Israel disappeared after Babylonian exile, but Judea was revived, and eventually fell into the hands of the Romans, where it was absorbed into the administrative district of Palestine. After an attempt to cast off Roman rule, the Second Temple was destroyed and the Jews were dispersed around the periphery of the Empire. This was a traumatic event in the history of the Jewish people, exceeded only by the Holocaust, and shaping their history. Your cavalier dismissal of their claim to an historical homeland is absurd.
Are you seriously suggesting that the modern world has the responsibility to rectify traumatic events that happened close to a thousand years ago? Are you suggesting that a modern territorial claim can be reasonably based on a transient tenure that occurred close to a thousand years ago, simply because the people involved still want to go back to that place? Are we supposed to seriously accept the notion that such a group’s claim to such a territory is stronger than that of the people who actually live there?
Is this sort of consideration limited to the Jews of the world, or shall we redraw the globe and restore everybody to what they had or claim to have had a thousand years ago. My folks left Cornwall close on 300 years back because people of their religious persuasion weren’t welcome there. Can I go back and stake a claim? Certainly the Native Americans could do a thing or two with such a precedent as well….
Somebody’s being absurd here, yes, but I don’t think it’s me. The whole idea of the “historic claim” – we had it once, and now we want it back – just doesn’t carry any weight any more. Can you imagine what a mess the world would be in if it did? The reality here is that any other attempt to reconstitute a nation that has not existed for nearly a thousand years would be greeted with universal and justified derision. The only reason this attempt was taken seriously is that the particular nation whose reconstitution was proposed occupied an important place in the prevailing mythological structure of the dominant nations of the day.
The only objection to righting that wrong is the harm done to contemporaries.
If by “contemporaries” you meant the people who actually lived in the land to which this supposed “historical claim” existed, that would be an objection, yes. It doesn’t seem to be an objection that occurred to too many of those making the “historic claim:.
The "Palestinians" never existed as a unique political or cultural entity. Their political aspirations were expressed in terms of pan- Arabism, primarily.
Are you trying to say that people aren’t people unless they are part of “a people”, or that individuals aren’t attached to the places where they live unless they are part of a unique political or cultural entity? We’re not talking about political aspirations, we’re talking about ordinary people suddenly discovering that the place where they live is going to be absorbed into a state controlled by foreign immigrants.
You try to focus on the initial hostility of Palestinians to Jewish settlement. But initially, there was not so much hostility, Arabs were glad to find buyers for their land, and often sold off very poor land, only to be shocked when the Zionists managed to irrigate and fertilize it, and make it workable. Jewish investment in Palestine generally made it more economically productive, and raised the living standard for everyone.
I’ve quoted these figures so many times that I’m surprised that you haven’t memorized them. Between 1900 and 1914 only 4.3% of the land acquired by the Zionists was owned by those who farmed it. The rest were composed of tenanted estates, generally owned by absentee landlords. The tenants, who traditionally had simply paid their rents to the new owners if the lands were sold, were evicted, with minimal compensation. One single sale in 1920 eliminated 22 villages; 8000 peasants were displaced with compensation of 3.5 Lebanese pounds per head. Do you think the immigrants “raised the living standard” for these people?
The displaced tenants did what displaced agricultural people always do: they moved to the nearest city and lived in the slums. They also formed the backbone of the anti-immigration riots.
Can you not see the causative chain here? Immigrants buy the estates and evict the tenants. Thousands of landless peasants accumulate in urban shantytowns. The slum dwellers, already not very happy about the state of affairs, learn that the immigrants intend to take over the country. Riots break out.
It’s worth noting that large-scale immigration always creates tension and very frequently causes violence between the immigrants and the local population. Asian immigration to Europe is in proportional terms not even close to what happened in Palestine, but you see German skinheads beating up Turks, and “paki bashing” evolving as a sport among working class British youths. Can you imagine how much worse it would be if the newcomers were arriving in numbers that threatened to make them a majority, if they were buying up land with money provided from unimaginably wealthy foreign sources, if they were declaring their intention to take over the country?
There is no point in trying to examine these phenomena through the lens of “political aspirations”. It’s not a question of political aspiration, economic factors, or any sequence of rational thought. It’s a product of simple territorial impulses. If you introduce a large enough number of newcomers to any populated area in a short enough period of time, there will always be tension between the newcomers and the existing population. There will often be violence. If the newcomers openly plan to take over, there will almost always be violence. This is simply human nature.
the British foreign office was more prone to support the Arab point of view than that of Jews? Remember, the British limited Jewish immigration out of Nazi Europe, and refused to allow the relocation of many displaced persons of Jewish descent to Palestine, at the behest of the Arab powers.
Why do you think this was the case. It certainly was not just at the behest of the Arab powers. Have you ever read any of the correspondence between British colonial officials in Palestine and the home office? Any of the reports of the various bodies that the colonial office sent to investigate the causes of the violence? The British officials on the spot were desperately trying to limit immigration, not because they were anti-Zionist or pro-Arab, but because they wanted to keep peace and they were convinced that more immigration would produce more violence. Their desire to keep the peace was not driven by sympathy for either side, but by simple concern for their own careers: there were few worse things that could happen to a colonial bureaucrat than to be stuch in charge of a colony that was being torn apart by riots.
No, the "Palestinians" were not having a "natural reaction" against colonialism, they were getting caught up in the fervor of pan- Arabism and the rise of Ba'athism.....
Where do you come up with this stuff? Have you ever looked at the reports written the Commissions of Inquiry led by Sir Thomas Haycraft in 1921, Sir Walter Shaw in 1929, or Sir John Hope-Simpson in 1930? All three conducted extensive, detailed investigations into the causes of the violence. Their reports are detailed, extensively referenced, and infinitely more credible than any secondary source material churned out by the winners or losers of subsequent conflicts, all of whom had enormous vested interests in distorting reality to suit their own particular agendas. None of the inquiries showed any sympathy with Arab violence, but all three concluded that the root cause of the violence was a reaction to Zionist immigration, settlement, and aspirations for sovereignty over the area. All three, particularly Hope-Simpson, recommended drastic curtailment of immigration. I suspect that these gentlemen knew some things that you don’t, and I suspect that the actions of the British government were as much a response to these reports as to the desires of the Arab powers. |
