For all its success since 1948, Israel is no nearer resolving its fundamental problem: what to do with and about the Palestinians. Though Jews can live a free life in Israel, they cannot escape the conditions of Israel's making.
Palestine was never a land without people. The making of Israel as a nation-state involved the unmaking of Palestine, given the residual Palestinian presence in the Jewish state.
So what was Zionism to do about the Palestinian presence inside Israel?
The logical solution was to population transfer of the Palestinians living inside Israel's borders to a space outside Israel's borders. However, the Palestinians had an attachment to the land inside Israel's borders, and did not welcome being relocated. Many Palestinians were transferred in 1948, often at the point of a gun, and they became Palestinian refugees shoved into the surrounding regions.
When the British mandate over Palestine expired in 1948 the Jews declared a state in accordance with the UN partition resolution of 1947 (to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in 1947) and the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq invaded Palestine. The war that ensued was won by Israel, creating a large number of Arab refugees.
In this article Benny Morris, the author of The Birth of The Palestinian Refugee Problem, says:
"Beside the emergence of the State of Israel, the other major result of the 1948 war was the destruction of the Palestinian society and the birth of the refugee problem. About 700,000 [Palestinian] Arabs --the figure was later to be a major point of dispute, the Israelis officially speaking of some 520,000, the Palestinian themselves of 900,000-1,000,000--fled or were ejected from the areas that became the Jewish State and resettled in the territories that became known as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon, with additional small communities in Egypt, Iraq, and the states of the Arabian Peninsula. The war's end found less than half of the Palestinians in their original homes--fewer then 150,000 in Israel, some 400,000 in the West Bank, and 60,000 in the Gaza Strip."
Although there was a "spontaneous" flight of Palestinians during the early stages of the 1948 war, there was also a brutal expulsion and deliberate harassment by the Israeli state. Zionism regarded transfer as a legitimate solution to the "Arab problem" in the newly formed Jewish state.
During the years after 1948 the refugees themselves rejected efforts to resettle them in the Arab states. They wanted to "go home," and the Arab states---save Jordan which gave them citizenship--- did little to absorb them, seeing in them and their misery a useful tool against Israel. Israel refused to allow them back, both because it needed the abandoned lands and houses for new immigrants and because it feared the refugees' potential for destabilization.-
And so the refugee problem has remained to plague the Middle East. And a Jewish state means just that. A state based on ethnicity. So Zionism is essentially Jewish nationalism maintained by violence.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 19, 2004 06:06 PM | TrackBackIt would be more correct to judge the zionism wether as ''Jewish nationalism maintained by violence '' or not,only through speculating the events that could have taken place in the region after had the 'Palestinians' accepted the UN partition plan and declared their own state...
What is quoted here as 'violence' is nothing than the outcome of a self defense reflex for surviving in front of millions who refused the two states solution and wishing 'to pour to Mediteranean Sea' a people in Exodus since thousands years before they got finally and legally their own sate....
Posted by: Vedat Mercek on November 20, 2004 08:49 AMVedat,
your account overlooks those non-Jews (Arabs) living inside the legal Jewish nation-state who owned land.
Hence the transfer problem.
What about the Palestinians in the occupied territories (West bank) In a no-war situation with an Arab state are not the conditions of life not being made bad so as to drive the Palestinians out?
It is made worse by the expansion of the boundaries of the Jewish nation state. Remember Zionism talks in terms of a Greater Israel, which is achieved through the expansionary drive of the settlements.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on November 22, 2004 05:25 PMWhen examining the history of Palestinian refugees, it is necessary to balance the experience of the Palestians with the experience the Jewish communities that had lived in Arab lands for centuries--lived there before the Arab invasion of the Middle East and Mediterranean lands at the end of the first millenium. With the withdrawal of the French and British that had replaced the vestiges of Ottoman empire, the Arab leaders of those lands embraced the ideology of the colonial powers' enemy, national socialism and anti-semitism. The leader of the Palestinians, the Mufti of Jerusalem, spent the war in Berlin, urging Palestinians to attack both the British and Jews. Many of the Jews excelled from their historic communities found a home in the Israeli lands recently evacuated by the Palestians. Why are the Palestians greater victims than the Jews? In terms of historical timelines, one can easily argue that Israel, and Zionism, is a reaction to European and Arab anti-semitism. Thus the root cause of the suffering of Palestinian people can be traced to the ideology of their leaders, from before the creation of Israel to the present day.
Although it is fine to argue over property rights (e.g. my Palestinian family owned a house in Haifa), one needs to also consider the property of the Jews expelled from Arab lands. Property rights are an issue within a civilized society. By embracing anti-semitism, the Arab groups opted out of civilization, and their demands that their property rights be respected ring hollow.
Posted by: on November 24, 2004 02:35 AM