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.
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.
Click on the next chapter
