A Mid-East history
you don’t often hear
Pre-dinner
party conversation the other night turned to a comment on the Islamic
Congressional representative from Minnesota’s fifth district regarding what she
refined, in further explanation, as Zionism. I made the off-hand comment that
it was critical to differentiate between being anti-Semitic and anti- Zionist. I
added that I found it odd that we give so much foreign- aid money to Israel
which is economically strong and doing it partially on stolen land (uh-oh!). My
friend (yeah, it’s possible to be friends with those with whom you have
opposing points of view!) after simmering a bit, defended Zionism on several
grounds, principally that, “If Israel falls the entire region would be
Islamic!” and “look what the Palestinians did to them in 1948.” (No, he didn’t
say “1948,” because he didn’t know the exact date, but I do, so there.) There
are several ways this analysis and discussion could go from here.
One, simplistic but accurate, view I share,
but have heard from no one in public, is that, as an American citizen with a
Somali ethnic background, Ms. Omar is welcome to her opinion, but would seem to
have no “nation-of-origin” dog in this hunt. Somalia and Palestine are far
apart and have relatively little in common. Or do they? Oddly, the same
religious divergence which has led to so much violence in the region formerly
known as Palestine, now Israel, has a sort of parallel in Somalia, in that
there are increasing attempts to institute Islam as a state religion. If Ms.
Omar’s argument was intended as an argument in favor of (any) state religion,
then we are diametrically at odds. If it was intended to express her distaste
for the almost slavish pro-Israel stance of some Evangelicals on the Far right
(the farther right, the more radical) and Liberals as well, then we may have
some common ground.
There are those
who view any any-Israeli sentiment as anti- Semitism. This position elides over
several relevant facts. To begin with, the term “anti-Semitic” has been
appropriated by some, well-meaning or simply ignorant, to mean anti-Jewish. In
point of fact, all persons native to the region are “Semites” by definition and
ethnicity, Arab or Jew. [“Semite, member of a people speaking any of a group of
related languages presumably derived from a common language, Semitic. The term
came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians, and
Aramaean tribes.” {OED}] Additionally, many currently residing in Israel and regarding
themselves as Israelis have relatively little blood/DNA tie to the region or to
a far distant, or even assumed, Semitic ancestry. I say this not to make any
particular point other than that many who use the term are ignorant of all its
implications.
Zionism, on the
other hand, is fraught with even more nuance and a simplistic “Israel is our
friend” is an incredibly naïve and simplistic point of view also. This, of
course, is complicated by the belief of many that somehow the region was
divinely appropriated to the current Israelis in a deal brokered somewhere
around 4000 years ago between a desert nomad and a supernatural sky being.
Seldom have so many died from such an obscure germ of an idea. In fact, Israel in Old Testament times was only independent for 70 years (the reigns of Solomon and David).
For American
Christians of a fundamentalist bent, this has come to mean that it is our
national duty as a "Christian Nation" to facilitate the solidity of
the state of Israel so the sky spirit can swoop down and escort all the true
believers to some paradise. Oddly enough, this is the same end that is supposed
to be accomplished by all those extremist Muslims who sacrifice their corporeal
selves in the process of killing any and all Jews within range of their Semtex
laden vests. Of course, most of these
simplistic naïfs don't recognize that Abraham's deal, including the ritual
fleshy sacrifice, is as sacred to Muslims as it is to Jews.
With all that
in mind and stipulating that numerous scholarly works by real authors precede
this poor effort, I shall try to provide a simplified chronology of the problems
and actions of others in laying the groundwork for the current quagmire/crises.
Current Israeli
claims to ownership of this relatively small area on the Mediterranean are
baseless from the standpoint of "who was here first?" The region is a
cradle of civilization and one of the places which first experienced the
Neolithic Revolution, sometimes referred to much more descriptively as the
Agricultural Revolution. As such, the region has a long and tumultuous history
as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics.
Over millennia, Palestine
has been controlled by numerous different peoples, including the Ancient
Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, , Ancient Israelites, Assyrians,
Babylonians, Persians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, early Muslims
caliphates (dynasties) such as the Umayyads,
Abbasids, Seljuqs, Fatimids), European
Crusaders, later Muslims (Ayyubids, Mamelukes, Ottomans), the British,
the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (1948–1967, on the "West Bank") and
Egyptian Republic (in Gaza), and modern Israelis and Palestinians. Other terms
for the same area include Canaan, Zion, the Land of Israel, Southern Syria,
Jund Filastin, Outremer, the Holy Land and the Southern Levant. The name
"Israel" is recent and strategically chosen to imply/affirm to the
world that this is, indeed the "promised land" referred to in Genesis
in the Hebrew Torah and Christian Bibles.
