AL
HABTOOR INFORMATION AND RESEARCH
DEPARTMENT
The
attack on America on September 11th
2001 and the subsequent
American military
campaign against Osama bin Laden and his
Al Qaida
Organisation, the bombing of Afghanistan and the success
of the Northern
Alliance to wrest
control of Afghanistan from the Taliban
rule, have all but
regulated news about the conflict in Palestine to a side show
that is earning
fewer and fewer
column inches in the world’s media. This
inattention to what
is in fact the root
cause of all the problems facing the West
in its relationship
to the Arab world and Islam will lead to the rise of other
Osama Bin Ladens who
will have the
support of hundreds of thousands of
Muslims and Arabs who feel
that America
and the West are ignoring the problems
faced by the Palestinian
people and
the feelings of the Arab world. In
this Article Al Habtoor’s
Information
and Research Department wish to try and
refocus attention on the
real cause of so much that is happening in the Middle
East.
Palestine,
is a defined geographical entity generally
defined as the region bounded
on the east by the Jordan River, on the
north by the border between modern Israel
and Lebanon, on the west by the
Mediterranean Sea (including the coast of
Gaza), and on the south by the Negev, with
its southernmost extension reaching the
Gulf
of Aqaba
Since
the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the
First World War, Palestine has been the
object of conflicting claims of both
Jewish and Arab national movements. This
conflict has led to prolonged violence and
open warfare. The latest instance of
which has been provoked by Israel’s
current Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon,
visit with over 1,000 members of
Israel’s Security forces, to the holiest
Muslim sites in Jerusalem, the Al Aqua
Mosque compound to assert “Jewish
sovereignty’’ over all Jerusalem. This
provocative action at a place considered
by the people of Palestine to be a symbol
of their identity and one of the most
revered sites in the Arab world was a
deliberate act of provocation by ardent
Zionist. This ignoble and cynical act by a
man considered by many to be a war
criminal, has acted as the trigger that
has ignited a fresh blaze of anger and
resentment by inflaming the Palestinian
people feelings toward Israel for its
illegal occupation and confiscation of
their land and the tearing apart of their
culture and society.
There
will be no end to this cycle of violence
until people in the West, their
governments and their media understand the
root cause of this conflict. Otherwise any
effort by the rest of the world to bring
about a fair and just resolution to the
damaging conflict without understanding
the root cause of it will be met by
failure.
According
to the conventional worldview of the
conflict ,both sides are at fault; it is
the Palestinians who are irrational
“terrorists” and opportunists trying
to assert a false claim on the historic
and biblical homeland of the Jews, and as
usurpers, have no point of view worth
listening to. But this view is simply not
true because the non-Jewish people of
Palestine, Muslim, and Christian, have a
real and deep grievance. Namely, that
Palestine has been their homeland for over
2000 years and was taken from them
fifty-four years ago without their
consent, mostly by force, to create the
state of Israel, a Jewish homeland in the
heart of the Arab world.
The
idea that Jews around the world that left
Palestine in the first century AD should
be allowed to return to a mythical
“homeland’’, was first put forward
seriously by the Zionist movement in the
late nineteenth century. Although the
notion of return had always been present
in Jewish consciousness, it was not until
the establishment of the Zionist movement
that active steps were taken to try to
establish a “homeland” for Jews in
what had become known as Palestine.
The
standard Zionist justification for
encouraging emigration was that they
wanted to reclaim their ancestral
homeland. For this purpose the Zionists
convinced rich Jews from Europe and
America to buy land and to establish and
build up a Jewish community there. As they
acquired more and more land, violent
opposition from the Palestinian Arabs
increasingly met these peaceful Israeli
settlers. According to the Zionists, this
violence erupted because the Palestinians
were inherently anti-Semitic. The Zionists
were of course forced to defend
themselves. And in one form or
another this has been the position of the
Zionist State of Israeli since its
foundation in 1948. They continue to claim
that they are only
“defending” themselves from a
people who have been historically hostile
to them.
The
problem with this seemingly reasonable
explanation is that it is simply not true.
