January, 2009
While both Israel and the Palestinian Arabs together with a host of interested 3rd parties have vied for a solution to the "Palestinian Problem", is it possible that not only are the wrong questions are being asked but that there may not be a solution at all?
The "solution", if it may be called that, may have occurred decades ago when the Palestinian Arabs lost what amounted to a civil war against the Palestinian Jews together with various military defeats by Jordan, Syria and Egypt at the hands of Israel. Let me explore commonly held ideas about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs as opposed to facts on the ground.
"Israel are the occupiers of Palestinian Arab lands." Is this really the case? The Palestinian Arabs entered into a civil war with Jewish Palestinians over land they shared in the final months of the British Mandate in 1947-48 with their eyes wide open. The Palestinian Arabs, who rejected the United Nations proposal for a 2 state solution, outnumbered the Jews 2 to 1 and furthermore were counting on the aid of their muslim neighbors, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt who were hostile to the Palestinian Jews. The Palestinian Arabs had every hope of expecting to win a civil war with the Jews; they, I think, felt they were rolling dice that were decidedly in their favor.
Even if you mostly agree with Ilan Pappe in his, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", one should keep in mind that there are 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs living in Israel today. Also, the notion of 400,000 to 600,000Jewish Palestinians simply and easily pushing 800,000 to 1.3 million Arab Palestinians who had the backing of Arab nations, off their land by snapping their fingers and further keeping in mind that this was during a civil war for survival is important to note. Israelis are not all die-hard Zionists, there are many who disagree with any plan to push Palestinian Arabs off their land.
It seems a bit late to argue that the Jews were wrong to come to a land in the first half of the 20th century that had only a small Jewish population and set their sights on a wholly Jewish state. To whatever extent Zionist's were able to succeed it was surely made easier by bitter strife beween Muslim and Jew and the resultant civil war between the 2 sides. The notion that Jews had no right to immigrate to Palestine then supports the notion that Europeans have the right to deny emmigration to expel muslim populations throughout Europe as I state elsewhere. One cannot have it both ways. The Palestinian Arabs willlingly engaged in the civil was against the Jews in 1947-8 and without the war the Zionist's would never have succeeded in any plan to seize Arab lands. In a war in which victory by either side was by no means certain, these plans to ethincally cleanse Palestinian Arabs are so many words on paper and no more. I'm sure there was enough hatred and plans on boths sides to go around.
The only thing I don't like about the tenor of Pappe's book is that it ignores the nature of the civil war as a battle for survival and it is important to remember that in battles fought between Arab nations and Israel the intent and declarations on the part of the Arabs was for the destruction of Israel. This is not an unimportant consideration. Laws and the niceties of laws go out the window when one is fighting a war for one's very survival. United Nations declarations seem foolish in this context. Only after the military option had once and for all been taken away from the Palestinian Arabs in 1973 with the defeat of the final Arab armies attempt to invade Israel did laws suddenly begin to look good to those opposed to Israel.
Say what you want about laws and land but in history it has frequently been armies that have decided what is what and laws seem to be almost an afterthought.
In a review of Ilan Pappe's book, Stephan Lendman writes about the present day Arab population in Israel: "They're targeted for extra-judicial assassination and indiscriminate killing; taxed punitively and denied basic services essential to life and well-being including health care, education, employment and even enough food and water at the whim of Israeli authorities in a deliberate effort to destroy their will to resist and eliminate those who won't by expulsion or extermination. Palestinians have no power to end these appalling abuses and crimes against humanity or receive any redress for them in Israeli, the West or through the International Criminal Court Israel ignores when it rules against its interests."
In rejecting a 2 state solution, the Palestinian Arabs obviously had no intention of sharing Palestine with the Jews; if the Palestinian Arabs got the upper hand, the Palestinian Jews could expect at best to continue to live in Palestine as 2nd class citizens and at worst, expect to be forcebly expelled from Palestine altogether. In the military conflicts that occurred between Muslims and Jews from 1947 to 1967, the present state of affairs were largely decided. Palestinian Arabs had rolled the dice and lost. It is hard to expect the Jews to go back to the state of affairs before the conflicts started in earnest in 1947-48 considering the fate they themselves would have suffered had the Palestinian Arabs won.
I do not disagree with the idea that the Palestinian Arabs are suffering under Israeli rule but it is not and has not been happening in a vacuum of preceding events. Where I disagree is how we came to be there. Let's not talk about this issue as if European Jews descended on Palestine in the 1920's and 30's with overwhelming military force, numbers and money and stole the land from the Arabs living there. It is a much more complicated story and I take issue with writers who minimize certain events in order to make their own argument more palatable.