In the past this
"promise' has been invoked by the ancient Hebrews to justify brutal acts
against peoples such as the residents of Jericho and Ai whose offence,
apparently, was simply already being there when the Hebrews wandered out of the desert
(allegedly having fled Egypt, a fact which even some Israeli archeologists now question)
and claimed ownership. Of course, the Jericho site has ruins going back as far
as 6000 years before Abraham's chat with the sky spirit, but that's just another inconvenient truth.
Hebrews were not
the political dominant force in the region now called Israel for well over 1900 years. The
Diaspora, the Jews’ cultural
/political/religious dispersion, began with the 6th century B.C. conquest of
the ancient Kingdom of Judah by Babylon, the destruction of the First Temple
(c. 586 B.C.), and the expulsion of the population, as stated in the Bible. The
Babylonian ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, allowed the Jews to remain in a unified
community in Babylon.
Another group
of Jews fled to Egypt, where they settled in the Nile delta. From 597 B.C.
onwards, there were three distinct groups of Hebrews: a group in Babylon and
other parts of the Middle East, a group in Judaea, and another group in Egypt.
Although Cyrus, the Persian king, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland
in 538 B.C., most chose to remain in Babylon. A large number of Jews in Egypt
became mercenaries in Upper Egypt on an island called the Elephantine. Most of
these Jews retained their religion, identity, and social customs; both under
the Persians and the Greeks, they were allowed to conduct their lives according
to their own laws.
In 63 B.C.,
Judah/Judaea became a 'protectorate' of Rome, and in 6 B.C. was organized as a
Roman province. The Hebrews, now generally referring to themselves by the
religious and culturally inclusive name "Jews" began to revolt
against the Roman Empire in 66 AD during the period known as the First
Jewish–Roman War which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD.
During the siege, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and most of
Jerusalem. In 132 A.D., the Jews
rebelled against Hadrian. In 135 A.D., Hadrian's army defeated the Jewish
armies and Jewish independence was lost. Jerusalem was turned into a pagan city
called Aelia Capitolina and the Jews were forbidden to live there, and Hadrian
changed the country's name from Judea to Syria Palaestina, which presages the
name "Palestine."
Muhammad (c. 570
CE – c. 8 June 632 CE), considered by Muslims as the last Prophet of God, based
on his alleged conversations with the same sky spirit as Abraham 2600 years
earlier, originated a new strenuous and
proselytic monotheism, which he called ""Islam," meaning
"submission" and, oddly enough, included some of the same concessions to the spirit in
the sky as Abraham's - dietary restrictions, ritual killing of animals,
circumcision, and ritual prayer. Muslims
(Semites just as the Hebrews had been) gained political control of the region
in question and ruled it as part of one caliphate or another for somewhere around
450 years.
In 1096, in
response to Papal propaganda and political concerns of the Byzantine Emperor,
the Crusades were initiated, ostensibly to redeem the "Holy Land"
(holy to many, but holy with a capitol "H" to European Christians. Most
Crusaders were driven, however, by purely human motivators, including freedom
from serfdom, a chance to grab an empire, especially among third and fourth sons of nobility who were unlikely to inherit, and the commands of their monarchs,
who were motivated by greed and the urge to make a religiously significant name
for themselves. The crusades influenced
the attitude of the western Church and people towards warfare. The frequent
calling of crusades habituated the clergy and monarchies to the use of
violence. The crusades also sparked debate about the legitimacy of taking lands
and possessions from pagans on purely religious grounds that would arise again
in the 15th and 16th centuries with the Age of Discovery.
With its power
and prestige raised by the crusades, the Papacy also gained greater control over
the entire western Church. One glaring
facet of the Crusades in general, is that, although, ostensibly aimed at
"reclaiming" the "Holy Land', technically, no European since
pagan Rome had ever "claimed" the region in any case. Another spinoff
was that although the Saracens (Turks/Muslims) were the targets, European and
Levantine Jews, themselves, suffered horribly as a sort of zealous collateral
damage. Jews living peacefully in Jerusalem were slaughtered in the thousands, not
by Muslims, in whose caliphate they resided peacefully, but by Crusader
Knights, all in the name of God. In Germany, synagogues were burned, sometimes
with the congregation huddled inside. The Fourth Crusade, as an example of the
depravity of the entire concept, actually attacked Byzantine Christian
Constantinople, and sacked the city, taking many of its priceless and art and
artifacts to Germany, Italy and throughout Europe. Persecution of Jews in the
First Crusade began a thousand-year tradition of organized attacks on the Jews
of Europe.
