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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (135910)	6/7/2004 1:35:34 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yes, Nadine. Wandering around looking for quotes, I found this, er, provocative account culled mostly from Ben Gurion's writings. I think the bald denial of the existence of Palestinian nationalism until 1948 or 1957 or whatever is somewhat dubious in light of this, or maybe the Ben Gurion quotes are all fabricated, who can say? Not that I'd claim this as an unbiased account, but there are two sides to every story, and I somewhat doubt the oft-asserted claims of absolute "truth" on one side that are a persistent feature around here. As the first popular response against the Balfour Declaration (in which Britain promised the Zionists to turn Palestine to a "Jewish National Home"), Palestinians organized their first commercial strike in 1922. Ben-Gurion acknowledged privately that a Palestinian national movement was evolving. He wrote in his diary: "The success of the [Palestinian] Arabs in organizing the closure of shops shows that we are dealing here with a national movement. For the [Palestinian] Arabs, this is an important education step." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 80) Similarly in 1929, he also wrote of the Palestinian political national movement: "It's true that the Arab national movement has no positive content. The leaders of the movement are unconcerned with betterment of the people and provision of their essential needs. They do not aid the fellah; to the contrary, the leaders suck his blood, and exploit the popular awakening for private gain. But we err if we measure the [Palestinian] Arabs and their movement by our standards. Every people is worthy of its national movement. The obvious characteristic of a political movement is that it knows how to mobilize the masses. From this prospective there is no doubt that we are facing a political movement, and we should not underestimate it." "A national movement mobilizes masses, and that is the main thing. The [Palestinian] Arab is not one of revival, and its moral value is dubious. But in a political sense, this is a national movement." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 83) When it was proposed that the Jews in Palestine organize an army and seize power in November 1929, Ben-Gurion offered these objections, first, "The world will not permit the Jewish people to seize the state as a spoil, by force." Second the Jewish people did not have the means to do so. And third and most important, it would be immoral, and the Jews of the world would never by this immoral cause. "We would then be unable to awaken the necessary forces for building the country among thousands of young people. We would not be able to secure necessary means from the Jewish people, and the moral and the political sustenance of the enlightened world. . . . Our conscience must be clean . . . and so we must endorse the premise in relation to the [Palestinian] Arabs: The [Palestinian] Arabs have full rights as citizens of the country, but they do not have the right of ownership over it." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 97) palestineremembered.com Granted, they had to insert "Palestinian" parenthetically all over the place here, but if you want to take that out, what was the alleged "Arab Nation" the native population aspired to? Were they visionary prophets of Nasser's '50s - era Pan-Arabism? Or did they just have normal aspirations to govern themselves? I know the official answer in advance, of course, but it seems, you know, disputable, under conventional logic anyway.