What is true about the Zionist movement
however is that from its conception it
planned to completely dispossess the
indigenous Arab population of Palestine so
that hey could create a state that would
be an entirely Jewish. A body called the
‘Jewish National Fund’ was established
by the Zionists to buy Arab land so that
it can be held in perpetuity in the name
of all Jewish people. Part of this
Fund’s covenant was that this land could
never be sold or even leased back to
Arabs; a situation that continues even
today.
The
Arab community in Palestine as it became
increasingly aware of Zionists intentions,
vigorously opposed further Jewish
emigration and land buying because they
realised early on that it posed a real and
imminent threat to the very existence of
the Arab society in Palestine. Because of
this increasing opposition by the Arab
community it was only through the military
backing of the British Government that the
Zionists were able to establish a Jewish
state. For without it the Zionist project
would have never been realised.
In
short Zionism was based on the faulty
colonist worldview that the right of
indigenous inhabitants did not matter. And
it is clear that Arab opposition was based
on a totally reasonable fear of the
dispossession of their people, rather
than, as the Zionists would have us
believe, on an inherent Anti-Semitism. It
can be clearly seen that Golda Meir’s
infamous quote that Palestine “was a
land without people for a people without
land” is a justification for the Jewish
colonialism; despite the fact
that even back in 1919 Palestine was the
home to over 700,000 Palestinians. This
act of settlement and the setting up an
exclusively Jewish state in Palestine with
intention of ousting its people is the
root of all the problems that beset the
Middle East today and only when the West
understands this there will be peace and
stability in the region.
An
added fact often ignored by the West,
particularly America when it tries
bringing peace to the region, is that for
the 1300 years prior to the founding of
the state of Israel, the overwhelming
majority of the citizens of Palestine were
Arabs; this fact alone totally rejects the
Zionist claim of right to the land. For
over 2,500 years
there has not been a Jewish state in
Palestine, the last one vanished in 586
BC. If we measure the amount of time from
the David’s conquest of Canaan (note
“conquest” this is in itself a
recognition that others lived there before
them) to the destruction of Judah we
arrive at a figure of only 414 years of
Jewish rule; and the fundamental truth is
that Israel has no legitimate claim to
Palestine.
One
further point: the Zionists were a very
small minority until the end of the
Second World War while the Jews had an
understandable desire to establish a place
where Jews could be masters of their own
fate, given a shameful history of
oppression in the West; especially as the
danger to Europe’s Jews became clear in
the late 1930’s when Fascists used them
as a scapegoat to raise to power in
Germany and Italy. At this turning point
the majority of European Jews came to
support the Zionists, propelled by real
desperation for themselves and their
families.
It is
exactly the same desperation that the
Palestinians feel now, here is another
people seeking to claim back and establish
a home land for themselves in a time
that is seeing them more and more
oppressed by a violent and aggressive
regime that has not learnt any lessons
from its recent past.
To
help readers gain a fuller understanding
of principle obstacle to a peaceful and
just settlement in Palestine we have
compiled a series of quotations and
insights from experts, historian and
personalities that will, we hope, give a
clearer picture
of the problem that needs to be overcome
to reach a just and fair settlement to
this conflict. Unless there is a clear
understanding by the Western governments,
the media and the people of the developed
world of, not just the Israeli position
but that of the Palestinians as well,
there will be no hope of bringing peace to
the region.
It
will clearly be seen from the beginning
that people who have lain claim to a land
that was once theirs only briefly many
millennia ago have disenfranchised another
by deliberately stealing their land
expelling the people and denying the same
basic civil and human rights that they
cherish themselves.
For
the West it is the myth that the Jews
“were driven from their land” that has
caused this conflict to continue and
worsen over the last fifty-four years. The
idea of a people whose only common bond,
their faith, allowed them to return to a
land that none of them had known is
absurd. For ethnically by the time
Zionists got the UN, America, and the
world to accept their mythical right to a
homeland. The Jews themselves were very
ethnically different from those, which all
those millennia ago left Palestine. Over
the two and a half thousand years since
their departure they
had mixed with and became Europeans,
Slavs, Latin’s, Arabs, and even
Ethiopians.
