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Early
History of the Region
The British Mandate
Period 1920-1948
The UN Partition
of Palestine
Statehood
and Expulsion - 1948
The
1967 War and Israeli
Occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza
The History of Terrorism
in the Region
Jewish Criticism
of Zionism
Zionism and the Holocaust
General Considerations
Jewish Fundamentalism
in Israel
Intifada
2000 And
The "Peace Process"
Views Of The Future
Conclusion
I
For Jewish Readers
Conclusion
II |
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 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. |