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12.04.02, 18:17
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Jews for Justice in the Middle East
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.
Introduction
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
Early History of the Region
The British Mandate Period
1920-1948
The UN Partition of Palestine
Statehood and Expulsion - 1948
The 1967 War and Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
The History of Terrorism in the Region
Jewish Criticism of Zionism
Zionism and the Holocaust
General Considerations
Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel
Intifada 2000 And The "Peace Process"
Views Of The Future
Conclusion I For Jewish Readers
Conclusion II