Apart
from the Yishuv Jews who were a very small
minority before the rise of Zionism, all
the Jews who came to Palestine under the
Zionist banner had no
affinity to the land. They were as stated
from many different ethnic and cultural
backgrounds. And often they found it
difficult to live together. This is even
true today, just look how badly Israel’s
latest influx of settlers, the Russians
are treated with the animosity and
ambiguity that most Jews feel towards Jews
of Arab origin.
It
is time that an effort is made by the
Countries of the West, particularly
America, to shrug off its feelings of
guilt brought on by the suffering of the
Jews in the hand of Fascism in the
1930’s and 40’s, and see that the same
people who have since
the Second World War claimed their
sympathy, are acting as 21st
century colonist who are consistently
ignoring the basic human rights of other
people to serve their own. It is the
Palestinians who are oppressed; there are
over three million of them
in refugee camps without the right to
return to the homes they legally own in
Israel.
All
what is asked from the people of the West
is to look past the propaganda, which was
so successfully put out over the last
fifty-four years by the Zionists, and
judge which of this two peoples has truly
been dispossessed.
On
Zionism
“
When we occupy the land we shall bring
immediate benefits to the state that
receives us. We must expropriate gently
the private property on the land assigned
to us…. We shall try to spirit the
penniless population across the boarder by
procuring employment for it in transit
countries. While denying employment in our
own country…. The property owners will
come over to our side. Both the
Expropriation and the removal of the poor
must be done discreetly and
circumspectly…. Let the owners of
immovable property believe they are
cheating
us, selling us something far more then
they are worth…. But we are not going to
sell them anything back.”
The complete diaries
of Theodore Herzl – founder of the
Zionist movement.
Historical
peoples of Palestine
Between
3000 and 1100 BC, Caananite civilisations
covered what is today Israel.
The West Bank, Lebanon and much of Syria
and Jordan…. Those who remained in
the hill after the Romans expelled the
Jews (second century AD) were a potpourri:
farmers and vine-growers, pagans and
converts to Christianity, descendants of
the Arabs, Persians, Samaritans, Greeks,
and old Caananite tribes.”
Marcia
Kunstel and Joseph Albright, “the
Promised Land.”
Present
day Palestinian ancestral heritage
But
all these peoples differ and peoples who
had come to Canaan were additional sprigs
grafted onto the original tree… And the
parent tree was Caananite…. The Arabs
who arrive in the 7th century
AD made moslim converts of the population,
settled down as residents, and
intermarried with them, with the result
that they
are now so completely Arabised that we
cannot tell where the Caananites leave
off and the Arabs begin”
Illene
Beatty “ Arab and Jew in the Land of
Caanan”
Caananite
civilisations
“Recent
archeological digs have provided evidence
that Jerusalem was a big and fortified
city already in 1800 BC…. Findings show
that a sophisticated water system
heretofore attributed to the conquering
Israelites pre dates them by eight
centuries and was even more sophisticated
than imagined… Dr. Ronny Reich, who
directed
the excavation along with Eli Shuikrun,
said the entire system was built as a
single complex by Caananites in the Middle
Bronze age period around 1800BC”
The
Jewish Bulletin July 31st 1998
Land
ownership in Palestine and its change
“The
Ottoman Land Code of 1858, Required the
registration in the name of
individual owners of agricultural land,
most of which had never previously been
registered, and which had formerly been
treated according to traditional forms of
land tenure, in the hill areas generally masha’a
or communal use. The new law
meant that for the first time a peasant
could be deprived not of the title of his
land, which he rarely held before, but
rather the right to live on it cultivate
it, and pass
it on to his heirs rights that formally
had been unalienable… under the
provisions of the 1858 law, communal
rights of tenure were often
ignored…instead members of
the upper classes adept at manipulating or
circumventing the legal process,
registered large areas of land as
their…. The fellahin
(peasants) naturally considered the land
to be theirs, and often discovered that
they had ceased to be the legal owners
only when the land was sold to Jewish
settlers by an absentee landlord…
not only had the land been purchased: its
Arab cultivators were being dispossessed
and replaced by foreigners who had overt
political objectives in Palestine.”