From about 1300 CE
through the 18th century, control of the
region (we’ll call it Palestine for simplicity’s sake) remained under the
auspices of various governments with
little in common except Islam, which was enough, to insure that Christians and
Jews remaining in the area, referred to as "people of the Book," were
significantly less persecuted than in Europe where Jews remained objects of
hostility and persecution and Christian dissenters fared little better.
The current
Arab–Israeli conflict is a relatively modern phenomenon, which has its roots in
the end of the 19th century. After almost two millennia of existence of the
Jewish Diaspora without a national state, the Zionist movement was founded in
the late 19th century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews
to rising anti-Semitism in Europe, exemplified by the Dreyfus affair in France
and the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire (see "Fiddler on the
Roof"). There was institutionalized social anti-Semitism in most European
nations throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian
journalist Theodor Herzl in 1897 following the publication of his book Der
Judenstaat (The Jewish State).
At that
time, the movement sought to encourage Jewish migration to Ottoman (Turkish)
Palestine. Zionism grew rapidly and
became the dominant force in Jewish politics with the World War II era
destruction of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. The conflict became a
major international issue with the birth of Israel in 1948.
In point of
painfully avaricious reality, prior to the petroleum age, much of the Levant
was more curiosity than concern for most European governments. Since then, however, The Arab–Israeli
conflict has resulted in at least five major wars and a number of minor
conflicts. It has also been the source of two major Palestinian intifadas
(uprisings).
Tensions between the Zionist movements and
the Arab residents of Palestine started to emerge after the 1880s, when
immigration of European Jews to Palestine increased. Herzl, a strong advocate for the cause of
Zionism, encouraged contributions from a broad spectrum of Europeans, Jewish
and gentile, said monies to be used to sponsor European Jews as settlers in
Palestine. In a sense, this is analogous to Europeans encouraging settlement in
the New World, in that the land wasn't empty in the first place. As an
alternative to stealing the land and evicting residents as Europeans did with
American Indians, Zionists purchased land, albeit, land with poor farmers
already there!
This immigration increased the Jewish
communities in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, by the acquisition of
land from Ottoman and individual Arab landholders, known as effendis, and
establishment of Jewish agricultural settlements. At the time, Arabs lived in
an almost feudal existence on the effendis' land. This is an important status
distinction, as there is a tendency to overlook that, more than anything else,
Palestine’s pre-Zionist occupants have been victims rather than aggressors.
It is important
to understand that the same rich Arabs who decry Israel's existence today were
the very social group who sold their tenants' land out from under them.
Additionally, in as much as Zionist settlers tended to be literate and better
educated, they had political skills and clout disproportionate to their
numbers. Demographers have
"guesstimated" (from Ottoman Turkish census data) that the population
of Palestine in 1882–3 was about 468,000, consisting of 408,000 Muslims, 44,000
Christians and 15,000 Jews. By the
outbreak of World War I, these numbers had increased to 602,000 Muslims, 81,000
Christians and 39,000 Jews, plus a similar but uncertain number of Jews who
were not Ottoman citizens. As of 1920, the ratio of Arabs to Jews was 15:1 with
a Christian population greater than the Jewish count.
Following WWI,
Europeans set about deciding the political fate of the Middle east, with an eye
towards control of lands and resources, facilitated by a fabricated
"mandate" concept established by the League of nations. This, of
course flies in the face of self-determination, but is consistent with the
Colonialist policies prevailing in Europe at the time. The process of establishing the mandates
consisted of two phases: The formal removal of sovereignty of the state
(Ottoman Turk or Austro-Hungarian) previously controlling the territory and the
transfer of mandatory powers to individual states among the Allied Powers
(France or Great Britain). Palestine, Jordan and Iraq (their modern names) fell
under British mandate, while Syria and Lebanon were French. Put plainly, to the
victor belonged the spoils, among which were Palestinians who were now
voiceless (again). This now transferred
responsibility and control of these largely Islamic regions to Christian,
European control, with Palestine, while majority Muslim, containing a growing
portion of educated European and Levantine Jews, and under nominal control of
Christian Britain. What could possibly go wrong?
