The increasingly ill-tempered standoff between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu over illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Arab east Jerusalem is a vivid reminder of the formidable obstacles in the way of middle-east peace. Clearly, there can be no negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and probably not even any negotiations - so long as Israel's colonisation of Arab land continues.
David Gardner is chief leader writer and associate editor at the Financial Times. He was the paper's middle-east editor from 1995-99. In 2003 he won the David Watt prize for political journalism for his writing on the Arab world. He is the author of Last Chance: the Middle East in the Balance (IB Tauris, 2009)
This article was first published on the website of the Norsk Ressurssenter for Fredsbygging (Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre / NOREF)
Yet, it is at moments of incipient crisis like this that it is worth insisting this conflict is soluble. There are some Arab-Israeli minefields that can still be traversed with a pragmatic compass: including the fate of the roughly 5 million Palestinian refugees - used by rejectionists on both sides to argue that no reconciliation of this tragic history will ever be possible.
The Palestinian refugees, who were driven out by or fled the 1948 and 1967 wars, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), insist on their right of return. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) responsible for their welfare, the number of refugees now totals around 4.5m. These refugees of war - the shattat, or diaspora - are to be distinguished from earlier waves of emigration, beginning under Ottoman rule in the 19th century. Israel opposes the right of return for any part of the Palestinian diaspora, arguing that this would irreversibly change the demographic balance of the Jewish state, which would then cease to be Jewish.
This is a real concern that has to be addressed. So it would be as well to begin with its threefold reality.
The real dimensions
First, the UNRWA numbers, though juridically correct, are not, in reality, accurate. In Lebanon, for example, the UN had 374,000 refugees on its books in 2002, spread out in twelve camps. Lebanon, fearful of its delicate confessional balance, denies Palestinians not only citizenship, but the right to own property or work in seventy-one specified professions (see Zaid Al-Ali, "Lebanon's Palestinian shame", 19 June 2007). Many Palestinians able to leave, using UNRWA-acquired educations as their passport, have therefore left. The actual number remaining in Lebanon in 2002, UN officials say privately, was 192,000. It is now thought to be smaller. This is doubly important because Israeli officials often point to the Lebanon Palestinians, who are mostly from the Galilee, as among those most likely to swarm back into northern Israel if they were to agree to the right of return.
Second, how many among them, sixty and more years on, would exercise their right to return? Khalil Shikaki, a reputable Palestinian pollster who runs the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, in 2003 asked refugees in Jordan and Lebanon if, given the choice, they would return to Israel, or accept compensation. In Jordan, which hosts the biggest concentration of about 2.8m refugees who, unlike in Lebanon, enjoy Jordanian citizenship, only 5% opted for return; in Lebanon, predictably given the inhospitality of the host country, it was 23%.
Taken together, these two indicative magnitudes give some idea of the real dimensions of the problem. Furthermore, UNRWA's overall regional tally is almost certainly a good deal higher than the actual number of refugees in the Arab states neighbouring Israel.
The reason for the discrepancy is that the UN agency is obliged to safeguard the legal rights of all the refugees, wherever they are, against compensation they may eventually receive in the event of a settlement of the conflict. This leads to the third element in the reality of the problem: compensation.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister, stated that the outline deal issued to the parties in December 2000 by the then US president Bill Clinton gave the refugees the right of return to "historical Palestine", but "no explicit right of return to the state of Israel", which could limit the numbers it admitted. A multi-billion-dollar compensation-and-resettlement programme would cover the rest of the refugees. The Arab League peace-offer agreed at Beirut in March 2002, moreover, proposes "a just solution" to the right of return that quite obviously foresees compensation for the majority of refugees. That offer remains on the table.
Israeli officials complain the Clinton parameters and the Beirut plan are too nebulous. This position is, at best, disingenuous. Israel is in control of its frontiers, its internal as well as its external borders; it has had little problem, for instance, in excluding Arab citizens of Jerusalem, in open defiance of international law. Most of all, however, Israeli officials know full well they negotiated just such a deal in 2000, with Syria, under US mediation. That package fell apart because, although Israel was prepared to return the Golan heights, it refused to allow Syria back onto the last metres of land down to the water's edge of Lake Tiberias or the Sea of Galilee.
But there was agreement in principle, Israeli and American officials say privately, on an overall, internationally funded package, then worth up to $17 billion, covering such items as early-warning stations on the Golan but mostly to compensate the registered 450,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria.
