November 19, 2004
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."
As you would expect the causes of the Palestinian transfer/ refugee problem are disputed.
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.
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It 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....