What Pappe fails to put into it's proper context is the idea that the Palestinian Arabs, had they been the winners of the civil war, would almost certainly have done to the Jews what the Jews did to them and that is a far, far different ordering of events.
There was much terrorist violence on both sides before the civil war and both sides are guilty of re-writing history to suit themselves.
The crux of the entire issue as I see it is not the history but the reality of where Palestinian Arabs and Israeli's now find themselves. However they got there it is the reality of the relationship between the two that must now be addressed. That relationship is one where Israel holds all the cards and any further type of violence on the part of the Palestinian Arabs is not only futile but counter productive. Like it or not the Palestinian Arabs must come to see that organizations like Hamas stand between them and their dream of a land they can call their own every bit as much as does Israel.
Even if you accept the idea that that the Jewish State of Israel was created in an illegitmate and illegal manner, Israeli Jews are not going back to Europe any time soon. What good does it do to cite the Zionist's from 100 years ago telling their followers that Palestine was an "empty land" ripe for the Jews to return to? How can one move forward with that bit of information? I would point out that there is a distinct difference between ethnic cleansing and and the successful prosecution of a war over land, a civil war in which the Arab Palestinians were involved in every bit as much as the Jews. To present evidence of Arab Palestinians being pushed off their land without presenting it in the context of a violent civil war whose outcome was far from certain is a form of outright lying.
Palestinian Arabs must study what happened to the Germans and Japanese after World War II and the South at the end of the American Civil War and take what lessons from this they can. One thing is certain, they are negotiating with no power and must act accordingly. Bigotry, violence and violent slogans, disinformation have and will continue to accomplish nothing. The Palestinian Arabs must operate from a realization of their true position in this relationship. They should also throw into this mix the successful strategems of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Mass civil disobedience with an empasis on the backing of international law will add a credibility to the plight of Palestinian Arabs Israel and the international community would find hard to resist.
One often hears it said that Israel are occupiers but the present Palestinian Arabs are free to emigrate should they wish and it is easy to believe that any "land rights" muslims held within Palestine were abrogated when they chose, freely, to enter into a series of military conflicts against the Jews; to me this is not a legal issue but a matter of war which is death and chaos. Again, this is keeping in mind the fate of the Palestinian Jews had fate gone against them. Naturally the Palestinian Arabs wish to have the matter of Arab lands become a legal matter now that the guns have been forcebly removed from their hands. Had the Jews lost and even been allowed to stay in Palestine I'm sure they would have pursued the issue in much the same manner.
What rights does a vanquished foe have who freely enters into a military conflict; the right to re-set the clock? Of course we all wish we would not be held responsible in life when we gamble and lose but this is not the real world. It seems to be that the Palestinian Arabs should be held accountable for their own role in the series of events in the last 60 years. Fate has not been kind to the Palestinian Arabs but it has not necessarily been unfair; they took their shot and they lost, they pursued an unwise course and paid the price.
Now, you hear Palestinian Arabs claim the whole affair started when Jews started to come back to Palestine little by little in the 19th and early 20th century, culminating in a flood of immigrants fleeing post-World War II Europe. In terms of rising tensions and conflict this is true as far as it goes.
However, there had always been a Jewish presence in historical times in the area known as Palestine and furthermore, the Jewish and Christian religions had entirely pre-dated Islam in Palestine by several hundred years. If the ethnic Palestinians in turn pre-date a Jewish presence in turn by 1,000 or 2,000 years that is not the point; the point is that Jews have also been there a long time. The claim by muslims that Palestine had been "invaded" by European Jews who had no claims to be in Palestine seem to be without any merit whatsoever. The whole idea brings into question, ironically, the idea as to whether muslim populations, who have inundated Europe, have themselves any "right" to exist in those lands. When it comes to a question of a "historical presence", muslims have absolutely none in Europe yet are vociferous when it comes to the question of their right to be there. One increasingly gets the feeling that when it comes to muslims, what is considered true and right is whatever is convenient to hand at the time to advance their cause. I have not found "fair play" to be a cherished idea in my encounters with muslim rhetoric when it comes to muslims and the West, or muslims and Israel.
On the question of the right of Jews to immigrate to Palestine, muslim views of the subject seem to be somewhat hypocritical to say the least. Of course there was the question and fear of European Jews arriving in Palestine in the early 20th century and"taking over", with a 1st world sophistication and the buying of land putting the Palestinian Arabs at a disadvantage in a land they considered their own.