The cost of security
The right-of-return conundrum, in other words, is pragmatically soluble. Israel knows this because it has already been down that path - and the path is still open. It will stay open, for a time, so long as it is clearly understood that no Palestinian leader - certainly not President Mahmoud Abbas, who has lost Gaza to Hamas, has nothing concrete to show for his peacemaking efforts, and is in danger of being branded a traitor to the Palestinian cause - can possibly yield on the rights of the refugees, as opposed to negotiating how those rights are honoured.
The cost of overall compensation, benchmarked against the Syrian package, could exceed $100bn, most probably financed by the United States, the European Union and the Gulf states. Expensive? That rather depends on the alternatives. Apart from the question of justice, of righting a wrong which is not just historical but actual, the idea that Israelis can enjoy security inside a ring of dozens of refugee camps - not just in neighbouring states but inside the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem - is delusional. Already the phenomenon of al-Qaida-style jihadism has begun to surface in the camps (for example, in Nahr al-Bared in Lebanon, in Jordan, and in Gaza - where Hamas crushed a jihadist group on 15 August 2009 after an eruption of fighting). Their upsurge is in part owed to the collapse of the refugees' own institutions as a result of the implosion of the PLO, which led and policed the camps (see Bernard Rougier, Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon [Harvard University Press, 2007]).
The amount of money suggested, in other words, will prove a lot cheaper than the alternative: a beleaguered Israel ringed by dozens of camps, desperate huddles of misery so cut off from any hope of a decent future they will become the new universities of jihad. No Israeli wall will be proof against that.
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Also in openDemocracy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2009: Paul Rogers, "Gaza: hope after attack" (1 January 2009) Ghassan Khatib, "Gaza: outlines of an endgame" (6 January 2009) Avi Shlaim, "Israel and Gaza: rhetoric and reality" (7 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the Israel-United States connection" (7 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the wider war" (13 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "After Gaza: Israel's last chance" (17 January 2009) Tarek Osman, "Egypt's dilemma: Gaza and beyond" (12 January 2009) Menachem Kellner, "Israel's Gaza war: five asymmetries" (14 January 2009) Khaled Hroub, "Hamas after the Gaza war" (15 January 2009) Prince Hassan of Jordan, "The failure of force: an alternative option" (16 January 2009) Martin Shaw, "Israel's politics of war" (20 January 2009) Fred Halliday, "The greater middle east: Obama's six problems" (21 January 2009) Conor Gearty, "Israel, Gaza and international law" (21 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the war after the war" (22 January 2009) Mustafa Kibaroglu, "Turkey-Israel relations after Gaza" (26 January 2009) Sadegh Zibakalam, "Iran and the Gaza war" (26 January 2009) Khaled Hroub, "The ‘Arab system' after Gaza" (27 January 2009) Hugo Slim, "NGOs in Gaza: humanitarianism vs politics" (30 January 2009) Lucy Nusseibeh, "The four lessons of Gaza" (4 February 2009) Martin Shaw, "Uses of genocide: Kenya, Georgia, Israel, Sri Lanka" (9 February 2009) Prince Hassan of Jordan, "Palestine's right: past as prologue" (11 February 2009) Colin Shindler, "Israel's rightward shift: a history of the present" (23 February 2009) Faisal al Yafai, "What makes the Arabs a people?" (25 February 2009) Eyal Weizman, "Lawfare in Gaza: legislative attack" (1 March 2009) Akiva Eldar, "The United States and Israel: moment of truth" (18 May 2009) Gershon Baskin, "The state of Israel: key to peace" (19 May 2009) Gideon Levy, "Barack Obama: Israel's true friend" (25 May 2009) Karim Kasim & Zaid Al-Ali, "The Cairo speech: Arab Muslim voices" (8 June 2009) Akiva Eldar, "Binyamin Netanyahu's mirage" (15 June 2009) Gershon Baskin, "Israel's path: from occupation to peace" (7 July 2009) Akiva Eldar, "Iran, the Arabs and Israel: the domino-effect" (27 July 2009) Hazem Sagheh, "Israeli settlement, Arab movement" (28 July 2009) |
Comments
Great piece, thank you. This is exactly the kind of nuts and bolts analysis that is needed to help build the middle ground for a solution that meets the demands of a survivors justice.