Rashid
Khalidi, “ Blaming the victims,” Ed.
Said and Hutchens
Was
Arab opposition to the Arrival of the
Zionists Based on Anti-Semitism?
“The aim of the Jewish National Fund was to
‘redeem the land of Palestine as
the
inalienable possession of the Jewish
People’…. As early as 1891, the
Zionist leader Ahad Ha’am wrote that the
Arabs ”understood very well what we were
doing and what we were aiming at, Theodore
Herzl, the founder of Zionism stated,
‘we
shall
try to sprit the penniless Arab population
across a boarder…. But must be carried
out discreetly and circumspectly’… At
various locations in northern Palestine
Arab farmers refused to move from land the
fund had purchased from absentee owners,
and the Turkish authorities, at the
Fund’s request, evicted them… The
ingenuous Jews of Palestine also reacted
negatively to Zionism. They did not see
the need
for a Jewish state and did want to
exacerbate relations with their Arab
neighbours.”
John
Quigley,
“Palestine and Israel -A
Challenge to Justice.”
“Before
the 20th century, most Jews in
Palestine belonged to Old Yishuv, or
community, that had settled more for
religious than political reasons. There
was little, if any conflict between them
and the Arab population. Tensions began
after the first Zionist settlers arrived
in the 1880’s…. When they purchased
land from absentee Arab owners, leading to
the dispossession of the peasants who
cultivated it.”
Don
Peretz, “ The Arab – Israeli
Dispute.”
“During
the Middle Ages, North Africa and the Arab
Middle East became places of refuge and a
haven for the persecuted Jews of Spain and
elsewhere… In the Holy land…. They
lived together in relative harmony, a
harmony that was only disrupted when the
Zionists began to claim that Palestine was
the ‘rightful’ possession of the
‘Jewish people’ to the exclusion of
its Muslim and Christian inhabitants.
Sami
Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
Attitude
of Jews reaching Palestine toward its
indigenous population
"Serfs
they (the Jews) were in the lands of the
Diaspora, and suddenly they find
themselves in freedom in Palestine; and
this change has awakened in them an
inclination to despotism. They treat the
Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive
them of their rights, offend them without
cause, and even boast of these deeds;
and nobody among us opposes this
despicable and dangerous
inclination."
Zionist
writer Ahad Ha'am, quoted in Sami Hadawi,
"Bitter Harvest."
Was
Palestine the only, or even preferred,
destination of Jews facing persecution
when the Zionist movement started?
"The
pogroms forced many Jews to leave Russia.
Societies known as 'Lovers of
Zion,' which were forerunners of the
Zionist organisation convinced some of the
frightened emigrants to go to Palestine.
There, they argued, Jews would rebuild
the ancient Jewish 'Kingdom of David and
Solomon,' Most Russian Jews ignored this
appeal and fled to Europe and the United
States. By 1900, almost a million Jews
had settled in the United States
alone."
"Our
Roots are still alive" by The People
Press Palestine Book Project.
The
Balfour Declaration
"The
Balfour Declaration, made in November 1917
by the British Government…was made a) by
a European power, b) about a non-European
territory, c) in flat
disregard of both the presence and wishes
of the native majority resident
in that
erritory. As Balfour himself wrote in
1919. 'The contradiction between the
letter
of the Covenant (the Anglo French
Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs
of
the former Ottoman colonies that as a
reward for supporting the Allies they
could have their independence) is even
more flagrant in the case of the
independent nation of Palestine than in
that of the independent nation of Syria.
For in Palestine we do not propose even to
go through the form of consulting the
wishes of the present inhabitants of the
country. The four powers are committed to
Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong,
good or bad, is rooted in age-long
tradition, in present needs,
in future hopes, of far profounder import
than the desire and prejudices of the
700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient
land,'"
Edward
Said, "The Question of
Palestine."
The
myth of Palestine as a wasteland before
the Jews moved there
"Britain's
high commissioner for Palestine, John
Chancellor, recommended total suspension
of Jewish immigration and land purchase to
protect Arab agriculture. He said 'all
cultivable land was occupied; there is no
cultivable land now in possession
of the indigenous population could be sold
to Jews without creating a class of
landless Arab cultivators'...The Colonial
Office rejected the recommendation."
