"Right of return" (M.E. R)
mannybolone
Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
Can someone please offer a nuanced explanation of the debate over the "right of return" as it relates to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? I'd like to get a more informed discussion of it than reading Wikipedia talking points, 
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?
Comments
ESSAY
Commentary 2001
Rights and Wrongs
History and the Palestinian "Right of Return"
By Efraim Karsh
By the early 1990s, most Israelis, on both sides of the political spectrum, had come to embrace a two-state solution to their decades-long conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, a solution based on the idea of trading "land for peace." For these Israelis, and especially for the doves among them, the twilight hours of Ehud Barak???s short-lived government came as a terrible shock.
During a span of six months, from the Camp David summit of July 2000 to the Taba talks a few days before his crushing electoral defeat in February 2001, Barak???s government offered to cede virtually the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state, and made breathtaking concessions over Israel???s capital city of Jerusalem. But to its amazement, rather than reciprocating this sweepingly comprehensive offer of land with a similarly generous offer of peace, the Palestinians responded with wholesale violence.
At Taba, the Palestinians also insisted, with renewed adamancy, on another non-negotiable condition that had been lying somewhat dormant in the background of the Oslo process begun in 1993. No peace would be possible, they declared, unless Israel guaranteed the right of the Arab refugees of the 1948-49 war, and their descendants, to return to territory that is now part of the state of Israel, and to be compensated financially for lost property and for decades of privation and suffering.
The reintroduction of this issue, at a moment when Israel had effectively agreed to withdraw to its pre-1967 lines, shook the Israeli peace camp to the core. "Implementing the ???right of return??? means eradicating Israel," lamented Amos Oz, the renowned author and peace advocate. "It will make the Jewish people a minor ethnic group at the mercy of Muslims, a ???protected minority,??? just as fundamentalist Islam would have it."
Oz???s plaintive cry struck no responsive chord with his Palestinian counterparts, however. "We as Palestinians do not view our job to safeguard Zionism. It is our job to safeguard our rights," stated the prominent politician Hanan Ashrawi. "The refugee problem," she continued, "has to be solved in total as a central issue of solving the Palestinian question based on the implementation of international law"; for not only has this right of return "never been relinquished or in any way modified," it "has been affirmed annually by the UN member states."
As it happens, Hanan Ashrawi is very much mistaken. There is no such collective "right of return" to be "implemented." But to grasp what is at issue here requires a deeper look into history, demography, international law, and politics.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the Palestinians??? legal case, their foremost argument for a "right of return" has always rested on a claim of unprovoked victimhood. In the Palestinians??? account, they were and remain the hapless targets of a Zionist grand design to dispossess them from their land. In the words of Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen), Yasser Arafat???s second-in-command and a chief architect of the 1993 Oslo accords: "When we talk about the right of return, we talk about the return of refugees to Israel, because Israel was the one who deported them." The political activist Salman Abu Sitta has put it in even more implacable terms:
"There is nothing like it in modern history. A foreign minority attacking the national majority in its own homeland, expelling virtually all of its population, obliterating its physical and cultural landmarks, planning and supporting this unholy enterprise from abroad, and claiming that this hideous crime is a divine intervention and victory for civilisation."
The claim of premeditated dispossession is itself not only baseless, but the inverse of the truth. Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, the Palestinians were themselves the aggressors in the 1948-49 war, and it was they who attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to "cleanse" a neighbouring ethnic community. Had the Palestinians and the Arab world accepted the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947, calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and not sought to subvert it by force of arms, there would have been no refugee problem in the first place.
It is no coincidence that neither Arab propagandists nor Israeli "new historians" have ever produced any evidence of a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians during the 1948 war. For such a plan never existed. In accepting the UN partition resolution, the Jewish leadership in Palestine acquiesced in the principle of a two-state solution, and all subsequent deliberations were based on the assumption that Palestine???s Arabs would remain as equal citizens in the Jewish state. As David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel???s first prime minister, told the leadership of his Labour (Mapai) party on December 3, 1947:
"In our state there will be non-Jews as well-and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well."
In line with this conception, committees laying the groundwork for the nascent Jewish state discussed in detail the establishment of an Arabic-language press, the improvement of health in the Arab sector, the incorporation of Arab officials in the government, the integration of Arabs within the police and the ministry of education, and Arab-Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction.
The Arabs, however, remained unimpressed by Jewish protestations of peace and comity. A few days before the passing of the UN partition resolution, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former mufti of Jerusalem and then head of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), told an Egyptian newspaper that "we would rather die than accept minority rights" in a prospective Jewish state. The secretary-general of the Arab League, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, promised to "defend Palestine no matter how strong the opposition." "You will achieve nothing with talk of compromise or peace," he told a secret delegation of peace-seeking Zionists in September 1947:
"For us there is only one test, the test of strength. . . . We will try to rout you. I am not sure we will succeed, but we will try. We succeeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lost Spain and Persia, and may lose Palestine. But it is too late for a peaceable solution."
In the event, the threats to abort the birth of Israel by violence heralded the Palestinians??? collective undoing. Even before the outbreak of hostilities, many of them had already fled their homes. Still larger numbers left before war reached their doorstep. By April 1948, a month before Israel???s declaration of independence, and at a time when the Arabs appeared to be winning the war, some 100,000 Palestinians, mostly from the main urban centres of Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and from villages in the coastal plain, had gone. Within another month those numbers had nearly doubled; and by early June, according to an internal Hagana report, some 390,000 Palestinians had left. By the time the war was over in 1949, the number of refugees had risen to between 550,000 and 600,000.
Why did such vast numbers of Palestinians take to the road? There were the obvious reasons commonly associated with war: fear, disorientation, economic privation. But to these must be added the local Palestinians??? disillusionment with their own leadership.
The British High Commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, summarized what was happening:
The collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable p eriod and the tempo is increasing
Hussein Khalidi, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, was more forthright. "Forty days after the declaration of a jihad, and I am shattered," he complained to a fellow Palestinian. "Everyone has left me. Six [AHC members] are in Cairo, two are in Damascus-I won???t be able to hold on much longer. . . . Everyone is leaving. Everyone who has a check or some money - off he goes to Egypt, to Lebanon, to Damascus."
The desertion of the elites had a stampede effect on the middle classes and the peasantry. But huge numbers of Palestinians were also driven out of their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces, whether out of military considerations or, more actively, to prevent them from becoming citizens of the Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example of such a forced exodus, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa against their wishes and almost certainly on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, despite sustained Jewish efforts to convince them to stay. Only days earlier, thousands of Arabs in Tiberias had been similarly forced out by their own leaders. In Jaffa, the largest Arab community of mandatory Palestine, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea. And then there were the tens of thousands of rural villagers who were likewise forced out of their homes by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the armies of the Arab states.
None of this is to deny that Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinians. But this occurred not within the framework of a premeditated plan but in the heat of battle, and was dictated predominantly by ad-hoc military considerations. Even the largest of these expulsions - during the battle over the town of Lydda in July 1948 - emanated from a string of unexpected developments on the ground and was in no way foreseen in military plans for the capture of the town. Finally, whatever the extent of the Israeli expulsions, they accounted for only a small fraction of the total exodus.
In an interview with the London Telegraph in August 1948, the Palestinian leader Emile Ghoury blamed not Israel but the Arab states for the creation of the refugee problem; so did the organizers of protest demonstrations that took place in many West Bank towns on the first anniversary of Israel???s establishment. During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to discover that while the refugees
"express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their home. . . . I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over."
