Statehood and Expulsion
1948
What
was the Arab reaction to the announcement of the creation of the state
of Israel?
"The armies of the Arab states entered the war immediately after the
State of Israel was founded in May. Fighting continued, almost all of it
within the territory assigned to the Palestinian state...About 700,000
Palestinians fled or were expelled in the 1948 conflict." Noam
Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."
Was
the part of Palestine assigned to a Jewish state in mortal danger from
the Arab armies?
"The Arab League hastily called for its member countries to send
regular army troops into Palestine. They were ordered to secure only the
sections of Palestine given to the Arabs under the partition plan. But
these regular armies were ill equipped and lacked any central command to
coordinate their efforts...[Jordan's King Abdullah] promised [the
Israelis and the British] that his troops, the Arab Legion, the only
real fighting force among the Arab armies, would avoid fighting with
Jewish settlements...Yet Western historians record this as the moment
when the young state of Israel fought off "the overwhelming hordes' of
five Arab countries. In reality, the Israeli offensive against the
Palestinians intensified." "Our Roots Are Still Alive," by the
Peoples Press Palestine Book Project.
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."
Ethnic cleansing - continued
"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."
Ethnic cleansing - continued
"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"
Didn't the Palestinians leave their homes voluntarily during the 1948
war?
"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.
Arab
orders to evacuate non-existent
"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."
Ethnic cleansing - continued
"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."
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... Khulda was leveled by Jewish
bulldozers 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 repassed 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 U.N. 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 U.N.- 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 Peoples Press Palestine
Book Project.
The
1967 War and the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Did
the Egyptians actually start the 1967 war, as Israel originally claimed?
"The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman,
regarded as a hawk, stated that there was 'no threat of destruction' but
that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so
that Israel could 'exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she
now embodies.'...Menahem Begin had the following remarks to make: 'In
June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in
the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack
us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.'"
Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."
Was
the 1967 war defensive? - continued
"I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The
Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew
it and we knew it." Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Chief of Staff in 1967,
in Le Monde, 2/28/68
Moshe
Dayan posthumously speaks out on the Golan Heights
"Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander
who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the
Golan...[said] many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately
provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government
to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the
farmland...[Dayan stated] 'They didn't even try to hide their greed for
the land...We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't
possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance
that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would
tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would
get annoyed and shoot.
And then we would use artillery and
later the air force also, and that's how it was...The Syrians, on the
fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.'" The New York
Times, May 11, 1997
The
history of Israeli expansionism
"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce
Transjordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We
shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries
of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no
external factor will be able to limit them." David Ben-Gurion, in
1936, quoted in Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."
Expansionism - continued
"The main danger which Israel, as a 'Jewish state', poses to its own
people, to other Jews and to its neighbors, is its ideologically
motivated pursuit of territorial expansion and the inevitable series of
wars resulting from this aim...No zionist politician has ever repudiated
Ben-Gurion's idea that Israeli policies must be based (within the limits
of practical considerations) on the restoration of Biblical borders as
the borders of the Jewish state." Israeli professor, Israel Shahak,
"Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3000 Years."
Expansionism - continued
In
Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett's personal diaries, there is an
excerpt from May of 1955 in which he quotes Moshe Dayan as follows:
"[Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument
with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension.
Toward this end it may, no - it must - invent dangers, and to do this it
must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge...And above all - let
us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally
get rid of our troubles and acquire our space." Quoted in Livia
Rokach, "Israel's Sacred Terrorism."
But
wasn't the occupation of Arab lands necessary to protect Israel's
security?
"Senator [J.William Fulbright] proposed
in 1970 that America should guarantee Israel's security in a formal
treaty, protecting her with armed forces if necessary. In return, Israel
would retire to the borders of 1967. The UN Security Council would
guarantee this arrangement, and thereby bring the Soviet Union - then a
supplier of arms and political aid to the Arabs - into compliance. As
Israeli troops were withdrawn from the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and
the West Bank they would be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. Israel
would agree to accept a certain number of Palestinians and the rest
would be settled in a Palestinian state outside Israel.
"The plan drew favorable editorial
support in the United States. The proposal, however, was flatly rejected
by Israel. 'The whole affair disgusted Fulbright,' writes [his
biographer Randall] Woods. 'The Israelis were not even willing to act in
their own self-interest.'" Allan Brownfield in "Issues of the
American Council for Judaism." Fall 1997.[Ed.-This was one of many such
proposals]
What
happened after the 1967 war ended?
"In violation of international law, Israel has confiscated over 52
percent of the land in the West Bank and 30 percent of the Gaza Strip
for military use or for settlement by Jewish civilians...From 1967 to
1982, Israel's military government demolished 1,338 Palestinian homes on
the West Bank. Over this period, more than 300,000 Palestinians were
detained without trial for various periods by Israeli security forces.
"Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation," ed.
Lockman and Beinin.
World
opinion on the legality of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza.
"Under the UN Charter there can lawfully be no territorial gains from
war, even by a state acting in self-defense. The response of other
states to Israel's occupation shows a virtually unanimous opinion that
even if Israel's action was defensive, its retention of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip was not...The [UN] General Assembly characterized
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a denial of self
determination and hence a 'serious and increasing threat to
international peace and security.' " John Quigley, "Palestine and
Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
Examples of the effects of Israeli occupation
"A study of students at Bethlehem
University reported by the Coordinating Committee of International NGOs
in Jerusalem showed that many families frequently go five days a week
without running water...The study goes further to report that, 'water
quotas restrict usage by Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza,
while Israeli settlers have almost unlimited amounts.'
"A summer trip to a Jewish settlement on
the edge of the Judean desert less than five miles from Bethlehem
confirmed this water inequity for us. While Bethlehemites were buying
water from tank trucks at highly inflated rates, the lawns were green in
the settlement. Sprinklers were going at mid day in the hot August
sunshine. Sounds of children swimming in the outdoor pool added to the
unreality." Betty Jane Bailey, in "The Link", December 1996.
Israeli occupation - continued
"You have to remember that 90 percent of children two years old or
more have experienced - some many, many times - the [Israeli] army
breaking into the home, beating relatives, destroying things. Many were
beaten themselves, had bones broken, were shot, tear gassed, or had
these things happen to siblings and neighbors...The emotional aspect of
the child is affected by the [lack of] security. He needs to feel safe.
We see the consequences later if he does not. In our research, we have
found that children who are exposed to trauma tend to be more extreme in
their behaviors and, later, in their political beliefs." Dr Samir
Quota, director of research for the Gaza Community Mental Health
Programme, quoted in "The Journal of Palestine Studies," Summer 1996,
p.84
Israeli occupation - continued
"There is nothing quite like the misery one feels listening to a
35-year-old [Palestinian] man who worked fifteen years as an illegal day
laborer in Israel in order to save up money to build a house for his
family only to be shocked one day upon returning from work to find that
the house and all that was in it had been flattened by an Israeli
bulldozer. When I asked why this was done - the land, after all, was his
- I was told that a paper given to him the next day by an Israeli
soldier stated that he had built the structure without a license. Where
else in the world are people required to have a license (always denied
them) to build on their own property? Jews can build, but never
Palestinians. This is apartheid." Edward Said, in "The Nation", May
4, 1998.
All
Jewish settlements in territories occupied in the 1967 war are a direct
violation of the Geneva Conventions, which Israel has signed.
"The Geneva Convention requires an occupying power to change the
existing order as little as possible during its tenure. One aspect of
this obligation is that it must leave the territory to the people it
finds there. It may not bring its own people to populate the territory.
This prohibition is found in the convention's Article 49, which states,
'The occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own
civilian population into the territory it occupies.'" John Quigley,
"Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
Excerpts from the U.S. State Department's reports during the Intifada
"Following are some excerpts from the
U.S. State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from
1988 to 1991:
1988: 'Many avoidable deaths and
injuries' were caused because Israeli soldiers frequently used gunfire
in situations that did not present mortal danger to troops...IDF troops
used clubs to break limbs and beat Palestinians who were not directly
involved in disturbances or resisting arrest..At least thirteen
Palestinians have been reported to have died from beatings...'
1989: Human rights groups charged that
the plainclothes security personnel acted as death squads who killed
Palestinian activists without warning, after they had surrendered, or
after they had been subdued...
1991: [The report] added that the human
rights groups had published 'detailed credible reports of torture, abuse
and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in prisons and detention
centers." Former Congressman Paul Findley, "Deliberate Deceptions."
Jerusalem - Eternal, Indivisible Capital of Israel?
"Writing in The Jerusalem Report (Feb.
28, 2000), Leslie Susser points out that the current boundaries were
drawn after the Six-Day War. Responsibility for drawing those lines fell
to Central Command Chief Rehavan Ze'evi. The line he drew 'took in not
only the five square kilometers of Arab East Jerusalem - but also 65
square kilometers of surrounding open country and villages, most of
which never had any municipal link to Jerusalem. Overnight they became
part of Israel's eternal and indivisible capital.'" Allan Brownfield
in The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, May 2000.
The History of Terrorism in the Region
Editor's Note: We believe that the killing of innocent people is
wrong, in all cases. Thus, we cannot condone the use of terrorism by
some extreme Palestinian groups, especially prevalent during the 1970s.
That being said, however, it is necessary to examine the context in
which such incidents occurred.
