and back cover which includes a quote from the Fifth Estate describing Last Days...as “one of the most wildly blasphemous books we have seen since the classics of sacrilege.”

...

Studying in Paris during the intense final year (1961 through 1962) of the Algerian war for independence, I became hooked on Algeria and the potentials of revolutionary politics. In 1965 through 1966, I pursued on-site doctoral research on Algeria’s most radical political innovation after independence--a large-scale realm of worked’ self-management in farms, factories and shops throughout the country.

...

a review of

Individualist Anarchism/Revolutionary Sexualism: Writings by Emile Armand. Pallaksch Press 2012 littleblackcart.com/books

This is a nice selected edition of mostly shorter tracts by the French sexpol individualist, Emile Armand (1872–1963). Alejandro De Acosta’s translations are excellent. Most informative are the essays “Life as Experiment,” “The Sexual Fantasists,” and “Revolutionary Sexualism.”

...

Diane Di Prima, 1960s

archangel of fire

enwraps now melts glaciers

turf unexposed

angelic aeons trembles

naked

under a vengeful sun

--Diane DiPrima

August 3, 2002

green shack in Richmond

tag on the door sez “Merlin’s”

just that

--Diane DiPrima

March 23, 2003

Train to Sacramento

true poppies:

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FE Note: The following is taken from the El Libertario web site. See the above article on this page for their URL.

In the last four years Venezuela has undergone a polarization induced by the top players vying for power: the old “punto fijista” bureaucracy (Fedecamaras, CTV, political parties) against the new Chavez bureaucracy that has supplanted the previous one. This antagonism, false as much as real vs. pretended exercise of power, sustained and amplified by the media, has benefited those who have cast themselves as legitimate voices of the sector of Venezuelan society they claim to represent.

...

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers has moved onto the Wayne State University Campus.

In a move to combat racism in employment and bad working conditions, members of the League have organized a group of thirty to forty black secretaries into the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racism, Exploitation and Oppression at Wayne State University.

...

Wayne State University is a working class college in a working class town. It is located in Detroit, a city which has long since taken the United Auto Workers bureaucracy into its ruling class and blunted union militancy by cooptation.

Many of the students of WSU work in Detroit’s factories and belong to unions. Almost all have come into contact with union experience through their parents.

...

After three weeks of exposes, rallies, demonstrations and meetings the Wayne Student Movement last week (May 17–18) elected three candidates to the Wayne Student-Faculty Council. Three additional candidates were elected on modified student power platforms.

The WSM has also been gaining support from the student boards of the various colleges at Wayne. The Liberal Arts Board, the Monteith Council and the School of Social Work Student Organization have endorsed the WSM six demands with qualifications.

...

Wayne University’s complicity with the war effort as well as the manifestation of student-faculty impotency in university policy making were both clearly revealed Nov. 1, when the administration of Wayne State University decided to lodge a marine recruiter on campus.

Following a rally near the south side of State Hall approximately 100 students headed by members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), Wayne State University Veterans for Peace in Vietnam and the Detroit Draft Resistance Committee protested the presence on campus of Captain Frank Huey, marine recruiting officer for the area south of Marquette, Mich.

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<em>

Anarchy 101</em>, edited by Dot Matrix, is a crowd-sourced introduction to anarchist ideas. The content comes from the website anarchy101.org, which poses and answers ongoing questions it receives. They represent the best responses from dozens of contributors to hundreds of queries about the “Beautiful Idea: this thing called anarchy,” as Ardent Press, the book’s publisher, puts it. See ardentpress.com.

...

Previous to this era, opponents of capitalism, particularly marxists, but also anarchists, saw the internal contradictions inherent in the political economy as the basis of the system’s overthrow; the working class was to be the agency of revolution. Other marxist theorists postulated that resistance to imperialist domination and colonial oppression, or a revolutionary peasantry, could carry out this task.

...

While Time magazine was announcing the computer as its Man-of-the Year, Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor presently in command of the most sophisticated computerized system of annihilation in history, had something else in mind.

Calling Americans “hungry for a spiritual revival,” the President decided to designate 1983 as the Year of the Bible, and told diplomats and politicians at a National Prayer Breakfast that “America will not go forward” without faith in God.

...