This is not an unknown consideration in recent or ancient history. When I was in Malaysia for some weeks in 1986 I learned of a law which went by the term "bhumipatra". The gist of the law was that those of Chinese or Indian descent had to have a Malaysian partner before they could start certain types of businesses. Ethnic Malaysians comprised, I believe, some roughly 75% of the population and Chinese, 25%. The concern on the part of ethnic Malaysians was that, for cultural reasons, the Chinese Malaysians were much more aggresive and ambitious in certain business matters and there was a fear among muslim Malaysians that the ethnic Chinese and Indians would come to have an unwanted hegemony despite their fewer numbers. The bottom line is that there were economic advantages put in place aimed at keeping Indian and Chinese minorities in check towards which there was no little resentment felt among these 2 groups.
Nevertheless, the Palestinian Arabs had a choice of living in peace with their Jewish neighbors or throwing the dice in a military confrontation which they subsequently lost. The Palestinian obssession with them being the sole proprieters of the former Palestine despite other ethnic groups besides Arabs and Jews and with a 2,000 year old history of many ethnic groups comings and goings has attained the status of an urban myth.
In regards to Palestinian refugee camps, Gazan Arabs have gone so far as to not allow refugees to accept permanent housing in Gaza, preferring instead to keep refugees in a never-never land where the only and unlikely option is a return of these refugees to "their land" in Palestine, thereby keeping alive the flames of a war already several times lost while some of these refugees wish only to reluctantly accept the de facto loss of their homes and land and to get on with their lives.
I think many of us can understand the mystical attachment that people can have for a land but when that attachment is exaggerated in pursuit of an agenda and of dubious heritage in the first place one can only feel for those generations of refugees who not only have lost their land and homes but continue to be cynically used as pawns in a hopeless cause. Many times in history great migrations have occurred, sometimes as a result of military force, sometimes reluctantly done for economic reasons but life goes on, whether you will it or no. Many Palestinian Arabs dispossessed of their land have come, however unwillingly, to pragmatically accept this loss and the politically motivated idea that these people can never again have productive lives unless they have this exact piece of property rises to the level of childish stuborness. I am not claiming that this acceptance is in any way easy but I am claiming that it is necessary because it is reality.
The Aztecs and Incans will never again have their lands and cultures, the glory that was once Constantinople will never be again, the Jewish enclaves of North Africa are dead and gone, the wonderful medieval muslim city of Granada is only a memory. I could go on and on with lists too long to read and the list would be almost entirely the result of military adventurism. The fact of the matter is that in war there are winners and losers; this is not rhetoric or a philosophy, it is a reality that some are forced to accept or the bitterness and suffering will go on and on.
During the December, 2008-January, 2009 invasion into Gaza by Israel in response to Hamas rocket attacks into Israel, I was amazed by the tenor of the anti-Israeli protests held in various locations around the world. In Florida during a protest, a young muslim woman shouts for Jews to "go back to the ovens". I saw this video on a news broadcast and it is currently on Youtube. I was also surprised at how little anti-Israeli protesters knew about the history of the conflict and how Israel had come to be unfairly demonized.
Of course no one wants to see children and civilians in Gaza killed but the truth is that they are all civilians in the traditional sense of an army in uniform. I'm sure many of the protesters around the world simply felt compassion for the civilian deaths in Gaza or were people whose hearts were in the right place but simply were misinformed as to the historical facts about the 60 year de facto civil war in Israel.
I personally have no bone to pick either with muslims or Jews in the region or anywhere else; I grew up in an area of the United States where such things were not an issue one way or another. I grew up with admiration for both Jewish culture and history in certain realms and for Islamic culture and history in others.
I have no admiration for people and cultures who try and re-write history in such a way as to minimize their own role and guilt in military conflicts. Japanese school history text books remain strangely silent on the Empire of Japan's activities on the Asian mainland from 1933 to 1945 to the fury of the Chinese. Among some Japanese, attitudes about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are strangely defiant as if they themselves had no role to play in bringing about such destruction on themselves or no role in bringing about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in what the Japanese blithely called, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a term that could have come straight out of George Orwell's "1984"
I'm trying to imagine how it would be if American historians were as fond of distorting their own history as are muslims when it comes to the decades long conflict between Israel and Arabs. In listening to muslim sources, one could easily be led to believe that every Israeli military action is totally unprovoked and that they delight in oppressing Arabs for the sheer fun of it.