John
Quigley, "Palestine and Israel: A
Challenge to Justice."
Zionist
Planning clear from the beginning
In
1919, the American King-Crane Commission
spent six weeks in Syria and
Palestine, interviewing delegations and
reading petitions. Their report stated,
"The commissioners began their study
of Zionism with minds predisposed in its
favor...
The fact came out repeatedly in the
Commission's conferences with Jewish
representatives that the Zionists looked
forward to a practically complete
dispossession of the present non-Jewish
inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms
of purchase...
"If
the principle of self-determination is to
rule, then the wishes of Palestine's
population are to be decisive as to what
is to be done with Palestine. It has to be
remembered that the non-Jewish population
of Palestine - nearly nine-tenths of the
whole - is emphatically against the entire
Zionist program. To subject a people so
minded to unlimited Jewish immigration,
and to steady financial and social
pressure
to surrender the land, would be a gross
violation of the principle just quoted. No
British officers, consulted by the
Commissioners, believed that the Zionist
program could be carried out except by
force of arms. The officers generally
thought that a force of not less than
fifty thousand soldiers would be required
even to initiate the program. That of
itself is evidence of a strong sense of
the injustice of the Zionist program...The
initial claim, often submitted by Zionist
representatives, that they have a 'right'
to Palestine based on occupation of two
thousand years ago, can barely be
seriously considered."
Quoted in
"The Israel-Arab Reader" ed.
Laquer and Rubin.
"Zionist
land policy was incorporated in the
Constitution of the Jewish Agency for
Palestine. ‘ Land is to be acquired as
Jewish property and the title to the lands
acquired is to be taken in the name of the
Jewish National Fund, to the end that
the same shall be held as the inalienable
property of the Jewish people.' The
provision goes to stipulate that 'the
Agency shall promote agricultural
colonisation based on Jewish labour'...The
effect of this Zionist colonisation policy
on the Arabs was that land acquired by
Jews became extra-territorialised. It
ceased to be land from which the Arabs
could ever hope to gain any advantage.”
The
Zionists made no secret of their
intentions. For as early as 1921, Dr. Eder,
a member of the Zionist Commission, boldly
told the Court of Inquiry. 'There can be
only one National Home in Palestine, and
that a Jewish one, and no equality in the
partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a
Jewish preponderance as soon as the
numbers of the race are sufficiently
increased.' He then asked that only Jews
should be allowed to bear arms." Sami
Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
Given
Arab opposition did the Zionists support
steps towards majority rule in Palestine?
"Clearly,
the last thing the Zionists really wanted
was that all the inhabitants of Palestine
should have an equal say in running the
country... Chaim Weizmann had impressed on
Churchill that representative government
would have spelled the end
of the Jewish National Home in
Palestine... Churchill declared, 'the
present form of government will continue
for many years. Step by step we shall
develop representative institutions
leading to full self-government, but our
children's children will have passed away
before that is accomplished.
"David
Hirst, "The Gun and the Olive
Branch."
Denial
of the Arabs' right to self-determination
"Even
if nobody lost their land, the Zionist
program was unjust in principle because
it denied majority political rights...
Zionism, in principle, could not allow
the
natives
to exercise their political rights because
it would mean the end of the Zionist
enterprise." Benjamin
Beit-Hallahmi, "Original Sins."
Arab
resistance to Pre-Israeli Zionism
"In
1936-9, the Palestinian Arabs attempted a
nationalist revolt... David Ben-Gurion,
eminently a realist, recognized its
nature. In internal discussion, he noted
that 'in
our political argument abroad, we minimize
Arab opposition to us,' but he urged, 'let
us not ignore the truth among ourselves.'
The truth was that 'politically we are the
aggressors and they defend themselves...
The country is theirs, because they
inhabit it, whereas we want to come here
and settle down, and in their view we want
to take away from them their country,
while we are still outside'... The revolt
was crushed by the British, with
considerable brutality."
Noam
Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."
