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 the 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.