The prevailing conviction among Palestinians that they had been, and remained, the victims of their fellow Arabs rather than of Israeli aggression was grounded not only in experience but in the larger facts of inter-Arab politics. Indeed, had the Jewish state lost the war, its territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians but rather divided among the invading forces, for the simple reason that none of the Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. Perhaps the clearest sign of this was that neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determination in the parts of Palestine they conquered during the 1948 war: respectively, Gaza and the West Bank. As the American academic, Philip Hitti, put the Arab view to a joint British and American committee of inquiry in 1946: "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not."
But the appeal to history - to what did or did not happen in 1948-49 - is only one arrow in the Palestinian quiver. Another is the appeal to international law, and in particular to the United Nations resolution that, as Hanan Ashrawi sternly reminds us, "has been affirmed annually by the UN member states."
The resolution in question, number 194, was passed by the UN General Assembly on December 11, 1948, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli war. The first thing to be noted is that, like all General Assembly resolutions (and unlike Security Council resolutions), it is an expression of sentiment and carries no binding force whatsoever. The second thing to be noted is that its primary purpose was not to address the refugee problem but rather to create a "conciliation commission" aimed at facilitating a comprehensive peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Only one of its fifteen paragraphs alludes to refugees in general - not "Arab refugees" - in language that could as readily apply to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were then being driven from the Arab states in revenge for the situation in Palestine.
This interpretation is not merely fanciful. The resolution expressly stipulates that compensation for the property of those refugees choosing not to return "should be made good by the governments or the authorities responsible." Had the provision applied only to Palestinians, Israel would surely have been singled out as the compensating party.
Most importantly, far from recommending the return of the Palestinian refugees as the only viable solution, Resolution 194 put this particular option on a par with resettlement elsewhere. It advocated, in its own words, that "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date," but also that efforts should be made to facilitate the "resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees."
It was, indeed, just these clauses in Resolution 194 that, at the time, made it anathema to the Arabs, who opposed it vehemently. Linking resolution of the refugee issue to the achievement of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace; placing on the Arab states some of the burden for resolving it; equating return and resettlement as possible solutions, and diluting any preference for the former by means of the vague phrase, "at the earliest practicable date"; and above all establishing no absolute "right of return," the measure was seen, correctly, as rather less than useful to Arab purposes.
Only in the late 1960s, and with the connivance of their Soviet and third-world supporters, did the Arabs begin to transform Resolution 194 into the cornerstone of an utterly spurious legal claim to a "right of return," buttressing it with thinly argued and easily refutable appeals to other international covenants on the treatment of refugees and displaced persons.
And the refugees themselves? As is well-known, they were kept in squalid camps for decades as a means of derogating Israel in the eyes of the West and arousing pan-Arab sentiments. And there large numbers of them have remained, with the conspicuous exception of those allowed to settle and take citizenship in Jordan.
At the end of the 1948-49 war, the Israeli government set the number of Palestinian refugees at 550,000-600,000; the research department of the British Foreign Office leaned toward the higher end of this estimate. But within a year, as large masses of people sought to benefit from the unprecedented influx of international funds to the area, some 914,000 alleged refugees had been registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
More than a half-century later, these exaggerated initial numbers have swollen still further: as of June 2000, according to UNRWA, the total had climbed close to three and three-quarters million. Of course, UNRWA itself admits that the statistics are inflated, since they "are based on information voluntarily supplied by refugees primarily for the purpose of obtaining access to Agency services." (The numbers also include close to a million-and-a-half Jordanian citizens.) But the PLO, for its part, has set a still higher figure of 5 million refugees.
Aside from demanding an unconditional right of return for these individuals, Palestinian spokesmen have calculated that justice will also require monetary "reparations" in the amount of roughly $500 billion - half for alleged material losses, and the rest for lost income, psychological trauma, and non-material losses. To this figure would also be added the hundreds of billions to be claimed by the refugees??? host countries (notably Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan), bringing the total to about $1 trillion.
Needless to say, Israel has challenged UNRWA???s figures; it has unofficially estimated the current number of refugees and their families at closer to 2 million. But even if the more restrictive Israeli figures were to be accepted, it is certainly true that the influx of these refugees into the Jewish state would irrevocably transform its demographic composition. At the moment, Jews constitute about 79 percent of Israel???s 6-million-plus population, a figure that would rapidly dwindle to under 60 percent. Given the Palestinians??? far higher birth rate, the implementation of a "right of return," even by the most conservative estimates, would be tantamount to Israel???s destruction.
Not that this stark scenario should surprise anyone. As early as October 1949, the Egyptian politician Muhammad Salah al-Din, soon to become his country???s foreign minister, wrote in the Egyptian daily al-Misri that "in demanding the restoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabs intend that they shall return as the masters of the homeland and not as slaves. More specifically, they intend to annihilate the state of Israel."
In subsequent years, this frank understanding of what the "right of return" was all about would be reiterated by most Arab leaders, from Gamal Abdel Nasser, to Hafez al-Assad, to Yasser Arafat. Only during the 1990s did the PLO temporarily elide the issue as it concentrated on gaining control of territories vacated by Israel as part of the Oslo peace process. Its Israeli interlocutors, for their part, chose to think of the "right of return" as a PLO bargaining chip, to be somehow disposed of symbolically or through a token gesture of good will.
Throughout the 1990s, successive academic study groups, made up of the most earnestly forthcoming Israelis and the most grudgingly tractable Palestinians, devoted themselves to formulating a compromise proposal on this issue. They all failed-a fact that should have raised a large warning flag. For the "right of return" is, for the Palestinians, not a bargaining chip; it is the heart of the matter.
That is why, over the decades, other perfectly commendable Israeli gestures toward dealing with the plight of the refugees have consistently met with indifference or rebuff. In 1949, Israel offered to take back 100,000 Palestinian refugees; the Arab states refused. Nevertheless, some 50,000 refugees have returned over the decades under the terms of Israel???s family-reunification program. 90,000 Palestinians have also been allowed to gain residence in territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority since the beginning of the Oslo process. Millions have been paid by Israel in settlement of individual claims of lost property.
Indeed, if one were to insist on the applicability of international law, here is one instance where it speaks unequivocally. In 1948-49, the Palestinians and Arab states launched a war of aggression against the Jewish community and the newly-proclaimed state of Israel, in the process driving out from their territories hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews and seizing their worldly goods. Ever since, these same aggressors have been suing to be made whole for the consequences of their own failed aggression. Both legally and morally, the idea is grotesque.
But in the end none of this matters. What is at issue in the dispute over the "right of return" is not practicality, not demography, not legality, and certainly not history. What is at issue is not even the refugees themselves, shamefully left in homelessness and destitution, and nourished on hatred and false dreams, while all over the world tens of millions of individuals in similar or worse straits have been resettled and have rebuilt their lives. What is at issue is quite simply the existence of Israel-or rather, to put it in the more honest terms of Muhammed Salah al-Din, the still vibrant hope among many Arabs and Palestinians of annihilating that existence, if not by one means then by another.
Tactically, "we may win or lose," declared Faisal al-Husseini, the "moderate" minister for Jerusalem affairs in Yasser Arafat???s Palestinian Authority, in late March of this year; "but our eyes will continue to aspire to the strategic goal, namely, to Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea"-that is, to a Palestine in place of an Israel. "Whatever we get now," he continued, "cannot make us forget this supreme truth." Until this "supreme truth" is buried once and for all, no amount of Israeli good will, partial compensation, or symbolic acceptance of responsibility can hope to create anything but an appetite for more.