Gandhi
on the Palestine conflict - 1938
"Palestine
belongs to the Arabs in the same sense
that England belongs to the English or
France to the French...What is going on in
Palestine today cannot be justified by any
moral code of conduct...If they the Jews
must look to the Palestine of geography as
their national home, it is wrong to enter
it under the shadow of the British gun. A
religious act cannot be performed with the
aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can
settle in Palestine only by the goodwill
of the Arabs... As it is, they are
co-sharers with the British in despoiling
a people who have done no wrong to them. I
am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish
they had chosen the way of non-violence in
resisting what they rightly regard as an
unacceptable encroachment upon their
country. But according to the accepted
canons of right and wrong, nothing can be
said against the Arab resistance in the
face of overwhelming odds."
Mahatma
Gandhi quoted in "A Land of Two
peoples" ed. Mendes-Flohr.
Didnt
the Zionists legally buy much of the land
before Israel was established?
"In
1948, at the moment that Israel declared
itself a state, it legally owned a little
more than 6 percent of the land of
Palestine. After 1940, when the mandatory
authority restricted Jewish land ownership
to specific zones inside Palestine, there
continued to be illegal buying (and
selling) within the 65 percent of the
total area restricted to Arabs.
Thus
when the partition plan was announced in
1947 it included land held illegally
by Jews, which was incorporated as a fait
accompli inside the borders of the Jewish
state. And after Israel announced its
statehood, an impressive series of laws
legally assimilated huge tracts of Arab
land (whose proprietors had become
refugees, and were pronounced 'absentee
landlords' in order to expropriate their
lands and prevent their return under any
circumstances)."
Edward
Said, "The Question of
Palestine."
UN
partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and
an Arab state
"By
this time, November 1947, the United
States had emerged as the most aggressive
proponent of partition...The United States
got the General Assembly to delay a vote
'to gain time to bring certain Latin
American republics into line with its own
views.’ ...Some delegates charged U.S.
officials with 'diplomatic intimidation.'
Without 'terrific pressure' from the
United States on 'governments which cannot
afford to risk American reprisals,' said
an anonymous editorial writer, the
resolution 'would never have
passed.'"
John
Quigley, "Palestine and
Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
Was
partition fair to both Arabs and Jews?
"Arab
rejection was based on the fact that,while
the population of the Jewish state was to
be only half Jewish, with the Jews owning
less than 10% of the Jewish state land
area, However, the Jews were to be
established as the ruling body - a
settlement which no self-respecting people
would accept without protest, to say
the least. The action of the United
Nations conflicted with the basic
principles for which the world
organization was established, namely, to
uphold the right of all peoples to
self-determination. By denying the
Palestine Arabs, who formed the two-thirds
majority of the country, the right to
decide for themselves, the United Nations
had violated its own charter."
Sami
Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
Were
the Zionists prepared to settle for the
territory granted in the 1947 partition?
"While
the Yeshiva’s leadership formally
accepted the 1947 Partition Resolution,
large sections of Israel's society,
including...Ben-Gurion, were opposed to or
extremely unhappy with partition and from
early on viewed the war as an ideal
opportunity to expand the new state's
borders beyond the UN earmarked partition
boundaries and at the expense of the
Palestinians."
Israeli
historian, Benny Morris, in "Tikkun,”
March/April 1998.
"In
internal discussion in 1938 [David Ben-Gurion]
stated that 'after we become a strong
force, as a result of the creation of a
state, we shall abolish partition and
expand into the whole of Palestine'...In
1948, Menachem Begin declared that: 'the
partition of the Homeland is illegal. It
will never be recognized. The signature of
institutions and individuals of the
partition agreement is invalid. It will
not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was
and will forever be our capital. Eretz
Israel (the land
of Israel) will be restored to the people
of Israel, All of it. And forever." Noam
Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."
Ethnic
cleansing of the Arab population of
Palestine
"Joseph
Weitz was the director of the Jewish
National Land Fund...On December 19, 1940,
he wrote: 'It must be clear that there is
no room for both peoples in this
country...The Zionist enterprise so
far...has been fine and good in its own
time,
and could do with 'land buying' - but this
will not bring about the State of Israel;
that must come all at once, in the manner
of a Salvation (this is the secret of the
Messianic idea); and there is no way
besides transferring the Arabs from here
to
the neighboring countries, to transfer
them all; except maybe for Bethlehem,
Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not
leave a single village, not a single
tribe'... There were literally hundreds of
such statements made by Zionists."
