Liberally Biased : The 60th anniversary of Al Nakba
Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008
This week marked the 60 th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel. For many it is an occasion for celebration, but not for all. For Palestinians it is known as Al Nakba, which means "the catastrophe. "It is not surprising that winners and losers perceive things very differently. What is interesting, if not surprising, is that Americans are so well versed in only the Israeli side of the story. It is a symptom of our appalling ignorance of history and needs to be rectified.
Arabs and Jews have lived together side by side in what is now Israel and the West Bank for centuries. As Bible readers know, Jews established a unified Kingdom of Israel around 1000 BCE. It only lasted a little more than 70 years until it split into Israel and Judah. Israel was destroyed around 722 BCE, and Judah in 586 BCE. That is the extent of any nonreligious Jewish historical claim to the region. Jews were subsequently scattered throughout the region and would remain a minority in Palestine until the 20 th century. Numerous empires conquered and lost Palestine over the next thousand years or so until Arabs conquered it in the seventh century CE. They dominated the region until 1517, when the Ottoman Turks conquered and ruled it - until 1918 when Europeans carved up the Ottoman Empire for themselves, creating the Middle East as we know it today.
It was then that our modern troubles largely began. The 19 th century saw the rise of nationalism around the world. This was true, too, of Jews and Arabs. A form of Jewish nationalism, Zionism, gained strength in the late 1800 s. Zionists argued, understandably amid virulent European anti-Semitism, that Jews would never be safe until they had a homeland of their own. Originally there was much disagreement about where this homeland should be. Perhaps inevitably, Zionists concluded that it should be where the last unified Jewish state was thousands of years ago. The problem was that Jews accounted for less than 10 percent of the population of Palestine. What would happen to the Arab majority that had lived in Palestine for more than 1, 000 years and also wanted sovereignty ?
As Jews began flooding into Palestine at the turn of the 20 th century talking about how they were going to build a new home there, the Arab majority, quite understandably, reacted poorly. Violence between the two sides became commonplace. This turf war is the problem that still confronts us today.
During World War I, in an effort to elicit support for their war effort against the Ottomans and Germans, the British made two contradictory promises, neither of which they were too sincere about keeping. In the Balfour Declaration, they promised Jews a homeland in Palestine sometime after the war, and in the Husayn-McMahon letters, they vaguely promised an independent Arab State. Actually, Britain wanted to keep the region under its control. So for the next 30 years, Britain tried to contain and control both sides.
By the 1940 s, as thousands of Jews fled Nazi-dominated Europe and the holocaust, it appeared to many Zionists that Britain was backing out on its promise of a Jewish homeland. Thus began a systematic Jewish terrorist campaign against the British. It worked wonderfully, and Palestinians learned this lesson well. By 1947, amid a flood of Jewish European refugees and with violence on all sides, the British had had enough and turned the matter over to the United Nations, which voted that year to partition Palestine in two. Palestinians rejected partition and urged one unified country where both Arab and Jewish rights were protected. Why did they reject partition ? Because the U. N. plan gave 57 percent of Palestine, including the most fertile land, to a Jewish minority that only comprised 33 percent of the population.
Fighting escalated dramatically after the U. N. vote. Contrary to myth, the Jews were better organized, armed, trained and led than the Arabs. Atrocities were committed by both sides, and a concerted Jewish campaign of terror produced a wave of Arab refugees fleeing Jewish-controlled lands. To this day, those refugees constitute the largest refugee population on Earth. More than 400 Arab villages were destroyed. Israel proclaimed its independence in May 1948, constituting 77 percent of Palestine - Jordan and Egypt occupied the rest. Today, Israel illegally occupies all of it and continues to build illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Palestinians never received their own country and still don't have one. Thus, for them, 1948 was truly a catastrophe. Americans must learn this side of the story if they are ever to understand the continuing violence there. Our lopsided support for Israel, especially its illegal occupation of the West Bank, explains much of the resentment toward us in the region.
• • • Tony Red writes a column for The Benton County Daily Record. He can be reached at tred 22 @ cox. net, or write to him in care of this newspaper.
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