Professor Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King???s College, University of London, and the author (with Inari Karsh) of Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 and Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians, among other books. Reprinted from Commentary, May 2001, by permission, all rights reserved.
Return Address
by Efraim Karsh
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 05.16.05
During a fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip in June 1949, a senior British official was surprised to discover that while the Palestinian refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes." Fifty-six years later the Palestinians have rewritten their national narrative into an unblemished story of victimhood that makes Israel, rather than Arab states, the sole culprit of the nakba, the catastrophe, as Palestinians call the collapse and dispersal of their society during the 1948 war.
This narrative has led Palestinian leaders to demand a right of return, for the descendants of those displaced in 1948, to territory that is now part of Israel proper. And today, even at a relatively optimistic moment in the Middle East--with the death of Yasir Arafat seeming to clear an opening for negotiations and Israeli settlers set to leave Gaza and part of the West Bank--the right of return as an animating issue of Palestinian politics simply will not go away.
In a televised speech last Sunday, on the occasion of Israel's Independence Day, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas described the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948 as an unprecedented historic crime and vowed his unwavering refusal to ever "accept this injustice." "On that day, a crime was committed against a people, who were uprooted from their land and whose existence was destroyed and who were forced to flee to all areas of the world," he said. "The refugees have a full right to fulfill the right of return. We strongly object to the possibility they would become citizens of the countries they live in."
Abbas's remarks came as Palestinians commemorated the nakba by staging rallies and demonstrations throughout the West Bank and Gaza to demand the right of return for all refugees to their original homes inside Israel. Accompanied by a virulent anti-Israel media campaign, the events reached their peak at midday, when sirens were sounded throughout the Palestinian controlled territories and people observed a minute of silence to mourn Israel's creation. In some areas, gunmen opened fire into the air as a sign of mourning.
In a joint statement, the main Palestinian organizations in the territories, notably Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, precluded the possibility of peace with Israel without the return of all refugees to their original dwellings. "We call on our masses in the homeland and the Diaspora to mark this painful occasion by making it clear to the world and the occupation that the issue of the refugees is the core of the conflict and that there would be no solution without their return home in line with United Nations resolution 194," the statement said.
Yet far from recommending the return of the Palestinian refugees as the only viable solution, Resolution 194 (passed on December 11, 1948) also advocates the "resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees" in other countries; indeed, that provision made the resolution anathema to the Arab states, which opposed it vehemently and voted unanimously against it. This, however, did not prevent Arabs and Palestinians from transforming the resolution into the cornerstone of an utterly spurious legal claim to a right of return, which in their internal discourse is invariably equated with the destruction of Israel through demographic subversion.
As early as October 1949, the Egyptian politician Muhammad Salah al Din, soon to become his country's foreign minister, wrote in the Egyptian daily Al Misri: "In demanding the restoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabs intend that they shall return as the masters of the homeland and not as slaves. More specifically, they intend to annihilate the state of Israel." In subsequent years, this concept was to be reiterated by all Arab leaders, from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Hafez Assad to Yasir Arafat. In the recent words of Hanan Ashrawi, "The fact that the Zionist project requires a Jewish majority does not justify conceding the legitimate right [of the refugees] to return and to receive compensation."
The right of return was enshrined in the guiding principles of the Palestinian Authority, published shortly after its establishment in mid-May 1994, which pledged "to work for the achievement of the legitimate Palestinian goals: independence, freedom, equality, and the return, through a graduated process." This graduated process was not confined to the West Bank and Gaza, conquered by Israel during the Six Day War. The document makes extensive use of the language and vocabulary of the PLO's 1974 "phased plan," which stipulated that Palestinians take whatever territory was surrendered to them by Israel, then use it as a springboard for further territorial gains until achieving the "complete liberation of Palestine."
While freely spelling out in inter-Arab forums the dire consequences of the right of return, PLO spokesmen took great care to hide the essence of this "right" from their Israeli interlocutors and Western audiences. It was only at the Camp David summit of July 2000, where Ehud Barak agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, that Israelis were confronted with the full extent of this demand for the first time. "Peace will not be achieved without the refugees getting back their sacred rights, which cannot be touched," Abbas said, explaining the reasons for the summit's failure. "It is the individual right of every refugee, and no one can reach an agreement in this matter without his consent." To dispel any doubts about the nature of this "right" he emphasized that "the right of return means a return to Israel, not to a Palestinian state."
Those who were disposed to regard these words as lip service by a lackluster apparatchik deferring to the omnipotent and hopelessly intransigent Arafat were to be bitterly disillusioned. Shortly after Arafat's death in November 2004, in his address to a special session of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah, he swore to "follow in the path of the late leader Yasir Arafat and ... work toward fulfilling his dream. ... We promise you that our hearts will not rest until the right of return for our people is achieved and the tragedy of the refugees is ended."
And therein lies the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. For to insist on the full implementation of the right of return, at a time when Israel has long agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state roughly along the pre-1967 lines, indicates that, in the Palestinian perception, peace is not a matter of adjusting borders and territory but rather a euphemism for the annihilation of the Jewish state. And while Abbas's statement in the wake of Arafat's death was quickly excused as posturing for the January 2005 elections for the PA chairmanship, the incontrovertible fact is that it was fully commensurate with his and the PLO's statements and actions during the 1990s, not to mention those of the more militant religious groups. All of which leaves little doubt that the right of return is not a bargaining chip but rather the heart of the Palestinian grievance against Israel.
One therefore hopes that in his upcoming meeting with Abbas (slated for the end of May) George W. Bush will inform the Palestinian leader in no uncertain terms of his unequivocal and non-negotiable rejection of the right of return--which, a fter all, negates the vision of two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, living side by side. Only a two-state solution will bring peace to the region. But until Palestinian leaders renounce the right of return, there is every reason to believe that it is a one, not two, state solution they have in mind.
Efraim Karsh is the head of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King's College, University of London.
Politics by Other Means
by Benny Morris
Post date: 03.17.04
Issue date: 03.22.04
A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
By Ilan Pappe
(Cambridge University Press, 333 pp., $22)
Ilan Pappe and I walked a stretch together in uneasy companionship, but we have now parted ways. In the late 1980s and early 1990s we belonged to a group dubbed the "New Historians" of Israel, which also included Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev. This group, contrary to the conspiratorial image projected by our critics, was never a close-knit or monolithic school of intellectuals who plotted together around the table at Friday-night meals. Some of us barely knew one another. Each, in different institutions and different cities and different countries (indeed, only Pappe was on the faculty of an Israeli university), had plied his craft alone and reached his conclusions on his own. But we had all written histories focusing on Israel and Palestine in the 1940s, and they had all appeared, mostly in English, in the late 1980s, and taken together they had shaken the Zionist historiographic establishment and permanently undermined the traditional Zionist narrative of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
In some measure, our histories also undermined the traditional Arab narratives of the conflict (as in my book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, which argued that there had been no Zionist master plan of expulsion and that no systematic policy of expulsion was implemented in 1948). But the thrust of the "New Historiography" was that the century-old conflict was not a straightforward clash between good and evil, that it could not be properly understood in black-and-white terms. Both sides, it was implied if not argued explicitly, had strong claims, and both sides had just grievances. The documentation released in American, British, U.N., and (principally) Israeli archives in the 1980s showed that the Zionist side was not blameless in the conflict, and had sometimes made wrong decisions and indulged in policies and practices that were morally dubious if not downright unethical.