Liberation News Service — Soldiers are shipping out for Vietnam from West Coast embarkation points at a rate that recalls the 1966 build-up—1,700 one day, 3,000 the next. The Oakland Army Terminal is so jammed with GIs on their way to war that hundreds had to sleep out in pup tents during the torrential rains of early January.

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LONDON The cartoon about the Beatles, “Yellow Submarine” is a watershed movie that could change the pictorial content of all movies and the style of cartoons for all time

Full of puns, (Ringo, rescued by the U.S. Cavalry after being chased by Indians, describes his adventure as “arrowing”), pictorial tricks (clouds patterned like Mexican blankets), thought-provoking jokes (vicious dog with four heads, all pulling different ways) it is a melange of all the commercial and pop art tricks of the past decade.

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The message relayed by the U.S. Strategic Air Command headquarters’ computer was unmistakable—Soviet missile attack! SAC B-52 bomber engines roared to life, their bomb bays laden with 20-megaton thermonuclear weapons; intercontinental ballistic systems were switched to command function—all that was necessary was the order from the President and the Armageddon of World War Three would commence.

...

Sometimes we have arguments about whether it is appropriate for anarchist-types to be participating in officially sanctioned political events with double-speak names like “public hearing” held before bogus, paid-off boards with Ministry of Truth names like “Michigan Air Pollution Control Commission.” Like the one held April 17^th to validate a backroom deal between the City of Detroit and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) called a “consent order,” made to allow the Detroit trash incinerator to keep burning even though they couldn’t come up with a test result that didn’t grossly violate emissions standards—standards which consider 79 deaths per million residents an acceptable risk.

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Reprinted from The Berkeley Barb

The death of the ballot, the birth of the bullet—here is the choice—contemptuously thrust in our face by this decadent racist power structure: racist pig Humphrey, racist pig Nixon, racist pig Wallace for President! So where do we go from here?

Into the streets! Into the alleys! Back of town! Onto the rooftops! Behind whatever shelter remains for a black person here in Babylon!

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The virtual vacuum that has been left in the wake of SDS’s floundering may be filled by the New Youth International Party. With repression growing and the need for a national organization crucial, YIP looks promising as a junction for the vast but disparate political energy the movement is developing.

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NEW YORK—The Yippies died for a few months this year, partly from under-exposure and partly because, as Abbie Hoffman believes, “the establishment became even more absurd than the idea of YIP.” Hoffman is one of the leaders of the Youth International Party (YIP or Yippies for short).

YIP has renewed its plans for the Chicago Festival of Life conceived last December and forgotten in the mayhem of this year’s politics. The dates of the Festival are August 25–30 and will coincide with Democratic Party Death Convention.

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What kind

of anarch

am I

on my

best days?

The kind

that eludes

the prisons of

“ists” and “isms”

for the

freedom

of the

“Y”.

Why?

That is

the question.

During

my childhood

daze

my mother

dismissed

my incessant

questioning

of her

authority

(my why-ning

as she called it)

with her favorite

parental

pronouncement,

“Y

is a

crooked letter.”

...

It was mid-August, and after singing at various events, mainly ones commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima, I was supposed to be switching planes, en route from Fukuoka to Christchurch, New Zealand, via Tokyo and Auckland. When I got paged over the intercom to the All Nippon Airways desk I was nervous, but figured it was something about a seat assignment on the flight from Narita to Auckland that I was about to board. When the woman from ANA handed me a cell phone and said that someone from New Zealand Immigration in Auckland wanted to talk to me, I was suddenly feeling fatalistic.

...

It doesn’t take an astute observer to point out that an increasingly important product of our society is death and disease. Neutron bombs, cruise missiles, satellite warfare, radioactive wastes, carcinogenic drinking water, mercury poisoning, chemical plagues, industrially-induced cancers, all are prominent parts of our daily lives.

...

A recent addition has been made to the folk scene in the name of John Stewart. He is currently touring key cities to promote his new Capitol album, “California Bloodlines.” The Fifth Estate spoke to him at Baker’s Lounge.

His producer is Nick Venet who has given us such sounds in the past as The Association and The Lovin’ Spoonful.

...

In the garden of 45 Colorado, Highland Park — 1981. Mel Rosas, Stephen Goodfellow, Alan Franklin, Ralph Franklin, Lowell Boileau & Silver

With a name like the Layabouts, it should come as no surprise that Detroit’s Cass Corridor premier anarchist dance band has taken 15 years to produce a follow-up recording to 1985’s blazing combination of infectious beats and insurrectionary lyrics, No Masters.