One cannot help but think that the Gazans re-write history as it is being made. In their Jan.20, 2009 online edition, in an article that speaks to the cost of rebuilding damaged infrastructure in the wake of the then planned Israeli withdrawal, the BBC credit their correspondent on the scene, Aleem Maqbool, with saying, "Many are angry and feel that the world did not do enough when it mattered to stop the violence..." If one cannot get a clear view of what is happening at the time it occurs then what chance is their for the history books. No mention of Hamas in this context of responsibility. If the Gazans accept the idea that someone should do something to stop the violence, where is the responsibilty of the Gazans themselves for preventing the violence and for having voted Hamas into power in the first place. The rest of the world doesn't live in Gaza and a good first step for preventing the violence that has occurred in Gaza for the last 3 weeks is to stop shooting rockets into Israel and stop supporting those that do. The whole thing smacks of sheer idiocy and delusion, Gazan rhetoric which addresses not at all why the Israelis invaded in the first place.
The article quotes an unnamed Hamas leader as saying that the Israeli withdrawal was a "'great victory' over Israel". That type of foolish rhetoric, without even a nod towards the reality of the situation encapsulates the delusional thinking that has proved such a disaster for Palestinian Arabs and neatly sums up 60 years of "great" victories.
Something should be said in this context about Israel's aims in invading Gaza and also about Israel's so-called failure in invading Lebanon in 2006 because I do not believe Israel failed in Lebanon. I believe that in both instances, since there was no standing army to fight as in 1967 and 1973, that Israel's aims were two-fold. The first was to attack such military positions and high ranking individuals as the Israeli intelligence services were able to locate. Second was to damage civilian infrastructure with a two fold aim to at once punish civilians who allowed anit-Israeli military units to operate amongst them and to turn those civilians against those groups if possible, hoping that the responsibility for civilian deaths and wrecked infrastructure would be laid at the door of such groups as Hezbollah and Hamas.
In the Beirut based online edition of Dar Al-Hayat for Jan.19, 2009, a Jameel Theyabi mentions, "...the terrorist Israeli war machine murders the innocent children indifferently." How would the rockets Hamas fired into Israel differ in the context of that comment other than the fact that those rockets cannot be aimed accurately? Again, pure delusional bigotry wherein basically muslims are always right and Jews always wrong. Muslim reportage of the Gaza invasion by Israel in many cases amounts to little more than outright lies since the term disingenuous cannot adequately describe what is going on here.
In that same online edition, an article by Patrick Seale titled, "The Battle For Legitimacy", presents a more subtle use of disingenuous rhetoric to lend credence to a point of view. I say "subtle" because the article lies about what it leaves out more than what it cites and in reality will fool few neutral readers but is the type of article that is eagerly gobbled up in middle eastern circles against those who simply do not like Israel. In what should have been a key point in the entire article, Seale dismissively mentions Hamas' "futile rockets", the firing of which deserves an article all to itself. The use of the word "futile" in this context is neither here nor there but is extremely significant for why it was used. Agenda driven? You decide.
Spreading such propaganda amongst Palestinian Arabs and muslims around the world may have a "feel good" effect but in fact, the Palestinian's unwillingness to accept their own true role and current position in this ongoing conflict only ensures a future of more suffering, privation, humiliation and death. It seems to me that the current goals of the majority of Palestinian Arabs is absolutely unobtainable. Israel holds the "high ground" in every way imaginable. The only hope for the Palestinian Arabs is for total philosophical capitulation to the reality in which they find themselves but more importantly to turn to peace as the means for obtaining their goal for a 2 state solution. Israel took over the West Bank during a time of war; like the Palestinian Arabs, Israel would like to continue to hold onto this territory and will only relinquish it for an absolutely guaranteed peace which is no where evident in the future or present mindset of the Palestinian Arabs.
Had the Palestinian Arabs accepted the unacceptable in 1947-8, the idea of a two state solution which embraced the admittedly harsh reality of that current situation, it would have been far preferable to the fantasy of pushing the Jews out of Palestine entirely by military means. Hindsight is 20/20 they say but this is not so in the case of how far too many Palestinian Arabs view the history of the conflict, which is a scenario where rich Jewish Europeans came to Palestine to steal the land from the Arabs like the rising tide of immigration pressure turned native-Americans from their lands in the United States.