While the British,
duplicitous colonial masters in other areas as well, had made promises to give
both Arabs and Jews land, (the Balfour declaration) the British claimed they
had never promised to give either side all of the land. Historically, most of
British foreign policy and commitment in the region was aimed at forwarding the
progress of what would eventually become T.E. Lawrence’s “Arab uprising” which,
it was hoped, would engage the Turks in the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean
coastal region-Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon.) In 1915, the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence
was formed as an agreement with Arab leaders to grant sovereignty to Arab lands
under Ottoman control to form an Arab state in exchange for the “Great Arab Revolt”
(watch Lawrence of Arabia) against the Ottomans.
However, the Balfour Declaration in 1917 also
proposed to "favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for
the Jewish people,” but that “nothing should be done to prejudice the
civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
Earlier, in 1916, the Anglo-French Sykes–Picot Agreement had granted mandatory
status to the British Empire for the area of present-day Jordan, Israel, the
Palestinian territories, and the area of present-day Iraq. The Balfour
Declaration was seen by Jewish nationalists as the cornerstone of a future
Jewish homeland on both sides of the Jordan River, but as one might expect, increased
the concerns of the Arab population in the Palestine region. And so, the
“troubles” began.
Rising tensions had given way to violence,
including civilian riots in 1920 and 21.
In an attempt to placate the Arabs, and
due to Britain's demonstrated inability
to control Arab violence in the Mandatory Palestine any other way, the
semi-autonomous Arab Emirate of Transjordan was created in all Palestinian
territory east of the Jordan river (roughly 77% of the Palestine mandate). Cementing this reality in 1922, the League of
Nations formally established the British Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan,
assigning all of the land east of the Jordan River to the Emirate of Jordan,
ruled by Hashemite king Abdullah but closely dependent on Britain, leaving the
remainder west of the Jordan as the League of Nations Mandatory Palestine.
The British now
found themselves in a politically charged situation at home and abroad. The
loss of much of a generation of young men left Britain shorthanded and sickened
by matters military, while thousands of
miles away in a part of the world most Britons couldn't even locate on a map,
the conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and the Zionist movement created a
situation which the British would neither resolve nor from which they would be
able to extricate themselves in any rational manner. Meanwhile on the
continent, and closer to home for the British, continuing pogroms
(semi-genocidal purges of entire Jewish communities) in Russia and the Ukraine
as well as the first hints of Adolf
Hitler's rise to power in Germany created a new urgency in the Zionist movement
to create a Jewish state, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked
increasingly fierce Arab resistance and attacks against the Jewish population
most notably in the preceding 1929 Hebron massacre, and during the 1936–39
Arab revolt in Palestine, historically referred to as “The Great Revolt”.
The British-appointed Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led Arab opposition to the idea of turning
part of Palestine into a Jewish state. "The Great Revolt", therefore was
a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the
British administration of the Palestine Mandate, demanding Arab independence
and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases
with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home".
Following
the killing of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in 1935, a declaration was made by
Hajj Amin al-Husseini of 16 May 1936 as 'Palestine Day' and call was made for a
General Strike. The revolt was branded by many in the Jewish Yishuv as
"immoral and terroristic", often comparing it to fascism and Nazism.
Now for a different interpretation, remarkable because it is the opinion of
Israel’s first prime minister and a life-long Zionist: “Ben Gurion however described
Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish
immigration and fear of the English identification with Zionism.”
Simply put, the Jews, with British support, were doing in Palestine what the
English had done centuries before, in Ireland! When reflecting upon Palestinian
refugees and those remaining occupants’ attitudes toward Israel today, reflect
on the facts in the following paragraph:
According to official British figures covering the whole
revolt, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, 108 were
hanged, and 961 died because of what they described as "gang and terrorist
activities". In an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi
estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead: 3,832 killed by the
British and 1,200 dead because of "terrorism", and 14,760 wounded.
Over ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and
60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. In June 1937, the British imposed
the death penalty for unauthorized possession of weapons, ammunition, and
explosives, but since many Jews had permission to carry weapons and store
ammunition for defense, this order was directed primarily against Palestinian
Arabs and most of the 112 executed in Acre Prison were hanged for illegal
possession of arms.
Estimates of
the number of Palestinian Jews killed range from 91 to several hundred. Even at
the higher estimate that’s a ratio of 25 Arab Palestinians killed for every
Palestinian Jew! In 1936 an Air Staff Officer in Middle East Command based in
the Kingdom of Egypt, Arthur Harris, known as an advocate of "air
policing", commented on the revolt saying that "one 250 lb. or 500
lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn" would satisfactorily
solve the problem. Later, in World War II, Harris would become better known as
“Bomber” Harris in the press, and “Butcher” Harris within the RAF.