But that was the limit of our consensus. Propagandistic or official historians usually sound the same happy note, and for the same reasons; but dissenting historians usually are polyphonic, and the relationships among them are often troubled, if not flatly unhappy. In the case of Pappe and myself, there was always methodological discord. We both knew that official Zionist historiography was deeply flawed and needed to be reassessed and rewritten on the basis of the evidence that had become available; but we approached history, and the writing of history, from antithetical standpoints. Pappe regarded history through the prism of contemporary politics and consciously wrote history with an eye to serving political ends. My own view was that while historians, as citizens, had political views and aims, their scholarly task was to try to arrive at the truth about a historical event or process, to illuminate the past as objectively and accurately as possible. I believed, and still believe, that there is such a thing as historical truth; that it exists independently of, and can be detached from, the subjectivities of scholars; that it is the historian's duty to try to reach it by using as many and as varied sources as he can. When writing history, the historian should ignore contemporary politics and struggle against his political inclinations as he tries to penetrate the murk of the past. Pappe--and, implicitly, my Zionist critics such as Anita Shapira and Shabtai Teveth--have argued that no one is capable of abandoning his educational, ideological, and political baggage, and that I, too, have been motivated, consciously or subconsciously, by my politics and have reflected (according to Pappe) my solid Zionist convictions or (according to the establishment Zionists) my solid anti-Zionist convictions.
From the first Pappe allowed his politics to hold sway over his history. Initially he was rather restrained. His first book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51, published in 1988, was bland and flat in tone. Perhaps this was due to its origins as a doctoral dissertation; perhaps there were other reasons. In any event, the book avoided blunt iconoclasm, and its innovations are extremely hesitant (unlike Avi Shlaim in his Collusion Across the Jordan, published the same year, where it was trenchantly argued that the Yishuv--the Jewish community in Palestine--and the Hashemite rulers of Jordan had colluded to limit their war in 1948 and to nip in the bud the emergence of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, as endorsed by the U.N. partition resolution of November 1947). In his second book, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951, which appeared in 1992, Pappe allowed his politics more leeway, and they are apparent in his descriptions and in his interpretations; but here, too, there is an effort toward objectivity and accuracy.
In both books Pappe in effect tells his readers: "This is what happened." This is strange, because it directly conflicts with a second major element in his historiographical outlook. Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next. Moreover, every narrative is inherently political and, consciously or not, serves political ends. Each historian is justified in shaping his narrative to promote particular political purposes. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, years ago confronted Pappe with the ultimate problem regarding historical relativism: if all narratives are equally legitimate and there is no historical truth, then the narrative of Holocaust deniers is as valid as that of Holocaust affirmers. Pappe did not offer a persuasive answer, beyond asserting lamely that there exists a large body of indisputable oral testimony affirming that the Holocaust took place.
This broaches the third element in Pappe's historiographical approach: his faith that oral testimony is valuable and valid, and that historians should base their narratives also on the testimony and the memory of witnesses, even decades after the event. But in his new book, as in his previous books, Pappe makes no use at all--or almost no use--of oral testimony, basing his work on primary and secondary written sources. Perhaps he does not really believe in the value of oral history; or perhaps he found the work involved too stressful and time-consuming. In any event, A History of Modern Palestine makes no use of oral sources.
My own view is that the historian must base his work on primary written sources, that is, on contemporaneous documents, and must be exceedingly wary of oral history, especially when the events that are being remembered are morally sensitive and politically charged, and occurred many years ago. In the absence of contemporary documents, the historian may occasionally draw upon oral testimony for "color" or a sense of atmosphere, but never to reconstruct what actually happened.
Since so much of the debate about the New Historians is political, I should add that Pappe and I differ not only in our methods but also in our politics. We are both men of the left; but whereas since the late 1960s I have consistently voted Labor or Meretz (a Zionist party to the left of Labor), Pappe, so far as I know, has always voted the Israel Communist Party ticket (under its different names) and has figured repeatedly in the party's list of Knesset candidates. During the past few years Pappe has veered even further leftward. Although his party still advocates a two-state solution, Pappe, like his mentor Edward Said, believes that the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is a single bi-national state in all of Palestine. (I shall return to this theme.)
So, as I say, Pappe and I always were uncomfortable companions in our historical travels. The outbreak, at the end of September 2000, of the current intifada, which I regard as a Palestinian rebellion against the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and as a political-terroristic assault on Israel's existence (and also as an offshoot of fundamentalist Islam's ongoing assault on the West, in which Israel, unfortunately, figures as a front-line outpost), has, like a giant centrifuge, sent the New Historians spinning toward opposite corners of the political universe. It has separated the anti-Zionist goats from the Zionist sheep, and has accentuated their goatish and sheepish natures. By now it would not be incorrect to call Pappe, as well as Shlaim, an anti-Zionist.
Shlaim's The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, which was published five years ago, is highly critical of the Zionist movement and Israel. Since the start of the current intifada, he has moved steadily to the left--or is it, really, to the right? After all, he shares his anti-Israeli analysis with European neo-fascists and the Islamic jihadists, who openly advocate Israel's destruction in the name of medieval religious values. In an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune, Shlaim recently identified with the anti-Semitic British official James Troutbeck, who in June, 1948 described the emergent state of Israel--the one that had just been assaulted by a bevy of Arab states, in defiance of the United Nations Partition Resolution of November, 1947--as a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders." "Today," Shlaim continued, "a similar sense of moral outrage is felt toward the rightist government of Ariel Sharon by people throughout the world."
As for Pappe, the outbreak of the Palestinian revolt has thrust him into academic and political prominence as one of the most outspoken Israeli advocates of a Western boycott of Israel's universities. During the past three years, many pro-Palestinian academics in the West have campaigned (not very successfully) to persuade their universities to cut off contact with their Israeli counterparts and to block research and investment funds from reaching Israel's universities; academic journals have refused to consider or to publish papers by Israelis; a handful of academics have refused to supervise Israeli postgraduate students; and scholars, such as Eugene Rogan, head of the Middle East Centre at Oxford's St. Antony's College, have refused to give lectures in a country governed by Ariel Sharon (presumably they would give lectures in countries run by the likes of Bashar al-Assad and the Ayatollah Khamenei). Pappe has been at the forefront of this effort. It is worth noting that he has not declined to receive wages from a university subsidized by the government whose policies he finds so repulsive. It is also worth noting--here Pappe's logic becomes as flawed as his ethics--that Israel's academic community, the one that has been boycotted by "progressives" in the West, has been in the vanguard of the struggle within Israel to recognize the Palestinians and to reach a political compromise. Israel's universities, as Prime Minister Sharon and Education Minister Limor Livnat regularly recognize, are a mainstay of the Israeli left--and none more so than Haifa University, Pappe's own institution, which has the highest proportion of Arab staff and students (the latter about 20 percent) in Israel.
This has been Pappe's political evolution. A History of Modern Palestine is a milestone in his evolution as an historian. He sets out to tell the story of Palestine, which he far less frequently also refers to as the Land of Israel, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, starting with Napoleon's invasion in 1799. It is mainly the story of two peoples--Arabs and Jews--and the interaction between them. Needless to say, a great many pages are devoted to the development of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; but Pappe is at pains, as he tells us in his foreword, not to confine himself to the usual tale of high politics and military history--to the thoughts, the words, and the actions of leaders and generals. In keeping with the politically correct norms of the profession in the contemporary West, he focuses, rather, on "the victims" of "the invasions, occupations, expulsions, discrimination and racism" to which Palestine has been subject. His "heroes," he says, are the "women, children, peasants, workers, ordinary city dwellers, peaceniks, human rights activists"--and his "'villains' ... the arrogant generals, the greedy politicians, the cynical statesmen and the misogynist men."