Why no assertion that the Israeli nation would necessarily implode into violent failed state nationalism? Why is failure and the threat of failure only a viable and yet patronizing option for the Arabs? Pay us $100 billion dollars or we're behave even worse? That's $20,000 a head or, according to Palestinian 'sociologists' who maintain that the average multigenerational Palestinian family is 15 people, that's $300,000. Sounds like a good deal to me. The problem with it, is that Arafat already floated this idea 10 years ago and the number he came up with was 10x that or 1 Trillion dollars. Three million dollars per household? Wow. Better you pay that than I.
I agree with what Empress Trudy said. At last a dose of realism.
Still, the money to compensate the Palestinians could come from sale of the Jewish property seized by Muslims, Arabs, and Muslim-Arab governments from the 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab and Muslim lands between 1948 and 1960. This is 100,000 *more* people than suffered in the Palestinian Nakba (where a minority were indeed expelled, but most simply fled the fighting, led by their leaders). No one talks about these Jews, or their suffering: it is equal or more than equal to the suffering of the Palestinians, and the refugees were left penniless and had to start their lives all over, and many lived for years in dismal displaced-persons camps. Still, this is clearly not a big issue for bien-pensant intellectuals here on opendemoc--some of whom deny this even happened. These 850,000 Jews were officially categorized by the UN as refugees, just like the Palestinians. One difference between the two groups--the Jews didn't attack their neighbors first.
But good luck getting the seized Jewish property from the current Muslim owners!
It is striking too that the al-Qaeda-like Jund in Gaza turned a mosque into an armed fortress--and Hamas simply attacked the mosque, and with enormous violence. Can you imagine the outrage, including here at opendemoc, if such a thing had been done by the IDF? So I must ask--are mosques sacred and sacrosanct places to Muslims, or are they not?
David Gardner only tells half the story: like many commentators he only sees the Palestinian refugees as victims of injustice. Apart from the fact that a convincing argument can be made for the Arab League to compensate Arab refugees for a war which they started, he overlooks completely any compensation owed to Jewish refugees driven from Arab countries. This should be rights dwarf Arab claims. One Iraqi Jewish organisation has made a claim for $100 billion owed to Iraqi Jews alone for lost and confiscated assets and property, before Syrian-, Egyptian-, Libyan - Jewish and other claims are taken into account.
@bataween:
Which war did the Arabs start? In 1948 a civil war developed between Palestinians and Zionists. In early 1948 David Ben-Gurion refused a US proposed cease fire twice because he feared losing "political gains". The Zionist actions up to April 1948 contributed at least as much to the escalations as the Palestinian actions. After the implementation of Plan Dalet, starting in april 1948, the Zionists chased about a quarter of a million Palestinians out of their communities by 14 May 1948. Given this onslaught the attack of the Arab states is completely understandable.
This is a matter between Israeli Jews and Arab states. The Palestinians have nothing to do with it. Furthermore, an important difference between the Jewish and the Palestinian refugees is that the Arab states did not want the Palestinians to come to their countries, while Israel wanted the Arab Jews to go to Israel; they wanted "human material" to build their nation. Israel even promoted the flow of Arab Jews into Israel with bomb attacks on Jews in Iraq.
Still, the money to compensate the Palestinians could come from sale of
the Jewish property seized by Muslims, Arabs, and Muslim-Arab
governments from the 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab and
Muslim lands between 1948 and 1960. This is 100,000 *more* people than
suffered in the Palestinian Nakba (where a minority were indeed
expelled, but most simply fled the fighting, led by their leaders).
Those who were expelled have got a case against the governments who expelled them. The Palestinians dispossessed of their lands by foriegners have a claim against those foreigners. The two issues are unconnected.
By the way, the Palestinians did not start any war. That was started by foreign colonisation which they have every right to resist.
The proto-Israelis accepted the UN resolution of Nov. 1947, the Palestinian Arabs did not, and began a war--which, to everyone's surprise, they lost.
Big C's position is the same as saying that the Allied Powers were responsible for Hitler's invasion of Poland, because by resorting to violence Hitler was only resisting the unfair Versailles Treaty. I don't think many people will accept that line of historical reasoning--though no doubt some will.
Treating Palestinians Arabs as if they had no choice in 1947 is to treat them as children, not adults.