We
hear lots about Palestinian terrorism. How about the Israeli record?
"The record of Israeli terrorism goes back to the origins of the
state - indeed, long before - including the massacre of 250 civilians
and brutal expulsion of seventy thousand others from Lydda and Ramle in
July 1948; the massacre of hundreds of others at the undefended village
of Doueimah near Hebron in October 1948;...the slaughters in Quibya,
Kafr Kassem, and a string of other assassinated villages; the expulsion
of thousands of Bedouins from the demilitarized zones shortly after the
1948 war and thousands more from northeastern Sinai in the early 1970's,
their villages destroyed, to open the region for Jewish settlement; and
on, and on." Noam Chomsky, "Blaming The Victims," ed. Said and
Hitchens.
Terrorism - continued
"However much one laments and even
wishes somehow to atone for the loss of life and suffering visited upon
innocents because of Palestinian violence, there is still the need, I
think, also to say that no national movement has been so unfairly
penalized, defamed, and subjected to disproportionate retaliation for
its sins as has the Palestinian.
The Israeli policy of punitive
counterattacks (or state terrorism) seems to be to try to kill anywhere
from 50 to 100 Arabs for every Jewish fatality. The devastation of
Lebanese refugee camps, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and
orphanages; the summary arrests, deportations, house destructions,
maimings, and torture of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza..these,
and the number of Palestinian fatalities, the scale of material loss,
the physical, political and psychological deprivations, have
tremendously exceeded the damage done by Palestinians to Israelis."
Edward Said, "The Question of Palestine."
"It is simply extraordinary and without
precedent that Israel's history, its record - from the fact that it..is
a state built on conquest, that it has invaded surrounding countries,
bombed and destroyed at will, to the fact that it currently occupies
Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian territory against international law -
is simply never cited, never subjected to scrutiny in the U.S. media or
in official discourse...never addressed as playing any role at all in
provoking 'Islamic terror.'" Edward Said in "The Progressive." May
30, 1996.
Jewish Criticism of Zionism
"Albert
Einstein - 'I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs
on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish
State. Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the
essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish State, with
borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest.
I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain'...
"Professor Erich Fromm, a noted Jewish
writer and thinker, [stated]...'In general international law, the
principle holds true that no citizen loses his property or his rights of
citizenship; and the citizenship right is de facto a right to
which the Arabs in Israel have much more legitimacy than the Jews. Just
because the Arabs fled? Since when is that punishable by confiscation of
property, and by being barred from returning to the land on which a
people's forefathers have lived for generations? Thus, the claim of the
Jews to the land of Israel cannot be a realistic claim. If all nations
would suddenly claim territory in which their forefathers had lived two
thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse...I believe that,
politically speaking, there is only one solution for Israel, namely, the
unilateral acknowledgement of the obligation of the State towards the
Arabs - not to use it as a bargaining point, but to acknowledge the
complete moral obligation of the Israeli State to its former inhabitants
of Palestine'...
"Nathan Chofshi - 'Only an internal
revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous
sickness of causeless hatred...It is bound to bring complete ruin upon
us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was
our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we
have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have
inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose
gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we
robbed we put up houses of education, charity, and prayer, while we
babble and rave about being the "People of the Book" and the "light of
the nations"'...
"In an article published in the
Washington Post of 3 October 1978, Rabbi Hirsch (of Jerusalem) is
reported to have declared: 'The 12th principle of our faith, I believe,
is that the Messiah will gather the Jewish exiled who are dispersed
throughout the nations of the world. Zionism is diametrically opposed to
Judaism. Zionism wishes to define the Jewish people as a nationalistic
entity. The Zionists say, in effect, 'Look here, God. We do not like
exile. Take us back, and if you don't, we'll just roll up our sleeves
and take ourselves back.' 'The Rabbi continues: 'This, of course, is
heresy. The Jewish people are charged by Divine oath not to force
themselves back to the Holy Land against the wishes of those residing
there.'" Sami Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest."
Jewish Criticism - continued
"A Jewish Home in Palestine built up on bayonets and oppression [is]
not worth having, even though it succeed, whereas the very attempt to
build it up peacefully, cooperatively, with understanding, education,
and good will, [is] worth a great deal even though the attempt should
fail." Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, first president of the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, quoted in "Like All The Nations?", ed. Brinner
& Rischin.
Martin
Buber on what Zionism should have been
"The first fact is that at the time when
we entered into an alliance (an alliance, I admit, that was not well
defined) with a European state and we provided that state with a claim
to rule over Palestine, we made no attempt to reach an agreement with
the Arabs of this land regarding the basis and conditions for the
continuation of Jewish settlement.