It goes almost without saying that Pappe's "victims" are primarily Palestine's Arabs; and all, or almost all, of the "greedy" and the "cynical" are Israelis. In fairness I should add that he does dish up some "misogynist" Palestinians, which is not surprising, given the fact that in Arab and Islamic societies women are by tradition, and often by law, third-class members, who often lack basic rights (in some countries they have no vote, in others they cannot drive cars, and so on). In this respect, Palestinian society is similar to Syrian or Jordanian or Egyptian society, but Pappe papers this over by repeatedly pointing to the continuously "improving" nature of Palestinian women's status at certain points in time--for example, during the two Palestinian intifadas or rebellions against Israel.
Unfortunately, much of what Pappe tries to sell his readers is complete fabrication. In trying to demonstrate women's growing political involvement (and, incidentally, Israeli beastliness), he tells us at one point that "one third of the overall [Palestinian] casualties [in the intifada of 1987-1991] were women," and that "rural women" took "a central role, boldly confronting the army." Among urban women, the proportion of participants in the intifada was even higher, he says. All of this is pure invention. In fact, women constituted about 5 percent of the Palestinian casualties in the first intifada. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, eleven hundred Palestinians died at the hands of Israeli army and security personnel during that uprising, and of these, fifty-six were women. Even a cursory glance at film footage of the intifada's riots shows that there were generally no female participants. Women did make an appearance, in small numbers, when pleading with soldiers not to take away arrested men for questioning or when mourning male casualties lying bloodied in the streets; but the women remained remarkably absent from the front lines of the intifada--as they remained, and still remain, absent from the front lines of the current intifada and from the coffee shops of the West Bank and Gaza and other venues where serious matters in the Arab Middle East are discussed, and sometimes decided. Indeed, the recent surge in Islamic fundamentalism in Palestinian society has restricted women even more firmly to hearth and home than was the case before the 1970s. Arafat, with his good sense for public relations, inducted two women--Hanan Ashrawi and Umm Jihad--into the political elite, and Arafat's Fatah has dispatched a handful of female suicide bombers into Israel's cities, but these are token representations of a gender that is essentially disempowered in Palestinian society.
Pappe's periodic insertion of women into the unfolding history is artificial, often absurd, and occasionally without foundation in the sources. He tells us--without offering any source or concrete example--that, following the Young Turks' reformist revolution in Istanbul in 1908, "women [in Palestine] too--but the elite only--began attempting to change their lives.... They organized on a gender basis for the first ti me." Organized what? He doesn't tell us. And then he adds: "True, only among the Zionist immigrants did women actually work--but even here rhetoric was more abundant than fundamental change in gender relations." In other words, after completely inventing a small feminist revolution among Palestinian women, Pappe, implicitly admitting that nothing of the sort occurred, goes on to assail the Zionists for being no better. The comparison is ridiculous. While women were certainly discriminated against in the workplace and in wages, they have always been full citizens in the Zionist community: they worked in the fields and factories, and they voted for candidates in the Zionist institutions, and they were elected to office. There was nothing comparable in pre-1948 Palestinian Arab society.
Since contemporary historiography apparently requires it, Pappe also injects children into Palestinian social history. Children were always there, of course, but very few sources discuss them, and their impact on the development of Palestine, at least until the intifadas, was probably insubstantial. Yet a politically correct historian worth his spurs cannot exclude them, and so Pappe writes: "It is also possible to say that 1908 marked a new beginning for children in Palestine." What he means by this assertion, or on what he bases it, is never elucidated. Did children suddenly get the vote? Did they get more candy? Did they cry less? Pappe does not say. What he does say is that in the Palestinian Arab school system corporal punishment continued to be the norm through the first half of the twentieth century. He also assumes that, since the Young Turks revolution of 1908 led to an increase in education throughout the Ottoman Empire, there must have been more or better schooling in Palestine too, hence the improvement in the lot of Palestinian children. (But if children were being routinely flogged in the schools, perhaps an increase in schooling--if this in fact occurred--would not necessarily have been a good thing.)
Keeping up with historiographical fashion leads to confusion. Nations and nation-states are retrograde and nasty, almost by definition. At the outset of his book Pappe informs his readers that he intends to "de-nationalize" the history of modern Palestine: a worthy postcolonial or at least postmodern goal. But how does one "de-nationalize" what is essentially a history of a conflict between two nations or peoples? One strategy, seemingly--it is the one Pappe adopts--would be to focus on the economic and social developments in Palestine rather than on the country's politics. But alas, here, too, the historian immediately comes up against the "national" problem, inasmuch as Palestine's two national or ethnic communities essentially developed and grew separately, on national lines. Indeed, by the 1920s they had even spawned two separate "national" economies.
Pappe recognizes the trap almost as soon as the word "de-nationalize" escapes his lips, and in mid-paragraph he dexterously switches gears, telling his readers that, at the least, he intends to "bi-nationalize" his history: unlike many of his predecessors from the Zionist and Arab camps, he will tell Palestine's history from both the Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish perspectives. And as the book unfolds, Pappe describes the separate socio-economic and political development of each people at each stage of the country's history before reviewing their interactions.
It all sounds very reasonable and very tolerant, but in fact Modern Palestine is really the story of one people, the Palestinians, who, according to Pappe, unequivocally "turn towards ... nationalism" in 1912 (most historians would place this "turn" a bit later, in the 1920s and 1930s). They are put upon and invaded and subjugated and in part exiled by another people, an invading people, the Zionist Jews. Pappe barely mentions the Jewish habitation of, and rule over, Israel during the thousand years between Joshua's invasion and the crushing of the Bar-Kochba Revolt against Rome in 135 C.E. And while he mentions the causes that during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries propelled a fraction of the Jewish people to head for the land in the Levant--anti-Semitic discrimination and violence in the Christian, and later the Muslim, world--Pappe's heart is clearly not in it. He sees the "invasion" and the inevitable clash solely from the Arabs' perspective.
In Pappe's account, there is no faulting the Palestinians for regularly assaulting the Zionist enterprise--in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39, 1947-48, the late 1960s and early 1970s, 1987, and 2000--as there can be no criticizing them for rejecting the various compromises offered by the British, the Americans, the Jews, and the world community in 1937, 1947, 1977- 1978, and 2000. The Palestinians are forever victims, the Zionists are forever "brutal colonizers." To his credit, Pappe wears his heart on his sleeve. There is no dissembling here. He even tells us in his acknowledgments--as if he cannot wait to inform his readers of his loyalties-- that while his "native tongue is Hebrew," "today [he] converses more and more in Arabic," and his "love of the country [Palestine]" is matched only by his "dislike of the state [Israel]."
Tony Judt once described in these pages an encounter with students in a graduate seminar in modern European history in an American university:
After some probing ... [the] students would start to confess that they were actually in a state of panic. To be sure, they could expatiate at length on theories of nationalism. They had mastered the disputes surrounding the nature of fascism or the gendered impact of industrialization. They knew how to "explain" history.... But they had not the foggiest notion what happened, when it happened, who did it, or why.
They simply did not know history. Judt could almost have been describing Ilan Pappe, his colleague in the "one-state solution." Pappe, too, is mortally ignorant of the basic facts of the Israeli-Arab conflict. This book is awash with errors of a quantity and a quality that are not found in serious historiography. And, in Pappe's case, it is not just a matter of sloppiness or indolence in checking facts; the problem goes deeper. It can almost be called a deliberate system of error.