There is every reason to believe from a reading of history that the Jews would have and did accept the notion of a 2 state solution in 1947-8 in exchange for peace rather than a civil war they were by no means certain of winning. Forced into a conflict that was a near thing many times, the Palestinian Jews not only created their own nation, but one that was specifically Jewish. What has happened in subsequent decades insofar as the attitude of Palestinian Arabs smacks of sour grapes because they decided to fight and had their chances to win
Instead of accepting the reality of the nature of that defeat which they have never done, the Palestinian Arabs have done such things as blame the United States for their defeat even though the U.S. was never involved. There are conspiracy claims such as that the United States knew and supported the idea as early as 1948 that the Palestinian Jews would eventually claim sovereignty over the entire region, squeezing out the Palestinian Arabs. To credit the U.S. with this type of foresight at a time when Israel was involved in a civil war in which they were outnumbered, barely armed and with the future prospect of the entry of Arab countries on the side of the Palestinian Arabs is simply an excuse to somehow involve the U.S. in the entire historical mythology of hate against the West and as an excuse for Arab defeats.
To overcome the mistakes of their own past should be the goal of the Palestinians Arabs rather than painting themselves as wholly innocent victims during the course of these last 60 years; it is the wrong path for the Japanese to follow in regards to the nuclear devastation of Hiromshima and Nagasaki and it is the wrong path for the Palestinian Arabs to follow as it leads to a place where there is no mature acknowledgement, no closure to put them on a path they will not repeat. Instead, what you have among the Arabs Palestinians' is a philosophical intrasigence that is a form of madness guaranteeing only that the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again.
Palestinian Arabs must stop looking at what Israel does as if it happens in a vacuum totally divorced from their own actions. One may not perhaps be able to control the actions of others but one can certainly control one's own attitudes and actions. This is the only way I see in which the Palestinians Arabs can perhaps come out of this situation with some degree of recompense. The alternative is to continue down the same sorry path which has led them to nothing but sorrow these past 60 years.
In pre-Columbian America, native-Americans and Aztecs were all too willing to steal land or engage in empire building against their fellow native-Americans; it was only with subsequent military defeats at the hands of a superior technology and a subsequent willingness to revise their own history that native-Americans found war "immoral" or "unethical".
It is said that it is the winners of wars who write history. This is not true; winners make history while the defeated languish on reservations or refugee camps if they are lucky enough to still be alive. Both sides write history and it speaks to the quality of a culture as to how willing it is to tell the truth of that history no matter how good or bad a picture it paints because that view of history becomes a portrait of how they view themselves. Perhaps it is human nature that the victors find it easy to be magnanimous and so have a view of themselves with all their human frailties intact.
Alexander Werth in his "Russia At War, 1941-1945", refers to Benno Zieser's German biographical viewpoint in, "The Road To Stalingrad" as an "odious little novel" Read some histories on how Syria and Egypt view their conflicts with Israel; if you didn't know better you would think they had come out on top. Read what you can in middle eastern newspapers and read Palestinian rhetoric about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. My own conclusion is that there is a nearly total disconnect from reality in the Arab world when it comes to this issue; there is a profound feeling of squirming discomfort in reading account after account that is hopelessly biased and bigoted. Winners and losers both write history, the accounts from those on the losing end smacks of madness and a type of dishonesty that the writers are deeply unaware of; difficult to feel compassion in these instances as I am reminded again and again of Soviet habits of disinformation and Orwell's "Doublespeak".
In taking sides in the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict among Americans there is a profound difference in the way we think of these things and of how muslims do. I do not claim to speak for Americans but it is with a sense of profound dishonesty with which I view muslim accounts on the matter. Read the Hamas Founding Charter; it's hard to imagine a document that would alienate Americans any more if one tried; it simply goes against the grain of how we look at our relationships with the world and with the concept of truth. If I didn't know any better, I would think it had been written by an insane 8 year old; when it comes to history, the truth of the matter is of seemingly no consequence. It's simply hard for me to imagine a sane human being writing such a document.
Any solution that comes about between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs now lies in the hands of the latter. Until they turn their back on violence and hate filled and dishonest rhetoric Israel will continue to sit back and react. The more radical in Israeli society will continue to quietly allow settlements to be built on the West Bank as moderates lose credibility. The Palestinian Arabs continue to shoot themselves in the foot with no strategy for the future other than some vague never say die rhetoric with nothing to back it up.
Israel can be brought to the peace table because they are profoundly sick of the conflict and what it is doing to their own society. However peace will never come about until Palestinian factions and grass roots elements totally eschew the use of violence and come to accept the reality of the defeat that is now several generations behind them.