The emotional level here seems to be reaching a point beyond my comfort level, and I am tempted to let the whole thing drop. Nonetheless, there are points seldom made that are relevant here, so I will make them, and then let the whole thing drop.
The 1948 war was of course not the beginning of anything. If there was a beginning, it came in 1897, at the first Zionist Congress in Basle. The method the Zionists would use was made sufficiently clear in 1901, when Theodor Herzl presented a draft charter for the establishment of a Jewish-Ottoman Colonization Association to the Turkish authorities. The 3rd article of the proposed charter would have granted the Zionists the right to deport the native population.
At this time, there were around 24,000 Jews in Palestine, most of them aging men who had come to the holy land to end their days in religious contemplation.
We all know that between 1900 and 1948 some 600,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine. It is interesting to look at the method: histories often point out that the Zionists purchased virtually all of the land that they occupied. What is often not pointed out is that most of these purchases were made from absentee landlords, without the consent or often the knowledge of the peasant tenants that actually occupied the land. A good example was a single sale in 1920, in which the Sursock family, which was based in Europe and rarely if ever saw its estates in Palestine, sold holdings containing 22 villages and 8000 peasants to the Zionists. The tenants were expelled with derisory compensation (around 3.50 British pounds per head), and ended up in the growing urban shanty towns that held so many who had met the same fate. Is it any wonder that these people, the first wave of Palestinian refugees, rioted (the word "pogrom" is not quite appropriate, I think) against Jewish settlement in the mid 30's? Is it any wonder that they supported the enemy of their enemy?
Of course these sales were perfectly legal, in the strict sense. But imagine the perspective of the tenants. They would of course be accustomed to land changing hands; it would matter as little to them as the difference between being Turkish subjects and British subjects. They would simply pay their percentage to a different middleman. Until one day someone showed up, with police at their beck and call, with a piece of paper that gave them the right to expel the tenants.
Can you blame the tenants for being a bit perturbed? How many of the attacks against Jewish immigrants reported by Zionist historians were acts of resistance against eviction?
By calling the Zionists "legal immigrants" you seem to take the position that since the British were strong enough to take Palestine from the Turks, they had the right to do any damned thing they wanted with it, and if they chose - for their own purposes, and against the will and interests of the indigenous population - to settle a foreign population there the only rightful step the locals could take would be to dry up and blow away.
And of course the Palestinians rejected the partition plan. What else could they have done? It must have seemed the height of insanity to them. If someone bought your mortgage from the bank, seized your house by force, settled it with outsiders against your will, and then proposed to partition it between you and the settlers, how would you feel about it?
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Another quote to think about:
Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine?... They treat Arabs with hostility and cruelty, unscrupulously deprive them of their rights, insult them without cause, and even boast of such deeds; and none opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination"
That was written by Ahad Aham, a Jew and a Zionist... in 1891. |