Edward
Said, "The Question of
Palestine."
"Following
the outbreak of 1936, no mainstream
(Zionist) leader was able to
conceive of future coexistence without a
clear physical separation between the
two peoples - achievable only by transfer
and expulsion. Publicly they all continued
to speak of coexistence and to attribute
the violence to a small minority of
zealots and agitators. But this was merely
a public pose…Ben Gurion summed up:
'With compulsory transfer we (would) have
a vast area (for settlement)...I support
compulsory transfer. I don't see anything
immoral in it,'"
Israel
historian, Benny Morris, "Righteous
Victims."
"Ben-Gurion
clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to
remain in the Jewish State. He hoped to
see them flee. He said as much to his
colleagues and aides in meetings in
August, September and October [1948]. But
no [general] expulsion policy was
ever enunciated and Ben-Gurion always
refrained from issuing clear or written
expulsion orders; he preferred that his
generals 'understand' what he wanted done.
He wished to avoid going down in history
as the 'great expeller' and he did not
want the Israeli government to be
implicated in a morally questionable
policy...But while there was no 'expulsion
policy', the July and October [1948]
offensives were characterized by far more
expulsions and, indeed, brutality towards
Arab civilians than the first half of the
war." Benny Morris,
"The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949"
"Israeli
propaganda has largely relinquished the
claim that the Palestinian exodus
of 1948 was 'self-inspired'. Official
circles implicitly concede that the Arab
population fled as a result of Israeli
action - whether directly, as in the case
of Lydda and Ramleh, or indirectly, due to
the panic that and similar actions (the
Deir Yassin massacre) inspired in Arab
population centers throughout Palestine.
However, even though the historical record
has been grudgingly set straight, the
Israeli establishment still refused to
accept moral or political responsibility
for the refugee problem it- or its
predecessors - actively created." Peretz
Kidron, quoted in "Blaming the
Victims," ed. Said and Hitchens.
"The
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts
throughout 1948. The records, and
companion ones by a United States
monitoring unit, can be seen at the
British Museum. There was not a single
order or appeal, or suggestion about
evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab
radio station, inside or outside
Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated
monitored record of Arab appeals, even
flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine
to stay put."
Erskine
Childers, British researcher, quoted in
Sami Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
"That
Ben-Gurion's ultimate aim was to evacuate
as much of the Arab population
as possible from the Jewish state can
hardly be doubted, if only from the
variety
of means he employed to achieve his
purpose...most decisively, the destruction
of whole villages and the eviction of
their inhabitants...even [if] they had not
participated in the war and had stayed in
Israel hoping to live in peace and
equality, as promised in the Declaration
of Independence." Israeli author,
Simha Flapan, "The Birth of
Israel."
And
Most Telling of All….
“
Jewish villages were built in the place of
Arab villages. You do not even know the
names of these Arab villages, and I do not
blame you because geography books no
longer exist. Not only do the books not
exist; the Arab villages are not there
either. Nahlal arose in the place of
Manlul; and Kefer Gvet in the place of
Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of
Huneiflis: and Kefer Yehushu’a in the
place of Tal al Shuman. There is not a
single place build in this country that
did not have a former Arab Population.”
Moshe
Detain 4th April 1969 (In an
address to the Israel t of Technology,
Haifa. Reported in Ha’aretz 4th
April 1969
The
deliberate destruction of Arab villages to
prevent return of Palestinians
"During
May [1948] ideas about how to consolidate
and give permanence to the Palestinian
exile began to crystallize, and the
destruction of villages was
immediately perceived as a primary means
of achieving this aim...[Even earlier,] On
10 April, Haganah units took Abu Shusha...
The village was destroyed that night...
Jewish bulldozers leveled Khulda on 20
April... Abu Zureiq was completely
demolished... Al Mansi and An Naghnaghiya,
to the southeast, were also leveled . .