This negative approach caused those
Arabs who thought about and were concerned about the future of their
people to see us increasingly not as a group which desired to live in
cooperation with their people but as something in the nature of
uninvited guests and agents of foreign interests (at the time I
explicitly pointed out this fact).
"The second fact is that we took hold of
the key economic positions in the country without compensating the Arab
population, that is to say without allowing their capital and their
labor a share in our economic activity. Paying the large landowners for
purchases made or paying compensation to tenants on the land is not the
same as compensating a people. As a result, many of the more thoughtful
Arabs viewed the advance of Jewish settlement as a kind of plot designed
to dispossess future generations of their people of the land necessary
for their existence and development. Only by means of a comprehensive
and vigorous economic policy aimed at organizing and developing common
interests would it have been possible to contend with this view and its
inevitable consequences. This we did not do.
"The third fact is that when a
possibility arose that the Mandate would soon be terminated, not only
did we not propose to the Arab population of the country that a joint
Jewish Arab administration be set up in its place, we went ahead and
demanded rule over the whole country (the Biltmore program) as a fitting
political sequel to the gains we had already made. By this step, we with
our own hands provided our enemies in the Arab camp with aid and comfort
of the most valuable sort - the support of public opinion - without
which the military attack launched against us would not have been
possible. For it now appears to the Arab populace that in carrying on
the activities we have been engaged in for years, in acquiring land and
in working and developing the land, we were systematically laying the
ground work for gaining control of the whole country." Martin Buber,
quoted in "A Land of Two Peoples" ed. Mendes-Flohr
Israel's new historians now refute myths of the founding of the state
"Since the 1980's,.....Israeli scholars
[have] concurred with their Palestinian counterparts that Zionism
was...carried out as a pure colonialist act against the local
population: a mixture of exploitation and expropriation...
"They were motivated to present a
revisionist point of view to a large extent by the declassification of
relevant archival material in Israel, Britain and the United States.
[For example,]...
Challenging the Myth of Annihilation -
The new historiographical picture is a fundamental challenge to the
official history that says the Jewish community faced possible
annihilation on the eve of the 1948 war. Archival documents expose a
fragmented Arab world wrought by dismay and confusion and a Palestinian
community that possessed no military ability with which to frighten the
Jews...
Israel's responsibility for Refugees -
The Jewish military advantage was translated into an act of mass
expulsion of more than half of the Palestinian population. The Israeli
forces, apart from rare exceptions, expelled the Palestinians from every
village and town they occupied. In some cases, this expulsion was
accompanied by massacres [of civilians] as was the case in Lydda, Ramleh,
Dawimiyya, Sa'sa, Ein Zietun and other places. Expulsion also was
accompanied by rape, looting and confiscation [of Palestinian land and
property]...
The Myth of Arab Intransigence - [The
U.N.] convened a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland in the spring
of 1949. Before the conference, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a
resolution that in effect replaced the November 1947 partition
resolution. This new resolution, Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948,
accepted [U.N. Mediator] Bernadotte's triangular basis for a
comprehensive peace: an unconditional return of all the refugees to
their homes, the internationalization of Jerusalem, and the partitioning
of Palestine into two states. This time, several Arab states and various
representatives of the Palestinians accepted this as a basis for
negotiations, as did the United States, which was running the show at
Lausanne...Prime Minister David Ben Gurion strongly opposed any peace
negotiations along these lines...The only reason he was willing to allow
Israel to participate in the peace conference was his fear of an angry
American reaction...The road to peace was not taken due to Israeli, not
Arab, intransigence.
Conclusions - The new Israeli
historians...wish to rectify what their research reveals as past
evils...There was a high price exacted in creating a Jewish state in
Palestine. And there were victims, the plight of whom still fuels the
fire of conflict in Palestine." Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe in
"The Link", January, 1998.
"It
is no longer my country"
"For me, this business called the state of Israel is finished...I
can't bear to see it anymore, the injustice that is done to the Arabs,
to the Bedouins. All kinds of scum coming from America and as soon as
they get off the plane taking over lands in the territories and claiming
it for their own...I can't do anything to change it. I can only go away
and let the whole lot go to hell without me." Israeli actress (and
household name) Rivka Mitchell, quoted in Israeli peace movement
periodical, "The Other Israel", August 1998.
The
effect of Zionism on American Jews.
"The corruption of Judaism, as a
religion of universal values, through its politicization by Zionism and
by the replacement of dedication to Israel for dedication to God and the
moral law, is what has alienated so many young Americans who, searching
for spiritual meaning in life, have found little in the organized Jewish
community." Allan Brownfield, "Issues of the American Council for
Judaism", Spring 1997.
-The
Palestine-Israel Conflict-
The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict
Founding the State of Israel and Expelling the
Natives
Zionism and the Holocaust
Jewish Fundamentalism and the Intifada
The Future and Conclusions
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