They had a choice. They could have chosen peace and their own state, and they would then have had a state for the past 62 years. Instead, they chose violence. That was their choice. The problem of peace is on the Arab side, not the Israeli side; like Big C, they don't accept Israel's right to exist. That is the basic problem with the peace process. Repeat: *that* is the basic problem. Now, some leftist intellectuals share their view, but they don't have to live with the consequences. But the Palestinian population would be in a much better position than they are now if they'd chosen peace in 1947, instead of war; or peace in 2001, instead of war. But in 1947 everyone--including the Palestinian Arabs--thought the Jews would lose.
Further, it is perfectly reasonable to propose that Palestinians who were dislocated by 1947/1948 should be compensated now with the property of Jews who were dislocated by Muslim/Arab govts in 1948-1960, and then the case is closed. That's where the money could come from--that's all I'm saying. In 1947/1948 and 1948/1960 we are talking about a population exchange, like the one that created India and Pakistan, except much smaller and much less bloody. The main differences between the Jewish refugees and the Palestinians are that the Jews of Arab/Muslim lands did not attack their neighbors first, and that more Jews suffered in becoming refugees than did Palestinians.
Keeping the "Jewish Nakba" in mind in terms of the overall Arab-Israeli problem, and the issue of compensatin, has an additional advantage, as laid out by Ada Aharoni; I think folks will find this incident interesting:
"During a course I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the head of the Palestinian student group, Fouad, said with amazement: We’re surprised that you, the Jews, who are known as smart people, did not publicize this important historical affair - the Nakba of Jews in Arab states. Why do you leave it tucked away in your drawers for 60 years?
"I asked him: Why do you want Israel to publicize it?
"And he replied: Because the Nakba narrative of Jews in Arab states salvages my dignity and that of my people! It makes us realize we are not the only ones who suffered in the conflict. Familiarity with the historical facts allows us to hold up our heads and opens up reconciliation opportunities."
Everyone who is being honest accepts that Jewish refugees from the Arab world have exactly the same claim on compensation as Arabs do, but the issue is less important, because they were resettled in Israel and have not been used as pawns like the Palestinians have. JC Bosma apparently would like us to think that Jews in the Arab world lived in paradise, and for us to buy into that myth that somehow, the founding of a Jewish state on a tiny piece of land in the "Arab world" (read, the place Arabs wanted to keep racially exclusive) was a good excuse for the Arabs to persecute Jews throughout the Middle East.
No one is putting up $100 billion to compensate the Palestinians. For Israel to be asked to do so is akin to requesting Shylock's pound of flesh.
Israel is not going to allow the creation of a situation where it is even 20% likely that the country would be overrun by Palestinian refugees. That is what the new state of Palestine is supposed to be for, unless of course the idea is to use the Palestinian state as a jumping off point
I did not say that. I just pointed out some differences. The Palestinians were driven out of Israel by military campaigns of the Zionists. This is what the Zionist leadership wanted. It also wanted Arab Jews as, what it called, "human material" for its state.
Arab governments did not want the Palestinians to leave Palestine, nor did they most of them want Jews to leave their countries. Israel was the biggest promotor of this "transfer".
This is pure nonsense. Arabs consider Jews not as people of another race, but as people of another faith. In Arab countries, Jews and Christians were treated similarly.
The Zionists talk about race.
Big C's position is the same as saying that the Allied Powers were
responsible for Hitler's invasion of Poland, because by resorting to
violence Hitler was only resisting the unfair Versailles Treaty
Good comparison but but the wrong way around. My position is the same as saying that Hitler's invasion of Poland would still have been wrong even if it had been sanctioned by an international legal body.
All your sophism does not change the fact that the Palestinians bear no responsibility whatsoever for the plight of people expelled from other countries. "The same as saying" that if I am mugged by someone today it cancels out the fact that I mugged his brother yesterday.
Big C, the more exact comparison would be: if I got into a fight yesterday with someone who started that fight and then I won, which no one expected, and the same day my peaceful brother got mugged by that guy's friends, and the guy actually demands compensation for my having won, while ignoring that I had to take care of my brother, and while also demanding that his friends keep everything they took from my brother, as their right.
Fascinating Professor. You appear to be advocating that international law be based on the Sicialian or Albanian vendetta systems.
It doesn't matter what one's brother, cousin or sister in law does. The law does not aggregate blame or responsibility on a family basis. Palestinians have a claim against those who expelled them. Those expelled by Arab governments have a claim against those governments. They are separate issues.
