|
Published
by
Jews for Justice in the Middle East
As
the periodic bloodshed continues in the Middle
East, the search for an equitable solution must
come to grips with the root cause of the conflict.
The conventional wisdom is that, even if both
sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational
"terrorists" who have no point of view worth listening
to. Our position, however, is that the Palestinians
have a real grievance: their homeland for over
a thousand years was taken, without their consent
and mostly by force, during the creation of the
state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes - on
both sides - inevitably follow from this original
injustice.
This
paper outlines the history of Palestine to show
how this process occurred and what a moral solution
to the region's problems should consist of. If
you care about the people of the Middle East,
Jewish and Arab, you owe it to yourself to read
this account of the other side of the historical
record.
Introduction
The
standard Zionist position is that they showed
up in Palestine in the late 19th century to reclaim
their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and
started building up the Jewish community there.
They were met with increasingly violent opposition
from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming
from the Arabs' inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists
were then forced to defend themselves and, in
one form or another, this same situation continues
up to today.
The
problem with this explanation is that it is simply
not true, as the documentary evidence in this
booklet will show. What really happened was that
the Zionist movement, from the beginning, looked
forward to a practically complete dispossession
of the indigenous Arab population so that Israel
could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as
was possible. Land bought by the Jewish National
Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people
and could never be sold or even leased back to
Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).
The
Arab community, as it became increasingly aware
of the Zionists' intentions, strenuously opposed
further Jewish immigration and land buying because
it posed a real and imminent danger to the very
existence of Arab society in Palestine. Because
of this opposition, the entire Zionist project
never could have been realized without the military
backing of the British. The vast majority of the
population of Palestine, by the way, had been
Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200
years)
In
short, Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist
world view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants
didn't matter. The Arabs' opposition to Zionism
wasn't based on anti-Semitism but rather on a
totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of
their people.
One
further point: being Jewish ourselves, the position
we present here is critical of Zionism but is
in no way anti-Semitic. We do not believe that
the Jews acted worse than any other group might
have acted in their situation. The Zionists (who
were a distinct minority of the Jewish people
until after WWII) had an understandable desire
to establish a place where Jews could be masters
of their own fate, given the bleak history of
Jewish oppression. Especially as the danger to
European Jewry crystalized in the late 1930's
and after, the actions of the Zionists were propelled
by real desperation.
But
so were the actions of the Arabs. The mythic "land
without people for a people without land" was
already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919.
This is the root of the problem, as we shall see.
|