.By mid-1949, the majority of [the 350
depopulated Arab villages] were either
completely or partly in ruins and
uninhabitable." Benny
Morris, "The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
After the fighting was over,why didn't the Palestinians return to their homes?
"The
first UN General Assembly
resolution--Number 194- affirming the
right of Palestinians to return to their
homes and property, was passed on December
11, 1948. It has been re-passed no less
than twenty-eight times since that first
date. Whereas the moral and political
right of a person to return to his place
of uninterrupted residence is acknowledged
everywhere, Israel has negated the
possibility of return... [And]
systematically and juridically made it
impossible, on any grounds whatever, for
the Arab Palestinian to return, be
compensated for his property, or live in
Israel as a citizen equal before the law
with a Jewish Israeli."
Edward
Said, "The Question of
Palestine."
Is
there any justification for this
expropriation of land?
"The
fact that the Arabs fled in terror,
because of real fear of a repetition of
the 1948 Zionist massacres, is no reason
for denying them their homes, fields and
livelihoods. Civilians caught in an area
of military activity generally panic. But
they have always been able to return to
their homes when the danger subsides.
Military conquest does not abolish private
rights to property; nor does it entitle
the victor
to confiscate the homes, property, and
personal belongings of the noncombatant
civilian population. The seizure of Arab
property by the Israelis was an
outrage."
Sami
Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
How
about the negotiations after the 1948-1949
wars?
"[At
Lausanne,] Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the
Palestinians were trying to save by
negotiations what they had lost in the
war--a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Israel, however... [Preferred] tenuous
armistice agreements to a definite peace
that would involve territorial concessions
and the repatriation of even a token
number of refugees. The refusal to
recognize the Palestinians' right to
self-determination and statehood proved
over the years to be the main source of
the turbulence, violence, and bloodshed
that came to pass."
Israeli author, Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel."
Israel
admitted to UN but then reneged on the
conditions under which it was admitted
"The
[Lausanne] conference officially opened on
27 April 1949. On 12 May the
[UN's] Palestine Conciliation, Committee
reaped its only success when it induced
the parties to sign a joint protocol on
the framework for a comprehensive peace. .
Israel for the first time accepted the
principle of repatriation [of the Arab
refugees] and the internationalization of
Jerusalem . . .[but] they did so as a mere
exercise
in public relations aimed at strengthening
Israel's international image...Walter
Eytan, the head of the Israeli delegation,
[stated].’ My main purpose was to begin
to undermine the protocol of 12 May, which
we had signed only under duress of our
struggle for admission to the UN Refusal
to sign would...have immediately been
reported to the Secretary-General and the
various governments.'" Israeli
historian,
Ilan
Pappe, "The Making of the Arab-Israel
Conflict, 1947-1951."
Israeli
admission to the UN- continued
"The
Preamble of this resolution of admission
included a safeguarding clause as follows:
'Recalling its resolution of 29 November
1947 (on partition) and 11 December 1948
(on reparation and compensation), and
taking note of the declarations and
explanations made by the representative of
the Government of Israel before the ad hoc
Political Committee in respect of the
implementation of the said resolutions,
the General Assembly...decides to admit
Israel into membership in the United
Nations.'
"Here,
it must be observed, is a condition and an
undertaking to implement the resolutions
mentioned. There was no question of such
implementation being conditioned on the
conclusion of peace on Israeli terms as
the Israelis later claimed to justify
their non-compliance."
Sami
Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
What
was the fate of the Palestinians who had
now become refugees?
"The
winter of 1949, the first winter of exile
for more than seven hundred fifty thousand
Palestinians, was cold and hard...Families
huddled in caves, abandoned huts, or
makeshift tents...Many of the starving
were only miles away from their own
vegetable gardens and orchards in occupied
Palestine - the new state of Israel...At
the end of 1949 the United Nations finally
acted. It set up the United Nations Relief
and Works Administration (UNRWA) to take
over sixty refugee camps from voluntary
agencies. It managed to keep people alive,
but only barely."
"Our
Roots Are Still Alive" by The People
Press Palestine Book Project.
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