The Palestinians: Victims Of A Complicated History
By
Allan C. Brownfeld
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The
brutal terrorist assault by Hamas, which killed innocent men, women
and children in Israel, and the continuing Israeli reprisal, should
focus attention on the complicated history of this region. For more
than a hundred years, Palestinians have been confronted by a history
they did not create. As antisemitism grew in Europe, culminating in the
Holocaust, Zionists began emigrating to Palestine, eventually creating a
Jewish state. Indigenous Palestinians were displaced from their native
land, although they were in no way responsible for the tragedy faced by
European Jews.
From
1947-49, Zionist militias and the Israeli military were responsible for
the deaths of an estimated 12,000 Palestinians while engaging in a
large-scale campaign of what Israeli historian Benny Morris and others
now call “ethnic cleansing.” This resulted in the permanent exile of
more than 750,000 people and the destruction of more than 400
Palestinian towns and villages. This is what Palestinians refer to as
the Nakba (“catastrophe”). Many of their descendants now live in Gaza
and in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied in violation of
international law for more than fifty years and which the Netanyahu
government now speaks of annexing.
Sadly,
European Jews and Palestinians have both been victimized by history.
Many early Zionists, who wished to create a Jewish homeland in
Palestine, recognized that the land was already populated, and lamented
the fact that early Jewish settlers were indifferent to the rights of
the Palestinians. Unlike many of his fellow Zionists, who persisted in
fantasizing about “a land without people for the people without a
land,” the Russian Jewish writer and philosopher Ahad Ha’am from the
very beginning refused to ignore the existence of Arabs in Palestine.
He paid his first visit to Palestine in 1891.
In
his essay, “The Truth From the Land of Israel,” he says that it is an
illusion to think of Palestine as an empty country: “We tend to believe
abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, a
non-cultivated wilderness, and anyone can come here and buy as much land
as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is
difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which is fallow.”
The
behavior of Jewish settlers toward the Arabs disturbed him. They had
not learned from experience as a minority within a wider population,
“but reacted with the cruelty of slaves who had suddenly become kings,
treating their neighbors with contempt.” The Arabs, he wrote,
understood very well what Zionist intentions were in the land “if the
time should come when the lives of our people in Palestine should
develop to the extent that, to a smaller or greater degree, they usurp
the place of the local population, the latter will not yield easily…We
have to treat the local population with love and respect, justly and
rightly. And what do our brethren in the land of Israel do? Exactly
the opposite!”
Jewish
morals and ethics were at the heart of Ahad Ha’am’s brand of
nationalism, and to the end of his life he denounced any compromise with
political expediency. In 1913, protesting against a boycott of Arab
labor, he wrote to a friend: “…I can’t put up with the idea that our
brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to humans of
another people, and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: If this
is so now, what will our relations to the others be like if, at the end
of time, we shall really achieve power in Eretz Israel? And if this be
the messiah, I do not wish to see his coming.”
In
1922, young Jewish zealots killed an Arab boy. This brought a cry of
rage from Ahad Ha’am: “Jews and blood —-are there two greater opposites
than these? Is this the goal for which our ancestors longed and for
which they suffered all those tribulations? Is this the dream of the
return to Zion which our people dreamt of for thousands of years; that
we should come to Zion to pollute its soil with the spilling of innocent
blood?”
Ahad Ha’am was
hardly alone in voicing such misgivings. Yosef Luria, a Romanian-born
journalist and teacher who settled in Palestine in 1907, wrote in the
newspaper Ha-Olam in 1911: “During all the years of our labor in
Palestine we completely forgot that there were Arabs in the country…We
failed to pay heed to one people—the people residing in this country and
attached to it.”
In
1925, under the leadership of Arthur Ruppin, an association called Brit
Shalom (Covenant of Peace) was established in Palestine and proposed
binationalism as the proper solution to the conflict between Zionists
and Arabs, two peoples claiming the same land. In their credo, issued
in Jerusalem in 1927, Brit Shalom said it was intent on creating in
Palestine “a binational state, in which the two peoples will enjoy
totally equal rights as befits the two elements shaping the country’s
destiny, irrespective of which of the two is numerically superior at any
given time.” Its spokesmen included such respected figures as Robert
Weltsch, editor of Judische Bundschau, the journal of the German Zionist
movement, Jacob Thon, from the settlement department of the Jewish
Agency, Judah Magnes, chancellor and first president of the Hebrew
University, and such university faculty members as Martin Buber, Hugo
Germann, and Gershon Scholem. For these men, Zionism was a moral
crusade or it was nothing.
Brit
Shalom leader Arthur Ruppin was saddened by the growing disparity
between universal moral values and narrow Jewish nationalism. “What
continually worries me,” he wrote, “is the relationship between between
Jews and Arabs in Palestine…the two peoples have become more estranged
in their thinking. Neither has any understanding of the other , and yet I
have no doubt that Zionism will end in a catastrophe if we do not
succeed in finding a common platform.”
The
views of Brit Shalom were defeated by the militant Zionism of figures
such as David Ben-Gurion. In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein
warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create
a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against
which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish
state.”
Another prominent
German Jew, the philosopher Martin Buber, spoke out in 1942 against the
“aim of the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of international
maneuvers.” From Jerusalem, in the midst of the hostilities that broke
out after Israel unilaterally declared independence in May 1948, Buber
cried with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion;
it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.”
Not
long after Israeli independence was achieved, David Ben-Gurion told
Nahum Goldmann, the Zionist leader, “Why should the Arabs make peace?
If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is
natural: We had take their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but
what does that mean to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from
Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, but what is that to
them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but
was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and
stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
Prior
to Workd War ll, the majority of American Jews and Jews in other
countries opposed Zionism. They believed that Judaism was a religion of
universal values, not a nationality. Only the rise of Nazism caused
many to support the establishment of a Jewish state. More and more
Jewish Americans are coming to believe that this was a mistaken choice.
The current Netanyahu government’s opposition to a two-state solution
and its plan to annex the West Bank is particularly rejected by most
Jewish Americans.
Many
Israelis concerned about their country’s treatment of Palestinians
lament its departure from Jewish values. Professor David Shulman of the
Hebrew University notes that, “No matter how we look at it, unless our
minds have been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious right, the
occupation is a crime. It is first of all based on the permanent
disenfranchisement of a huge population…In the end, it is the ongoing
moral failure of the country as a whole that is most consequential, most
dangerous, most unacceptable. This failure weighs heavily on our
humanity. We are, so we claim, the children of the prophets. Once,
they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all that can be known about
slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate, expulsion, exile. I find
it astonishing that we of all,people, have reinvented apartheid in the
West Bank.”
In order to
understand current developments in the Middle East, it is important to
review its history. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been victims of
a complex history. How to bring justice to both groups should be the
goal of the international community and of our own government.
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