Ethan II's "more exact" comparison is not exact at all. It is full of "dubious legitimisations" of Zionist policies and acts:
The Zionists are at least as responsible for the war of 1948. Before May 1948 the fight between the Zionists and the Palestinians escaleted more and more. The Zionists had a big hand in this with their so-called "retaliations". They even rejected two U.S. proposals for de-escalation. The Zionists had been building their forces for years and not surprisingly, easily got the upper hand. Starting in April 1948, expulsions were implemented on a large scale. With over 250,000 refugees by 14 May 1948 it was almost unthinkable for Arab states not to attack the Zionists (just like NATO attacked Serbia in 1998 because of ethnic cleansings in Kosovo). Their armies were little more than palace guards however, except for the Transjordanians, but they did not want to fight the Zionists, but only to take the Arab part of Palestine (rather, it were the Zionists who attacked the Transjordanians).
Throughout 1948 Ben-Gurion was confident that the Zionists would win. To the public however he talked about a second Holocaust. This talk of Ben-Gurion legitimised the violence the Zionists unleashed on the Palestinians. Unfortunately, today, Zionist sympathisers still believe in Ben-Gurion's fairy tale. This is not a rational believe, but a believe kept alive by their wish to legitimise Zionism.
This was not the same day, nor the same year. Very few Jews from Arab states went to Israel in 1948.
Are you suggesting the Zionists expelled the Palestinians in order to protect Jews in Arab states? This would reverse the order of events.
It's just one more dubious legitimisation of ethnic cleansing.
Big C conveniently forgets the period Nov. 1947-May 1948 when (a) the Palestinian Arabs started the fighting, (b) were the ones on the offensive, and (c) the Arabs were winning. Repeat: winning. I could recommend some reading on this.
The point about including the Jewish Nakbah in any discussion of the refugee problem is conceptual: what occurred was in fact a population exchange--a terrible sequence of events, but one that was far far less bloody than what happened in India (where a *million* people were killed) and with only 1/12 the numbers of humans displaced on both sides when Pakistan and India divided. As the Palestinian student Fouad said, such a conception also allows the Palestinians to see they were not the only victims in what happened, which--he says--allows them dignity, and hence the possibility of reconciliation. We should all want that.
Most Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands arrived in the first few years after 1948. So let's say: the friends of the guy who started the fight with me (and was beaten) attack my peaceful brother the *next* day; they mug him, and demand to be allowed to keep everything they've stolen, and they get their wish, while I must take care of my brother, while the guy who started the fight with me actually demands compensation for losing.
a,b) What was typical of the escalation was that Zionist extremist would make terror attacks on Palestinian civilians, that Palestinians would retaliate, and that the Haganah would retaliate very brutally. For instance around New Year of 1948 the Irgun terrorists exploded a bomb in a crowd in a refinery in Haifa, killing several Palestinians. In the next hours, Palestinians killed about 30 Jews working in the refinery. As a retaliation the Haganah unleashed its death squads on two villages close to Haifa, Balad al Sheik and Hawassa. Their orders were to "kill maximum males". They killed (or should I say murdered) over 60 people.
c) there is no serious history book that will tell you that the Palestinians were beating the Zionists in April and early May 1948. On the contrary, e.g. Benny Morris, a rabiate Zionist historian, holds that by May the Palestinians were "thoroughly beaten"
Viewing it as a population exchange is a Zionist way of legitimising the expulsion of the Palestinians. In fact, the Zionists wanted both "transfers", while the Arabs wanted neither.
JC Bosma asserts that Arabs don't talk about race, only Zionists do. Really? How about the following (official names):
Arab Republic of Egypt (what about all those Copts?)
Arab Repubic of LIbya
Arab Republic of Syria
Yeman Arab Republc (what about all those Africans?)
United Arab Emirates (what about the Iranians there, not to mention all those Philippino servants?)
And shifting the topic jut a little--in terms of that welcoming inclusion which JCB evidently believes is so typical of all Muslim nations, in contrast to horrid Israel, we also have (official names):
The Islamic Republic of Iran
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan
The Islamic Republic of Mauretania
even: The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
The following countries' flags prominently dispaly Islamic (and only Islamic) symbols:
Algeria
Afghanistan
Azerbaijan
Comorros
Malaysia
Maldives
Mauretania
Pakistan
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Welcome to the real world JCB.