The multiplicity of mistakes on each page is a product of both Pappe's historical methodology and his political proclivities. He seems to admit as much when he writes early on that
my [pro-Palestinian] bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the 'truth' when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers; and sides with the workers not the bosses. He feels for women in distress, and has little admiration for men in command.... Mine is a subjective approach....
For those enamored with subjectivity and in thrall to historical relativism, a fact is not a fact and accuracy is unattainable. Why grope for the truth? Narrativity is all. So no reader should be surprised to discover that, according to Pappe, the Stern Gang and the Palmach existed "before the revolt" of 1936 (they were established in 1940-1941); that the Palmach "between 1946 and 1948" fought against the British (in 1947-1948 it did not); that Ben-Gurion in 1929 was chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive (he was chairman from 1935 to 1948); that the Arab Higher Committee was established "by 1934" (it was set up in 1936); that the Arab Legion did not withdraw from Palestine, along with the British, in May, 1948 (most of its units did); that the United Nations' partition proposal of November 29, 1947 had "an equal number of supporters and detractors" (the vote was thirty-three for, thirteen against, and ten abstentions); that the "Jewish forces [were] better equipped" than the invading Arab armies in M ay, 1948 (they were not, by any stretch of the imagination); that the first truce was "signed" on June 10, 1948 (it was never "signed," and it began on June 11); that in August, 1948 "the successful Israeli campaigns continued, leading to their complete control of Palestine, apart from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip" (the Second Truce prevailed during August and September, and warfare was resumed only in mid-October); that the Grand Mufti fled Palestine in 1938 (he left in October, 1937); that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was "built ... in 1920" (it was founded in 1925 and constructed during the following decades); that Tel Aviv was "founded ... on a Saturday morning in July 1907" (it was in 1909); that the late nineteenth-century Zionist pioneers known as the Biluim established "the first Zionist settlements in Palestine" (they did not), and that they "were led" by Moshe Lilienblum and Leon Pinsker (they were not); that "the Israeli Foreign Office ... translated [U.N. Security Council Resolution 242] into Hebrew in a way that implied that it did not have to withdraw from all the territories it had occupied [in the Six Day War]" (the resolution, in the authoritative English original, speaks of withdrawal "from [occupied] territories," not "the territories" or "all the territories"); that in 1979 there were "1.8 million [Palestinian] refugees" in Lebanon, and in 1982 "well beyond two million" (on both dates the number was around two hundred thousand); that Black September, the Jordanian crackdown against the PLO, took place in 1969 (it was in 1970); that the first settlements in the West Bank were established in 1968 (they were established in 1967); that there was an anti-Hashemite "uprising" in Jordan in 1956 (there were anti-Hashemite or anti-Baghdad Pact riots in Jordan in 1955, but not an uprising); that "the negotiations on Palestine's future produced [during World War I] three documents: the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration" (only the last focused on Palestine's future); that "in September 1918 the north of Palestine was taken quietly [by the British army]" (it was taken in battle, the Battle of Armaggedon or Meggido); that "300 Jews" and a similar number of Arabs were killed in the Arab rioting of 1929 (just over one hundred Jews and a similar number of Arabs died); and so on and on and on.
Again, Pappe's errors are not merely a matter of sloppiness born of a contempt for that leaven of dullards, "the facts." The book is also awash with errors resulting from the writer's ideological preferences, his interest in blackening the Zionists and whitening the Palestinians. His description of the events of 1920 (in which Pappe proves the dictum that necessity--in this case, an ideological imperative--is the mother of invention) is surely a classic of the genre:
In April 1920, a Nabi Musa rally [a Muslim celebration commemorating the prophet Moses] clashed with the most aggressive of the Zionist organizations, Beitar, whose members marched provocatively in the streets of Arab Jerusalem at the time of the feast, and a day of violence ended with deaths on both sides.... A [British] commission of inquiry, the Palin Commission, concluded the obvious: that there was growing dissatisfaction among the Palestinian elite with the British pro-Zionist ... policy.
In fact, Pappe's evenhandedness, while morally commendable, is out of place. There was no "provocative" Jewish march through Arab Jerusalem; there was no march at all. What occurred was an unprovoked assault on Jewish passersby and shops by a politically and religiously inflamed Muslim mob. The subsequent British investigation, embodied in the Palin Report, found that a Muslim Arab religious procession, incited by, among others, Haj Amin al Husseini and Arif al-Arif (a Palestinian journalist), had attacked Jews along Jaffa Road in Jewish (West) Jerusalem and then inside the Old City. Beitar, the youth movement of the right-wing Revisionist Movement, was founded in 1923, so clearly it could not have had a hand in the events of 1920. (Even a postmodernist can see that!) The Palin Report, acknowledging the pogrom for what it was, stated that "all the evidence goes to show that these [Arab] attacks were of a cowardly and treacherous description, mostly against old men, women and children--frequently in the back" (though, to round out the picture, Palin did attribute the rising tide of Arab anger to Britain's pro-Zionist policy).
Brazen inaccuracy similarly marks Pappe's treatment of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Pappe writes that the Arab Higher Committee had tried to "negotiate a principled settlement with the Jewish Agency" (it did not); that in "October 1936" the AHC "declared a general strike" (it was declared in May, 1936 and ended in October); that "in August [1937]" Palestinians assassinated "Major Andrew," the British acting Galilee district commissioner (his name was Lewis Andrews, he was a civilian, and he was assassinated in September); and that "quite a few" of the Palestinian dead in the 1936-1939 rebellion were women (there are no accurate figures, but there can be no doubt that only a handful of the three thousand to six thousand Palestinian dead were women, who generally took no part in the rioting and the fighting).
Pappe writes that "in the 1969 election, the moderate Eshkol could not prevail against the more inflexible Golda Meir" (Eshkol simply died in office, and his party, Mapai, selected Meir as his successor, and later, in the general elections of 1969, the incumbent prime minister Meir, heading the Mapai list, ran against, and beat, a collection of right-wing, religious, and left-wing parties); that there were one million Palestinians living outside Palestine by the end of the 1948 war (the number was no more than three hundred thousand); that "the fida'iyyun [literally, self-sacrificers or guerrillas] ... activities initially consisted of attempts to retrieve lost property" (this was probably true of infiltrating Palestinian refugees, but the fida'iyyun, set up by Egypt only in 1954-1955, from the first were engaged in intelligence and terrorist activities, not in property retrieval); that "Lebanon was destroyed in [Israeli] carpet bombing from the air and shelling from the ground" in 1982 (Lebanon was not destroyed, though several neighborhoods in a number of cities were badly damaged, and there was no "carpet bombing"). Again, the list is endless.
Where Pappe's ideological bent is not responsible for outright inventions and errors, it leads instead to narrative lopsidedness. He devotes a full seven pages to instances of Zionist-Arab cooperation and co-existence (which he calls "cohabitation") during the Arab revolt of 1936- 1939, but only two pages to the actual revolt and its consequences. Surely the revolt itself was far more important than the handful of concurrent inconsequential Arab-Jewish contacts aiming at coexistence. And Pappe devotes a mere sixteen pages to the revolutionary upheaval of the 1948 war--surely the central event in Palestine's modern history--and two of those pages are maps. Still, 1948 does relatively well in this regard: the 1973 war--which Pappe describes as a "devastating Israeli defeat," echoing Arab propaganda, and the "bloodiest Arab-Israeli confrontation" (in fact, the war of 1947-1949 was bloodier)--gets about half a page. I should add also that Hafez Assad of Syria did not embark on the 1973 war in order to resume the peace process with Israel; he simply wanted to re-conquer the Golan Heights (and perhaps thus to avoid entering a peace process).