Unsurprisingly,
the 1936–39 Arab Revolt has been, and still is marginalized in much of both
Western and Israeli historiography on Palestine. Most progressive Western
scholars of the era and the region have relatively little to say about the
anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinian Arab rebels against the British
Empire. One searching for American
parallels can look at almost any account of US Cavalry encounters with native
Americans, which are, too frequently, "sanitized" in similar manner. According to
Swedenburg’s (Ted Swedenburg, “The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian
National Past”) analysis, for instance, the Zionist version of Israeli history
acknowledges only one authentic national movement: the struggle for Jewish
self-determination that resulted in the Israeli Declaration of Independence in
May 1948. Swedenburg writes that, "The Zionist narrative has no room for an
anticolonial and anti-British Palestinian national revolt." Zionists often
describe the revolt simply and prosaically as a series of "events,"
"riots", or "happenings", the deaths of thousands of
Palestinians having been relegated to the status of a collateral damage statistic.
The
appropriate “official” description was debated by Jewish Agency officials, who
were anxiously keen not to give a negative impression of Palestine to prospective
new Jewish European immigrants. In private, however, Prime-Minister-to-be,
David Ben-Gurion was unequivocal, stating flatly that “The Arabs, were fighting
dispossession ... The fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of
the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish
people." And there you have it. One can imagine that description applied
to Lakota, Cheyenne, Cherokee, Seminole, and the list goes on.
In search for help in expelling British
forces from Palestine, (thus removing the enforcer of the Zionist enterprise),
the Grand Mufti sought alliance with the Axis Powers. The response of the
British government was to banish the Mufti from Palestine, curb Jewish
immigration, and reinforce its police force. As an “interesting” side note: He
(the grand Mufti, banished Palestinian Arab leader) spent much of World War II
in Germany and helped form a Muslim SS division in the Balkans, (perhaps sowing
the seeds of the 1990's "ethnic cleansing" in reverse?)
The Jewish
leadership then adopted a policy of "restraint and static defense" in
response to occasional Arab attacks and criticized the British for what they
considered to be a British retreat from the conditions promised by the Balfour
Declaration and its (Britain's) less than enthusiastic response to Arab
violence. This sense of "we're on
our own" led to a break- away from the more pacifistic Hagana (the Jewish self-defense
organization of the Yishuv) and
created the more right-wing militant Irgun,
which would later be led by Menachem Begin in 1943 and would result in the
group’s bombing of the King David Hotel. Irgun
led attacks against Arab policemen and civilians in the 1930s.
The King David
Hotel bombing was a terrorist attack carried out on Monday, July 22, 1946, by
Irgun, by then a militant right-wing Zionist underground organization. British
administrative headquarters for Palestine, were housed in the southern wing of
the King David Hotel. (Now who’s your terrorist?)
But now, back to the timeline. In 1936,
A British Royal Commission of Inquiry that came to be known as the Peel
Commission was established to attempt resolution of what was now the continuing
and widening split in its mandate. The
commission proposal was a two-state solution that gave the Arabs control over
all of the Negev, much of the present-day West Bank, and Gaza and gave the Jews
control over Tel Aviv, Haifa, present-day northern Israel, and surrounding
areas. Per the conditions proposed, The British would to retain control over
Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and surrounding areas. The two main Jewish
leaders, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion had convinced the Zionist Congress
to approve the Peel recommendations as a basis for more negotiation. The Arabs,
however, emphatically rejected it while demanding "an end to Jewish
immigration" and land sales to Jews, calling for independence of Palestine
as an independent Arab state. Sound unreasonable? We American colonists didn’t
think such a concept was all that bad in 1776, did we?
While the Arabs
held a large numerical advantage, the Zionists had far more resources,
organization and political skill, not to mention a steady infusion of funds
from wealthy Jews in Europe and America.
Jewish violence against the Mandatory Palestine continued to mount
throughout the latter half of the 1940s, with attacks by the Irgun,
assassination of British authorities’ officials by the Lehi, and the 1946 King David Hotel bombing. In 1947, the
population was reported as 1,845,000, consisting of 608,000 Jews and 1,237,000
Arabs and others, making the region still 2:1 Arab to Jewish population, even
with the new flood of European refugees and holocaust survivors, for whom the
West (the former Allied Powers) had significant and appropriate sympathy and
concern.
The 1948
Arab–Israeli War (1948–49), known as the "War of Independence" by
Israelis and al-Nakba ("the Catastrophe") by Palestinians, began
after the UN Partition Plan and the subsequent 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory
Palestine in November 1947.