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The sphere of politics has gone full-circle with the newly organized Oakland County Chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom.

In the past, YAF has been considered a right-wing, conservative organization. Recently, the Oakland County YAF under the chairmanship of Terry Epton passed resolutions against the draft and against “laws regulating the sale possession and use of marijuana.”

...

When Saturday matinees were only two bits and weekly serials dragged on endlessly, James Bond was barely a flicker on a distant horizon. Broccoli and Saltzman with Panavision, Technicolor, United Artists, Sean Connery and a bottomless shipload of gimmickry have thrown us back to our childhood.

Until now, the most un-cinematic bait drew the fish out of the woodwork; Lesbians, homosexuals, a sadistic grandmother, a unique air corps and a frequently bedridden James Bond. The utter shock of the latest Bond thriller is that it really clears the deck and settles down to telling an exciting story.

...

this courtroom is a public urinal reeking

with the suicidal odor of protocol

the oily horror of boredom illuminates my nausea

on a never ending ride into the hinterlands

of the loneliest chaos I have ever known

does the defendant waive time?

my lawyer winks flirtatiously

yes, your honor

he learned his ABCs

...

Part II of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #273, June 1976.

The American health care system is currently undergoing a barrage of criticism from every corner; particularly, it has become fair game for dissection on the pages of newspapers all over the country. Last month the Detroit Free Press headlined a front page story “Doctors Blamed for Health Costs,” with a subhead running beneath it which read: “Study Cites Monopoly Fees; Hospital Bills Triple in a Decade.”

...

Part I of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #272, May, 1976.

“Horse sense and humanitarianism dictate that we phase out most and probably all municipal hospitals before the end of the century.”

—New York Commissioner of Health Lowell Benin, speaking to a group of businessmen, March 5, 1976.

“We’re going to have to operate pretty much like a private hospital; if a patient can’t pay he won’t be admitted. Patients may have to sell their homes for care. We can’t deprive a student of his education to finance a patient who can’t pay.”

—Chancellor Elmer Learn of the University of California at Davis, on the occasion of the university’s takeover of a public hospital in 1972.

...

The color of the Statue of Liberty

Grows ever more deathly pale

As, loving freedom with bullets

You shoot at yourself, America.

You can kill yourself this way!

It is dangerous to go out

Into this hellish world,

But it is still more dangerous

To hide in the bushes

There is a smell on earth of a universal

...

The second issue of the Youth News Service was sent out on February 25. The news packet was sent to some 43 high school and youth collectives who are putting out underground newspapers or are thinking of starting them.

The Fifth Estate is turning over a back office to the Youth News Coalition to use as a general Office.

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NOTE: Costa-Gavras, the director of “Z,” was born in Athens, Greece in 1933. In 1964 he made his first film, “The Sleeping Car Murders” and since has completed “One Man Too Many” and “The Avowal.” While in New York for the opening of “Z,” he was interviewed by Dan Georgakas, a writer who is active in the anti-junta movement, a past contributor to the Fifth Estate who was in Greece in 1963 during the Lambrakis affair, and Gary Crowdus, editor of Cineaste Magazine.

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The calendar is prepared by Fifth Estate calendar girls Karen Kovac and Naiomi Epil with cooperation from Detroit Adventure. Copy deadline is the 6^th and 22^nd of each month and should be sent to the Fifth Estate, Calendar 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

SUN OCT 15

DANCE/CONCERT. The Cream plus the Rationals, the Apostles, the Thyme in a no — age — limit show at the Grande Ballroom, Grand River at Beverly from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Adm. 10/15.

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Excerpted from Fifth Estate #367–368, Spring-Summer 2005 40^th anniversary issue. This is an edited version of Don’s essay.

The design shows a pyramid surmounted by an eye being blasted by a bolt of lightning. Bannered beneath the collapsing pyramid is the motto, “NON SERVIAM.”

If English, Spanish, Italian, or French is your native tongue, then you can probably guess the Latin translation: “I will not serve.” The phrase is taken from Paradise Lost (1674) by the radical poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, wherein the archangel Lucifer refuses to obey God and is cast into the frozen lake of Hell for his rebelliousness.

...