Pappe dedicates his book to "Ido and Yonatan, my two lovely boys. May they live not only in a modern Palestine, but also in a peaceful one." His choice of the term "Palestine" rather than "Israel" would seem to indicate that Pappe is looking forward to a polity that will emerge after Israel's disestablishment or demise. He obviously supports a single bi-national state in all of Palestine. And he is no fool. He must know what such a state will look like. A bi-national state, if established tomorrow, would contain roughly five million Jews and four and a half million Arabs (1.3 million Israeli Arabs, including the Arabs of East Jerusalem; two million West Bank Arabs; and close to one and a half million Arabs of the Gaza Strip). There would be instant chaos, as Arab and Jewish communities would vie for dominance and try to settle old scores, and as the two to three million refugees from 1948 and their descendants, now resident in the West Bank and Gaza, would make tracks for, and try to repossess, lost houses and lands in pre-1967 Israel.
Moreover, were the "right of return" to be adopted--as would be demanded by Palestine's Arabs and the surrounding Arab world, perhaps with European endorsement--another million Arabs would pour into the country from the refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, instantly creating an Arab majority in the "bi-national" state. If that state were democratic, the majority would determine its character, and in fairly short order it would become an Arab state with a gradually decreasing Jewish minority. Without doubt, the Arab majority would pass legislation blocking further Jewish immigration into the country; and, equally without doubt, Jews would begin to leave.
But even without implementation of an instant or gradual return of refugees from outside Palestine, Pappe's binational state would quickly become an Arab-majority state, given relative Arab and Jewish birthrates. Palestinian Arab families have an average of four or five children (and this includes Israeli Arab households), while Israeli Jewish families tend to have two or three children. Within a decade or so of its creation, the bi-national state would have an Arab majority. I find it difficult to imagine what sort of life Pappe really believes that he and his children and grandchildren can expect as members of a Jewish minority in an Arab state. After all, the Jewish minorities in the Islamic Arab world have fared poorly over the centuries, always subject to second-class citizenship and often to brutal oppression and massacre; as late as the 1940s they suffered from discriminatory laws and pogroms (in Baghdad, Tripoli, Aden); and by the 1960s they had all fled, or been expelled from, their native lands. Iraq, with one hundred thirty-five thousand Jews in 1948, has today about fifty Jews; Egypt, once with seventy-five thousand, has about one hundred; Morocco, with two hundred sixty-five thousand in 1948, has about six thousand. For all practical purposes, these countries have been ethnically cleansed of their Jews. Almost no Jews at all are left in Yemen or Algeria, and none, as far as I know, live in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Oman, Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates.
A Muslim-dominated Palestine would be even less benign or hospitable toward its Jewish minority. After all, the Palestinians are not a particularly forgiving people (the cry for revenge seems to be on the lips of every suicide bomber), and what they have suffered at Jewish hands since 1947 will not easily be erased from their collective and individual memories. Moreover, the Islamic Arab world, including Arafat's Palestinian Authority, has shown little penchant for democracy. More generally, tolerance of the "other" is not a deeply ingrained tradition in the Muslim Arab world, as the fate of the Arab world's Christian communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will attest. (Look at Sudan.) Nor would the social and economic gap between the Jews and the Arabs of Pappe's bi-national state make for peaceful co-existence.
So I doubt that Ido and Yonatan will enjoy life in their new Muslim Arab-dominated environment. My prediction is that, whatever their politics, they will quickly repair to Europe or America. And if, contrary to logic, they stick it out, they will enjoy an existence infinitely less free, creative, and pleasant than that currently enjoyed by Israel's Arab minority citizens. This truly is an appalling book. Anyone interested in the real history of Palestine/Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would do well to run vigorously in the opposite direction.
Benny Morris , a professor Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press).
This is obviously one of the radical Palestinian voices here, but this is a quote from Ali Safuri, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader, with PBS??? Frontline from 2002.
"Q: Tell me step by step what needs to happen for you, for Islamic Jihad, to then declare peace, to stop military actions?
A: I am the son of Safooryeh [village in 1948 Palestine]. I am not from the Jenin camp. I want to return to Safooryeh, which is my true homeland, so that I can live in peace. This is what I seek. That every human being returns free and honorable to his homeland to live in safety and peace. This is what I seek. ...
I have cousins in Beirut, in Syria, in Saudi Arabia, in all the countries of the world. It is their right to return to their country and homeland. The son of Haifa has the right to return to his town. ... The person who comes from America or Russia has the right to live in Haifa and Tel Aviv, and the true son of Haifa and Tel Aviv remains homeless and exiled. Is this justice? Where is justice? Would you accept that for yourself? Would Bush accept this? Or anybody in Europe accept that I come and kick him out from his home, and replace him? No. No human being would accept that, but instead would fight me. ... I too have a right to my country. I will fight until I remove the occupation totally from Palestine."
No, I think the main point is that Palestinians feel like Israelis don't have a right to the land. Basically they would have to move out so that the Palestinians could move back in. Read that quote by the guy from Islamic Jihad. He's talking about a bunch of Israeli cities like Haifa that's getting missile attacks from Hezbollah right now. Under the right of return all the former Palestinian inhabitiants of Haifa would be able to move back to their historical homes, and the Israelis would just have to go somehwere else. It's not a workable solution. The 2 state plan would have the Palestinians live in Gaza and the West Bank in their own country, so any Palestinian refugees would move there, and basically give up their claim to any land in Israel.
My head's spinning. Now I'm trying to wrap my head around the argument (not advanced here but elsewhere) that Zionists were essentially colonialists. I've seen arguments on both sides and after a while, it seems impossilbe to untangle who is "right" or not.
I only have 5 mins so here's an unsophisticated response:
1. While it is true that between 500K and 600K Arabs fled or were otherwise forced out during Israel's War of Independence which the Arabs started, any discussion of the so-called "right of return" that doesn't mention the 800 000 sephardi/mizrachi Jews (from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Morrocco, etc.) that were forced from their homes is racist. It assumes that the Arab grievances are superior. See, Israel absorbed its refugees and paid dearly for it. But they built a successful state in the process (despite that internal arab documents from the War of Independence actually allude to the expulsion of the Jews from Arab and Muslim countries as a concerted effort to overwhelm Israel economically with refugees). Well that didn't work out. And Israel now pays a price for its success because the Palestinians can point to middle class Israelis (albeit three generations later - Israel was poor at the outset) and cry no fair. Meanwhile an Arab middle East flush with oil wealth and foreign aid has done absolutely nothing for these people.
2. An unspoken, bedrock principle of the "negotiating process" has been that Jews must evacuate any territory slated for a Palestinian state. Meanwhile 1 million
Palestinians live in Israel . So implementation of the "right of return" means an ethnically-pure Jew-free state of Palestine (to be created at some point in the coming years) and a 2nd, 60%-70% Palestinians state (formerly known as Israel, now composed mostly of Palestinians, their children, their grandchildren, etc.) that would soon be closer to 100% Arab given their higher birthrates and the inevitable flight of Jews due to intolerant Islamic norms and anti-Jewish violence. A 23rd Arab state (Palestine), and eventually a 24th one (formerly Israel, now Palestine II). Sound fair? No more Jewish state, and the pan-Arab and Islamist dreams are that much closer to realization. Next stop Spain. Don't think it can't happen.
3. Finally, it's hard to take the "right of return" arguments seriously when this so-called right has been historically championed almost solely by people who (a) wanted to see Israel done away with anyway (many Palestinians and Arab governments), or (b) didn't want Palestinians in their country (the Arab and racist Western governments currently hosting the refugees and their descendents).