The "Arab" in the names of countries does not refer to a race. It refers to the culture and language. Arab countries do not distinguish Arab Jews as a separate race, just as a separate religious group. Arab Christians, like the Copts, are Arabs too. It is the Zionists who like to put people in boxes according to their 'race'. For instance according to Zionsim the Palestinians are not a separate people, but are part of the Arab people.
Israel calls itself a "Jewish state",.It's flag doesn't carry a religious symbol, but a symbol of the "glorious past" of the Jewish people: the Star of David. Israel is all about the nationalism of the Jewish people.
By the way: how does Israel treat its "guest workers", the Rumanians, Chinese, Filippino's etc.? I've read they treat them rather similar to the way the UAE treats its.
How many European flags display Christian "and only" Chistian symbols Professor? Ah! it is Moslems "and only" Moslems who get criticised for this.
Big C conveniently forgets the period Nov. 1947-May 1948 when (a) the
Palestinian Arabs started the fighting,
No they didn't. the Zionists started the fighting by attempting to colonise their homeland.
(b) were the ones on the
offensive,
Defending your homeland against foreign invaders is not an offensive act.
The difference is, in eight Muslim countries, including countries with those Muslim symbols on their flags, the penalty for disavowing Islam is death. In what European country is there *any* penalty for disavowing Christianity?
The Palestinian Arabs started the fighting. None of the land held by Jews in 1947 was anything other than land that had been bought from willing owners. The Palestinian Arabs were the aggressors, the proto-Israelis were on the defensive, and by May 1948 they seemed about to (e.g.) isolate and destroy the Jewish population in Jerusalem (which had been there for 5,000 years). Those are historical facts.
The rest of Big C's argument is the sort of thing that Hitler used to justify invading Poland over Danzig; after all, he was just naturally reacting to the unfair Versailles Treaty. It is time that Big C stop naturalizing the violence on the Palestinian side. If they'd made the UN-approved deal in 1947, they would have had a state for the past 62 years.
But Big C's statements do serve to prove one thing: that the problem with "peace" lies with those who do not accept Israel's right to exist, not with intransigent Israelis who won't give enough concessions. He has certainly helped to clarify where the weight of blame for the continuing conflict should be placed.
I'm glad people here (e.g., JCBosma, today at 22:42) are citing Benny Morris, "1948" as an authority.
Benny Morris in "1948" repeatedly says that the Arabs initiated the violence, which began in Nov. 1947, not Jan. 1948: "the Arabs had initiated the violence" (p. 93, referring to November); "most of the violence was initiated by the Arabs" (p. 101), covering the period Nov. 1947 to March 1948; the first attempted ethnic cleansing was of the Jewish quarter in east Jerusalem in Dec. 1947 (pp. 101-102).
As for the military situation being bad for the proto-Israelis in early 1948, I guess it's March-April 1948 not May that I meant: Benny Morris, "1948", p. 109-113; by the last week of March the proto-Israelis faced a "military crisis" (p. 114), with Jerusalem likely to fall by the middle of May unless the Jews did something (pp. 112-113). The British evaluation (by the very experienced General Alan Cunningham, British High Commissioner in Palestine) is as follows: "The balance of the fighting seems to have turned much in favour of the Arabs" (3 April 1948).
As for Arab meaning culture and language and not race, I suggests that people google "Sudanese refugees in Egypt" (that's...the Arab Republic of Egypt), and see what you come up with.
I did not write that Benny Morris is authorative. I wrote that he is a rabiate Zionist historian. He describes history from the Zionist point of view, which means that he is continuously legitimising what the Zionists did and deligitimising what the Palestinians did.
Generally you can trust Morris for the facts he reports, but his interpretations, and the way he tells the story are highly skewed. For instance, Morris insists that the Palestinians started the civil war with riots. In Morris's view, unknown to anyone at the time, the riots that erupted after the UN approved the partition of Palestine, were the start of a war by the evil Palestinians.
A historian who is not writing from the Zionist point of view, but rather from a neutral point of view is Ilan Pappe. He wrote "the ethnic cleansing of Palestine"
Furthermore, according to Morris in December 1947 the British High Commisionar (according to Ethan II "the very experienced General Alan Cunningham") blamed the Zionists for the escalation: "the 'spontaneous and unorganised' rioting might well have subsided had the Jews not resorted to retaliation with firearms", "some of the Jewish reprisals were 'on offense to civilisation'" (p. 75 of Morris's "the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited")
And maybe Cunningham was under the impression that the Zionists had a hard time in March 1948. They had some setbacks, but it said nothing about their overall prospects. The Zionists were simply much better organised and had much more weapons at their disposal than the Palestinians. In April 1948 the Zionists inplemented Plan Dalet, which meant that the Palestinians would be ethnically cleansed.
