Hi all - Interesting, informative, and constructive reading for anyone interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict
Third Edition
(Including Intifada 2000)
Published by Jews for Justice in the Middle East
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.
cactus48.com
The rest of the document is also quite informative and interesting. |