1. Even if one wants to blame Arabs for Arabs leaving their homelands while it was in the midst of war, who gives anyone but Arabs any right to claim that momentarily departed land for themselves?
Which leads us to the next point...
2. If the U.N. had such a hand in creating Israel as part of its own agenda, why would Arabs turn to that same organization to offer a solution to this problem?
Outsiders stepped in to claim something that in all appearance wasn't rightfully theirs and then get bent out of shape when the displaced aren't overjoyed by being offered half of their own land back.
To me, and yes, I am extremely insignificant to all of this...there's too much faulty logic and intellectual complicating of the scenario at work on the Israeli side of this conflict. The discussion is currently being pigeonholed into...forget all of the wrong that Israel has done the past ~60 years in instigating this unfortunate predicament...and tell us what you would do if bombs were lobbed at you for offering an olive branch?
Forget that that olive branch barely scratches the surface of what seem to me to be perfectly viable Palestinain demands?
Palestinians want their land back. And they want to rule themsleves in that land.
Some could call that wishing to eradicate the area of all Jewish people, but one would have to be an extremist on either side of the conflict to actually believe that that is the true root of the issue at hand.
War is obvioulsy inevitable where the two sides stand today. But why must rather simple concepts and convictions be morphed into these biased distortions?
Israelis want to live in peace. We should all be able to grasp and respect that as quickly as any issue on the table. But what has the Israeli government, and more importantly the unseen forces that control the Israeli government, really done to ensure that as reality?
Of course we can't turn back the clocks and undo anything that has already happened. But my response to reading those articles is that we shouldn't be coerced into forgetting what actually led us to this point in history either.
Fucking fuck you, man. Really. Seriously. Get a fucking grip on reality.
I'm sick of this shit.
He's right though. If only the Israelis, Palestinians and Lizard people could sit down for some tri-lateral talks this shit would be solved in like 5 minutes.
I'm truly sorry to upset you with my comments, but if you can't see that there is at the very least an international interest to sustain an Israeli state as a trumped-up superpower that transcends the interests of the Israeli government on its own, then you are blind.
It's not even a controversial point.
Some of y'all are so predictable in the worst possible way.
Enjoy your infernal war.
I'll go back to staying out of it.
thank you.
Without (a) claiming that all Palestinians are Muslim, nor (b) claiming that all Muslims are Islamists (I hate that I have to make these disclaimers), I will say this: The idea that land that was once udner Islamic rule must remain so in perpetuity is deeply rooted in political Islam. This is not a fringe idea.
Thus, Spain and those parts of Yugoslavia, etc. that were once Ottoman are ultimately meant to be "redeemed" from the infidels. Sounds crazy but this is not a controversial point among Islamists. Look it up. So yeah, Jews have no right to sovereignty anywhere, but particularly in any area that was once "Muslim land." Hamas and Hezbollah both subscribe to this 100%.
'The term "Palestina" was invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian. The Romans wanted to rename Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) after the Philistines, the longtime enemy of the Jews. Hadrian believed that by renaming the Jewish homeland after the Jews' archenemy, he would be able to forever break the bond between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.
But even the name of the Philistines, from which the term "Palestine" was adopted, is completely alien to the Land of Israel.
The name Philistines in Hebrew is plishtim, which comes from the Hebrew verb polshim (foreign invaders).
Arabs only came to the Land of Israel in large numbers after the Jews returned in the 20th century and started to rebuild the nation, thereby creating economic and employment opportunities for Arab immigrants.
Prior to 1870, when Jews started to return to the Holy Land in large numbers, there were fewer than 100,000 Arabs living in what is today the State of Israel - including Yesha (the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District).
This small number of nomadic, tribal Arabs who lived in the Holy Land before the modern Jewish return never considered themselves to be a separate people or nation.
The Arabs who lived in the Land of Israel were not "Palestinians" but Arabs - part of a huge Arab people with 22 very large independent nations that control one-ninth of the land mass on the planet Earth.
In an interview given by Zuhair Mohsen to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977, Mr. Mohsen explains the origin of the 'Palestinians':
'The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.
For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.'
(taken from here.)
Motown, Vitamin, anyone else who wants to take a stab at it.
If every single Jew moved out of Israel, and every single square inch of land was given to the Palestinians, would there finally be 100% peace in the Middle East?
No more suicide bombers, missles, acts of terror, train bombings, etc.
And if the answer is no, why not??
if Israel didn't exist the Arabs would have to invent it. otherwise who would these dictators blame for the utter failure of their countries? I'm serious.
Actually it depends upon which group you talk to. Hezbollah has definitely modifed their position since partaking in Lebanese elections. Their grand leader in Syria said that he does not even want an Islamic state in Lebanon anymore unless the Lebanese public votes for it. I think Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have only talked about returning the Caliphate to the Middle East and North Africa. That group in Indonesia, that was afiliated with Al Qaeda (can't remember their name right now) talks about creating a greater Islamist state just in Southeast Asia with Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc. The original Islamist movements in Tunisia and Algeria just talked about bringing Islamic law to their specific countries before the militaries intervened in elections and tried to wipe them out. Iran talks about spreading Islamism just to the Shiite of the Middle East.
Wow, you really set up realistic situations.
The only countries that really have terrorism and widespread violence right now are: 1) Iraq which has a growing civil war which has nothing to do with Israel, but rather the consequences of the U.S. invasion. 2) Sudan also has a civil war. 3) Israel, 4) Lebanon, but it was actually peaceful before Hezbollah's actions. 5) Saudia Arabia, which has an occasional terrorist attack by Al Qaeda because they want to overthrow the government.
Otherwise, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Kuwait, the Gulf States, and Iran are not facing violence.
Sounds pretty peaceful overall
Rock, geography is obviously not your strong point. You said "100% peace in the Middle East?" India is in South Asia. The Middle East is West Asia and part of North Africa.
damn you're fast.
This is absoultely some ugly shit. Harvey[/b] You made a promise to me to back off everything and anything semetic while typing on this site. I dealt with your holocaust revisionist bullshit but I ain't going to deal with your current new world order view of the Jewish state. plainly and simply STFU on shit you can only throw fearmongering theories on and stay within the bounds of your project blowed carpetbaggeur world of imagination.
I think Iraq, Israel, and Al Qaeda make it seem like the whole Middle East is going to hell, but overall it's actually more peaceful now then say 10 years ago. Go back to the 1990s and you had the following: 1) Algeria was fighting a bloody insurgent war against Islamists who had actualy won national elections before the military stepped in. 2) Tunisia was also suppressing its Islamist movement after they did well in elections. 3) Egypt was fighting its Islamist movement. 4) Lebanon was finishing off its civil war. 5) Iraq was trying to wipe out the Kurds, etc.
...and if you beleive these people, then I don't know what to tell you....
Listen, I would love to beleive that the democratic process somehow moderates these movements, but I'm not holding my breath. That said, you have just presented a list of objetives that requires the potential death or subjugation of thousands of people (non-Muslims and moderate Muslims alike). So even if your conservative estimates are true as to the aims of these people, these are still violent, irredentist movements that threaten the lives of LOTS of people.
My response was, that's not an agreed upon point among Islamists. Those Indonesia Islamists don't lay any claim to even the Middle East, let alone Spain or Yugoslavia. I'm not even sure the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are actively trying to re-create the Caliphate throughout the Middle East anymore. The Islamist movement is not a unified, nor monolithic group, yet your original statement seemed to imply that to me.