The rest of Big C's argument is the sort of thing that Hitler used to
justify invading Poland over Danzig; after all, he was just naturally
reacting to the unfair Versailles Treaty.
Hitler invaded Poland in order to turn it's population into second class citizens or kill them (especially the Jews and Gypsies) . No legality on Earth could have legitimised that.
The Palestinians took up arms against the Zionists in order to regain their lost lands, whether taken by force or sold from under their feet by absentee landlords. No legality on Earth could take de-legitimise that.
Hitler invaded Poland, he said, to regain Germany's lost lands (Danzig, and East Prussia), taken either by force or sold out from under the people's feet by corrupt politicians at Versailles. Sound familiar? Of course, behind the rhetoric of victimization at which Hitler and his apologists were so adopt, a rhetoric which ignored Germany's own heavy contributions to its own "plight", Hitler also had another agenda, a genocidal one. Read the Hamas Charter.
I don't like comparison's with the Nazi's, but now that you brought up the subject I'll comment on the things you bring up.
Indeed much of this sounds familiar when one knows a little bit about Zionism.
The "Land of Israel"
Don't the Zionists believe that they were forcibly expelled from "The Land of Israel" by the Romans?
How do Jewish Israeli's see themselves?
Ben-Gurion also had another agenda: making Palestine Jewish was impossible without an ethnic cleansing
By the way, if you want to read about similarities between how Zionists legitimised their project and how Hitler legitimised the conquest of Eastern Europe, the Americans the conquest of America and the "Boers" that of South Africa, I can advice Norman Finkelstein's "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict" (chapter 4)
Hamas's charter says that Hamas wants to make Palestine Islamic again, which means that the people who live there, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, can stay there.
Furthermore, according to an expert, Azzam Tamimi, Hamas's charter has never been their real guideline. Certainly since they took part in the elections they are much more moderate. Read e.g. these articles: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001209.html , http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/mar/31/israel
Also Big C, it is not the case that all the land bought by the proto-Israelis was sold by absentee landlords; that's simply cod-Marxist rhetoric.
The story is a lot more complicated than that, and lots of Palestinian Arab smallholders sold land to the proto-Israelis too (at high prices for marginal land, just like the Palestinian Arab absentee landlords did). On all this, people should read: Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (University of California Press, 2008).
Or, since people here at opendemoc are now accepted Benny Morris as an authority, see his review of this book online at The New Republic, May 2, 2008.
JCBosma cited Benny Morris because he thought Morris supported him on lots of important points. Now, when it turns out that Morris doesn't, JC Bosma delegitimizes Morris as a "rabiate Zionist". Interesting Freudian slip.
Sir Alan Cunningham is himself authoritative in terms of military judgment of the situation as of April 1948: he was a very experienced soldier, the commander of the British army in Palestine, and knew the politics as High Commissioner. People should accept his judgment of the situation as of April, even though it means the Palestinians weren't hapless victims, like many here wish.
"Plan Dalet" is another slander. Read Morris on this. There were ethnic cleansings, on both sides (Arabs starting first); but the Palestine refugee problem was not primarily the result of Israeli ethnic cleansing.
If you read back you will see that when I first introduced Morris I wrote: "Benny Morris, a rabiate Zionist historian,"
If you read Morris you can read that "Zionist military attacks and the fear of Zionist military attack" were the most important reasons why Palestinians fled. Plan Dalet was the Zionist plan that legitimised this ethnic cleansing, and the conquest of an addition quarter of Palestine in 1948. You can read this in Morris's book "The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited" .Morris clouds this in very legitimisative language though, so you can better read Ilan Pappe's "The ethnic cleansing of Palestine"
Sir Alan Cunningham's military evaluation as of April 3, 1948 shows that the Palestinian Arabs were winning, and on the verge of decisively winning. This means they were not hapless victims of "Israeli aggression," much as people here on opendemoc would like to believe, in their oh-so-pc way, but were themselves on the offensive. The U.S. govt did try to stop the fighting in winter 1947/1948, because they were afraid there was going to be another Holocaust this time inflicted by the Arabs.