The plan proposed the establishment of both
independent Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. The Arabs had rejected the
plan while the Jews had accepted it. As a point of interest, a modern-day point
of Palestinian discontent seems to be lack of independent territory, which they
rejected almost 60 years ago! For four months, under continuous Arab
provocation and attack, the (we'll say "Israelis" from here on) were
usually on the defensive while occasionally retaliating. By March 1948 however,
the United States was actively seeking a temporary UN approved trusteeship
rather than immediate partition, known as the Truman trusteeship proposal, a
proposal rejected by Israeli leadership.
By now, both Israeli and Arab militias had begun campaigns to control
territory inside and outside the designated borders, and an open war between
the two populations emerged.
At this point the
stage was set for all the violence and hatred of the following 60 years. Palestinian Arabs felt they had lost their
land even if it had been sold out from under them by other absentee rich Turkish,
then Arab, landlords. Having no recourse, they were primed to turn their
disaffection on the Israeli settlers who had bought it. It must be noted that regardless of how one
views land ownership, that, while Israelis didn't steal Arab land, they
certainly stole Palestinian sovereignty.
Adjoining nations, following Israel's declaration of statehood and
Britain's 1948 withdrawal, admitting they were powerless to stop the flood of
Jewish immigration, declared the mantra which survives today - "Israel has
no right to statehood." Further in an act of hubris and epic
underestimation, Israel's neighbors assured the Palestinian Arabs that their
troubles would be short lived as they (Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon,
fueled with Saudi money) were about to annihilate the Israelis. They were
encouraged to leave until hostilities were over and they could reclaim
"their" lands and independence. Note, and this is a crucial point,
most Palestinians, in what would soon be a proliferation of refugee camps, had
simply gotten “out of the way” of other Arab troops, and were refused the right
to return after Syria., Egypt and Jordan, Lebanese and Saudi troops had been
defeated
Jordanian,
Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Saudi troops invaded Palestine subsequent
to the British withdrawal and the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14,
1948. Israel, the US, the Soviet Union and UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie
called this "illegal aggression", while China broadly backed the Arab
claims. The Arab states proclaimed their aim of a "United State of
Palestine" in place of Israel and an Arab state. The Arab Higher Committee
said, that in the future Palestine, the Jews would be no more than 1/7 of the
population. i.e. only Jews that lived in Palestine before the British mandate,
not specifying what would happen to the other Jews. They considered the UN Plan
to be invalid because it was opposed by Palestine's Arab majority and claimed
that the British withdrawal led to an absence of legal authority, making it
necessary for them to protect Arab lives and property. About two thirds of
Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territories which came under
Jewish control; the rest became Arab, and generally second class, citizens of Israel. As a further cultural
nightmare for the Arab neighboring states, Israel humiliated them militarily.
All of the much smaller number of Jews in the territories captured by the
Arabs, for example the Old City of Jerusalem, also fled or were expelled. The
official United Nations estimate was that 711,000 Arabs became refugees during
the fighting. These, then, are the progenitors, several generations removed, of
today's current crop of violently anti- Israeli terrorists, encouraged into
exile by their fellow religionists and left to ferment in refugee camps. Of
course, the further (and continuing) expulsion of Arab Palestinians and the
seizure of what lands they may still hold, continues to exacerbate the
situation.
The fighting
ended with signing of Armistice Agreements in 1949 between Israel and its
warring neighbors formalizing Israeli control of the area allotted to the
Jewish state (per the original UN partition plan, rejected by Palestinian
Arabs) plus just over half of the area allotted to the Arab state. The Gaza
Strip was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan until June 1967 when
they were seized by Israel during the Six-Day War. The 711,000, or so, Palestinians who fled or were expelled from
the areas that became Israel were not allowed to return to their homes, and
took up residence in refugee camps in surrounding countries, including Lebanon,
Jordan, Syria, and the area that was later to be known as the Gaza Strip; they
were usually not allowed to leave refugee camps and mix with the local Arab
society either, leaving the Palestinian refugee problem unsolved. Around 400 Arab towns and villages were
depopulated during the 1948 Palestinian exodus.
Post war, the surrounding Arab states created a group of their own whom
they neither recognized or significantly assisted financially.
After the
1948 war, the (defeated) Arab states insisted on two
main demands, neither of which were accepted by Israel: 1. Israel should
withdraw to the borders of the UN Partition Plan — Israel argued "that the
new borders—which could be changed, under consent only—had been established as
a result of war, and because the UN blueprint took no account of defense needs
and was militarily untenable, there was no going back to that
blueprint." 2. The Palestinian
refugees deserved a full right of return back into Israel — Israel argued that
this was "out of the question, not only because they were hostile to the
Jewish state, but they would also fundamentally alter the Jewish character of
the state." It is worthy of note that Arabs who had not left were integrated
into Israeli society to a large extent unless demonstrably hostile to the
established order.
