The Crooked Course xxxvii Many of the political battles related to the Arab-Israeli conflict have been fought in the halls of the United Nations. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted Resolution 181, also known as the Partition Plan. It called for the creation of two states—one Palestinian and one Jewish. Other key UN Resolutions include General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948), which calls for the return of Palestinian refugees; General Assembly Resolution 303 (1949), which designates Jerusalem to be placed under UN jurisdiction; and, most famously, Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), which calls on Israel to withdraw from all territory seized during the Six Day War of 1967. Paradoxically, some of the Resolutions are seen by both parties as supporting their side of the argument. For example, in Resolution 242 the interpretation of the clause calling for “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” has been controversially ambiguous, and the object of widely different inter- pretations. The key argument relates to whether the clause requires Israel to withdraw from all territory occupied in the 1967 war, or only from some parts of the territory captured. While many Resolutions have had hardly any effect, they nevertheless continue to be used as points of reference in the different attempts to resolve the conflict. ON PART IV: REGIONAL DOCUMENTS The Israeli-Palestinian issue cannot be seen in isolation: it affects and has been affected by broader regional dynamics and conflicts for a century. After years of colonial competition, France and the United Kingdom drew lines in the sand through the Sykes—-Picot Agreement of 1916. This agreement divided the region into spheres of influence, and eventually led to the creation of new countries. In the subsequent thirty years, several programmatic initiatives were taken in the context of multiple anti- colonial campaigns for national self-determination and political s