The Hamas Charter calls for the death of every single Jew in the world (including those who might be found hiding behind trees and rocks), based on a Hadith. This genocidal vision is actualized in Hamas ' approval of conscious attacks on Jewish civilians, including old people and children--or the 6,000 rockets shot at civilian Sderot (the population of which is made up of refugees from Morocco).
This genocidal vision is actualized in
Hamas ' approval of conscious attacks on Jewish civilians, including
old people and children--or the 6,000 rockets shot at civilian Sderot
(the population of which is made up of refugees from Morocco).
In eight years 24 people have been killed by rocket fire in Sderot. There have probably been more people killed in traffic accidents in that period. The number of Palestinian civilians murdered by the Zionists over that period is many hundreds times that figure. If Hamas want to commit genocide then they should take lessons from the Zionists. They are much better at it.
This is what Hamas people in Gaza told Jimmy Carter shortly before the Gaza war (known as "Operation Cast Lead" in Israel an as the "Gaza massacre" in the Arab world):
see Carter's view on the Gaza war: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/07/AR2009010702645.html
I wish everybody had the clear sight that Carter has!
That Hamas has managed to kill only 24 civilians is hardly a defense against the fact that they are attempting to kill a whole lot more--thousands more (6,000 more at least).
That Hamas has "no choice" but to attempt to kill civilians--a position happily accepted by some people here on opendemocracy--is manifestly absurd.
According to your reasoning the fact that in the first four days of the Al Aqsa Intifadah the IDF shot more then a million bullets means that they attempted to kill a million Palestinians???
With respect to your second point, let me emphasize that I disapprove the fact that Hamas tries to kill civilians (I certainly do not 'happily' accept this); I just pointed out the reasons Hamas gives for it, which contrast sharply with your accusation that Hamas aims at genocide.
By the way, I thought that "ein breira" (Hebrew for "no choice") was one of the favorite legitimisations of Zionism.
I guess that in your opinion "Operation Cast Lead"/"The Gaza Massacre" was also a case of "ein breira". People who talked with Hamas-leaders tell another story though. Jimmy Carter writes that the war was unnecessary (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/07/AR2009010702645.html ) With a little bit more goodwill the cease fire could easily have been extended. In other words, Israel could stop the rockets by opening the borders of Gaza for more civilian goods (and thus releasing some of the pressure on the Hamas government). Of course, such a solution would never come up in the minds of people who can only think of Hamas in terms of Nazis. For me however, it is clear that the war was not necessary in order to stop the rockets, but in order to keep Hamas under pressure.
Let's see: on Nov. 4, the Israelis struck a tunnel very near the Gaza/Israel border which was being prepared by Hamas for another Gilad Schalit-like kidnapping. Six Hamas terrorists were killed. The response of Hamas was 35 rockets fired at civilian Sderot the next day, followed by a barrage against nearby Israeli towns that (according to the Daily Telegraph) "approached pre-truce levels".
And JC Bosma writes "with a little bit more goodwill the truce could have been extended." Goodwill on whose part, sir?
It was Israel that attacked on 4 November. There was no Hamas attack. In fact, Hamas had been abiding by a cease fire for months. Israel broke that cease fire. Furthermore, since Israel knew about the tunnel (if indeed there was a tunnel) it could have set up a trap for the Hamas-fighters if indeed they would try to abduct a soldier. There was certainly no security-related need to attack the Palestinians. In fact, Israels breaking of the cease fire led to Hamas firing rockets in retaliation, which was very bad for security.
Why would Israel attack right at the night of the US elections (when media-attention is directed elsewhere)? Why provoke Hamas in such a way? Why break the cease fire for a threat that could have been met without breaking it? The only reasonable explanation seems to be that the IDF wanted a war to teach Hamas a lesson. In fact, only two weeks after provoking Hamas the IDF sought approval for its "Cast Lead" attack plan (see http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050448.html). Six weeks later it started "operation Cast Lead", known in the Arab world as the "Gaza.Massacre".
When I write "a little more goodwill", I mean, for very good reasons, a little more goodwill from the Israeli side.
This is a matter between Israeli Jews and Arab states. The Palestinians have nothing to do with it. Furthermore, an important difference between the Jewish and the Palestinian refugees is that the Arab states did not want the Palestinians to come to their countries, while Israel wanted the Arab Jews to go to Israel; they wanted "human material" to build their nation. Israel even promoted the flow of Arab Jews into Israel with bomb attacks on Jews in Iraq.
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