Over the next two
decades after the 1948 war ended, between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews fled or were
expelled from the Arab countries they were living in, in many cases owing to
anti-Jewish sentiment, expulsion (in the case of Egypt), or, as in Iraq, legal oppression but also quite often to
promises of a better life from Israel; of this number, two-thirds ended up in
refugee camps in Israel, while the remainder migrated to France, the United
States and other Western or Latin American countries. The Jewish refugee camps
in Israel were evacuated with time and the refugees were eventually integrated
in the Jewish Israeli society (which in fact consisted almost entirely of
refugees from Arab and European states). Over the ensuing 60 years there have
been numerous hostilities, overt and terrorist, between Israel and her
neighbors. They include armed conflicts in 1950, 1956, 1964 (the Six Day War),
1973 (the Yom Kippur War), anti-terrorist incursions into Lebanon in 1978 and
1982, and in 1987-1993 the first Intifada.
While the
principle conflict of previous wars had been by uniformed services one against
the other, the Intifada was far more of a terrorist nature. It began as an
uprising of Palestinians, particularly the young, against the Israeli military
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the failure of the nationalist
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve any kind of meaningful
diplomatic solution to the Palestinian issue. The exiled PLO leadership in
Tunisia quickly assumed a role in the intifada, but the uprising also brought a
rise in the importance of Palestinian national and Islamic movements and helped
lead to the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988. The intifada was
started by a group of young Palestinians who began throwing rocks at the
Israeli occupying forces in the Gaza Strip in December 1987. In May 1989, the
government of Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir, suggested that violence cease, and
that elections should be held in the West Bank and Gaza for "a political
delegation with whom Israel would come to terms regarding the implementation of
Palestinian interim self-governing authority in these areas." These
elections however never materialized as Israel had and continues to have
internal divisions over ways and means of dealing with "The Palestinian
Problem."
Backing the wrong
horse has become a way of life for Palestinian separatists in more recent years.
The First Gulf War was a political disaster for the PLO due to their support of
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Following Iraq's crushing defeat by coalition
forces, Kuwaiti authorities forcibly pressured nearly 200,000 Palestinians to
leave Kuwait. This forced expulsion was a response to the alignment of PLO
leader Yasser Arafat with Saddam Hussein. They (oil rich Kuwait) also withdrew
their financial support from the Palestinian cause due to PLO support of Saddam
Hussein. This large political setback created the conditions that allowed for
the PLO to begin talks with the United States and Israel. The First Palestinian
Intifada ended with the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the signing of the Oslo
Accords by Israel and the PLO in 1993.
A second Intifada,
of 2000, triggered by Israeli PM Sharon declaring the temple Mount in Jerusalem
to be “an eternal Israeli territory” lasted another several years and was
characterized by suicide bombings and large numbers of civilian casualties, in
a sort of prequel to current events. In
2002, as the second Intifada raged on, Saudi Arabia offered a peace plan in The
New York Times and at a summit meeting of the Arab League in Beirut. The plan
essentially calls for full withdrawal, solution of the refugee problem through
the Palestinian "right of return" (to?), a Palestinian state with its
capital in East Jerusalem in return for fully normalized relations by Israel
with the whole Arab world. This proposal was the first to receive the unanimous
backing of the Arab League. In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Peres said:
"... the details of every peace plan must be discussed directly between
Israel and the Palestinians, and to make this possible, the Palestinian
Authority must put an end to terror." Curiously, following the Saudi plan,
in 2005, the United States Congress acknowledged that our regional ally, then
and still, Saudi Arabia, had been funding Hamas and other Palestinian
insurgency terrorist groups.
In an effort of
its own in 2005 Israel unilaterally evacuated settlements, and military
outposts from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. The Disengagement Plan
was a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, adopted by the
government and enacted in August 2005, to remove a permanent Israeli presence
from the Gaza Strip and from four Israeli settlements in the northern West
Bank. The civilians were evacuated (many forcibly) and the residential
buildings demolished after August 15, and the disengagement from the Gaza Strip
was completed on 12 September 2005, when the last Israeli soldier left. The
military disengagement from the northern West Bank was completed ten days
later.