The design shows a pyramid surmounted by an eye being blasted by a bolt of lightning. Bannered beneath the collapsing pyramid is the motto, “NON SERVIAM.”

If English, Spanish, Italian, or French is your native tongue, then you can probably guess the Latin translation: “I will not serve.” The phrase is taken from Paradise Lost (1674) by the radical poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, wherein the archangel Lucifer refuses to obey God and is cast into the frozen lake of Hell for his rebelliousness.

...

What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist?

If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves?

Does the flag move? Does the wind move?

Does the revolutionary movement move?

What is your original nature--before May ’68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?

Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638–713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183–1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200–1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685–1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.

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Ugly nationalism is surfacing everywhere. It is important for those who oppose the State to reject any and all forms it may take. The following addresses the problem in Canada, but applies to all nationalisms.

from A comrade from Quebec, with FE editing

As the orgy of nationalist stupidity approaches its climax, there has never been a better time to reappropriate the word sovereignty. Never has a need for autonomy been more painfully urgent than it is today. But now that Capital and the State occupy almost all the terrain, our minds become the only space that is usually left. The power of the courts, cops, bosses, and bureaucrats of the present and future States is awesome and undeniable. But for us, these institutions have no legitimacy and will have none in the future State.

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Zerowork No. 1; Available from P.O. Box 515, Station C, Toronto, Ontario, Canada or through Ammunition Books (see further in this issue).

The last few years have seen the appearance of few new journals, even fewer of which are worth taking seriously. Zerowork, however, is one of the exceptions. Despite a density of text and an absence of graphics and photographs, this journal is well worth reading.

...

Bob Brubaker’s defense of agriculture [this issue, FE #330, Winter, 1988–89] seems to have two main components, one in which agriculture itself recedes in favor of “symbolic exchange.” Here it is argued that “symbolism, not agriculture, was the sun around which primitive life revolved,” and that “where there is symbolic interaction with nature, ecological destruction doesn’t take place.” But while it is more pleasant to hear the voices of ceremonials and rituals than to contemplate the ravages of agriculture, reality must also be encountered.

...

Five-legged beast carved in basalt. Face of a Babylonian warlord and body of a desert flesh eater. His eyes saw for centuries into black sand and dust, into the thickened skin of the earth. Cities and cities, temples and temples, mountains of bone above him as a grave. He is a protective godling, seeing forward and seeing nothing.

...

a review of

The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East by David Hirst. Second Edition, 1984, Faber and Faber, 475 pp., £12.50.

In Mein Weltbild (1934) Albert Einstein identified Judaism with a specific “moral attitude” to life: “the essence of that conception seems to me to lie in an affirmative attitude to the life of all creation. The life of the individual only has meaning insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful. Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.” Yet in this same work, the great thinker and lover of peace and human brotherhood defended the Zionist realization of “Judaism” in Palestine

...

Today (1973) a new imperialist war breaks out in the Middle East and the vicarious social-patriots who constitute today’s established “left” can hardly contain themselves in their eagerness to rush to the defence of one bourgeoisie against the other.

A few social-democrats and left-wing Zionists declare their solidarity with “plucky little Israel” against “Arab aggression”, ignoring the fact that the state of Israel is fighting a war over conquered territories, over vital raw materials such as the Sinai oil-fields, which now supply almost all of Israel’s oil, over Israel’s “right” to continue her repression and exploitation of thousands of Arab workers and peasants in the “administered areas”.

...

This short account by Liberation News Service of Zionism’s sordid history as a white settler, colonialist movement barely scratches the surface in terms of the magnitude of the injustices committed in the name of the Jewish people, but should not in any way imply support for any of the Palestinian Nationalist groups who claim to speak for the refugees.

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This article is an excerpt from Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People, by The Peoples Press Palestine Book Project, published by the leftist newspaper The Guardian and is available through the FE Book Service.

[In 1947] The United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP), which had no African or Arab members, recommended by a narrow margin that Palestine be divided into a Jewish and an Arab state. The partition plan granted 55 percent of Palestine to the Jews, who were 30 percent of the population and owned only 6 percent of the land. Some 407,000 Arabs, a number nearly equal to the number of Jews, were to live in the area assigned to the Jewish state. The Arab state was to include ten thousand Jews and 725,000 Arabs in the remaining 45 percent of Palestine.

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