In January 2006,
elections were held for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas won these
elections, and thus secured a majority of seats. Due to the nature of their
Parliamentary system, this meant they also controlled the executive posts of
the Palestinian Authority, including the Prime Minister's post, and the
cabinet. Hamas gained popular support
because it appeared much more efficient and much less corrupt than Fatah
(political, relatively non-violent). Unfortunately, it was also far more
willing to resort to violence to achieve its aims. While it built various institutions and
social services. Hamas also openly declared that it did not intend to accept
any recognition of Israel. It stated it would not accept the Oslo Accords, and
would not accept or recognize any negotiations with Israel. Throughout previous
years, it had openly stated that it encouraged and organized attacks against
Israel. This created a major change in previous Israeli-Palestinian
interactions, which had previously been going through various periods of
negotiations. This also signaled a huge step back from resolution, triggered by
the Saudi plan and the Israeli unilateral withdrawal of 2005.
Most Western
nations and international organizations did not give the Hamas led government
official recognition and responded by cutting off funds and imposing other
sanctions. In June 2007, Hamas took
control of Gaza, violently routing the forces of Fatah. This effectively
severed control of the Palestinian territories. Those in the West Bank were
under Fatah's control, with those in Gaza under the control of Hamas. Mahmoud
Abbas, the Palestinian president, dissolved the government. The fighting had numerous
casualties, and gave rise to even more refugees, who fled to Egypt and other
countries
And so, we come
to the present. With or without their Palestinian serfs’ approval, more than
100 years ago wealthy Turks first, Arabs later, freely sold Jewish immigrants
land on which their Arab tenants lived. Powerless against their former
landlords, Palestinian Arabs turned their hatred upon the Jews. The holocaust
left numerous European Jews stateless, so they fled to Palestine. European nations, having made promises and
pseudo political divisions they had no ability to enforce or maintain, simply
left. Fueled by cultural and religious hatred, Arab neighbors turned military
force upon the new state of Israel after it took unilateral steps to create a nation.
While Israel may have acted alone, they did not create an exclusionary policy
until they were attacked on all sides. Meanwhile Arab states, having created a
huge number of Palestinian refugees, did little to deal with them or
incorporate them into their own Arab societies. In fact, due to Islamic sectarianism,
some were regarded as poorly by others as if they were Israelis, not fellow
Arabs.
Several wars and
six decades later, even though Israel had withdrawn from Gaza, Hamas forces
seized control in Gaza, ousted the Palestinian authority and destabilized the
region. Hamas terrorists in Gaza built tunnels used for terrorist raids inside
Israel. In some ways, this is Israel reaping as they had sowed 60 yeas
previously. By its nature, terrorism endangers those who sponsor it, in this
case Hamas and, unfortunately those innocent civilians in whose presence
terrorists hide. In the face of Hamas' intransigence and continued terrorist
actions, Israel was (is) faced with really only two choices: sit in Israel and
allow continued tunnel incursions and rocket bombardments from and by Hamas or
defend its own civilians. What Israel is doing has had horrific effects on
civilians, yet what is the option? If
they do nothing, they will be continually assaulted. What did Britain do when
the Germans lobbed v-1s and v-2s into London? They bombed Berlin, hardly a
military or industrial target, and civilians died, same in Dresden, same in
Frankfurt. There is a choice in Gaza as there was in Germany - stop projecting
deadly force at your neighbors. Hamas isn't the moral standard setter for
anyone. It is a rogue terrorist organization which has hijacked Gaza and
endangered all its occupants. Where should world anger focus in the current
situation? Stopping Hamas' use of deadly force. This may be hard since they
have broken three cease fires since their action triggered the most recent horror.
But what provocation is there for the continued violence?
Amnesty International has a pretty good idea: “Since January (2018) the Israeli
government, emboldened by President Donald Trump’s inauguration, has authorized
the construction of more than 6,219 illegal settlement homes in the occupied
West Bank, including 719 in East Jerusalem. These announcements not only mark a
shift from the Israeli government’s more cautious approach under the Obama
administration but also fly in the face of UN Security Council resolution 2334,
passed in December last year, which calls on Israel to immediately cease all
settlement activities in the OPT."
Israel has consistently demonstrated willingness to shoot at anything or anyone and ask questions later, as the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli naval vessels and aircraft firmly established. 34 US sailors died, 171 were wounded. Israel said they were sorry and paid off the families of the survivors.
And yes, all
this ultimately emanates from a single concept – Zionism.
" We stress that there are hundreds of thousands Jews
around the world who identify with our opposition to the Zionist ideology and
who feel that Zionism is not Jewish, but a political agenda...What we want is
not a withdrawal to the '67 borders, but to everything included in it, so the
country can go back to the Palestinians and we could live with them.”
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss
