Where Blood Kin Fight (3)

The Trouble with Colonizers

While the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian animosity is a fight for the right to a homeland, geopolitics involving powerful countries has played a crucial role in this conflict.

It is of note that at the beginning of the modern Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Arab world was either under the Otttoman Empire or a European colonizer. In the case of Palestine, it was the British.

The British Passfield White Paper sought to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine. This was followed by the 1939 White Paper that limited Jewish immigration to 15 thousand a year for five years, after which Arab approval was required.

The White Paper was in response to the Arab uprising against the displacement of Arabs in Palestine because of the influx of Jews.  As well, it was a response to the threat of King Saud of Saudi Arabia who declared that if Britain goes against Arab wishes in Palestine, the Arabs would side with the British enemy.

By 1945, when the Labor Party (of today’s British Prime Minister Tony Blair) came to power in Britain, its promise to repeal the White Paper and support a Jewish state in Palestine came to naught.  Instead, efforts were doubled to stop immigration.

Saving Lives

After World War II and the extermination of some six million Jews became known, priorities changed. The desperate need to find sanctuary for Jewish refugees became paramount.

A clandestine Jewish group illegally brought immigrants from Europe into Palestine while dissident terrorist groups used force to drive the British out of Palestine by bombing trains, train stations, the British headquarters, and kidnapping British nationals.

Pressure on the British government to settle the dispute and save British lives was then brought to bear. Part of that pressure was the US whose own government committee on the issue of Jewish immigration recommended letting a hundred thousand Jews immigrate at once.

‘I think the proper thing to do, and the thing I have been doing, is to do what I think is right and let them all go to hell,’ US President Harry S. Truman was said to have written in his diary. It was presumed that his decision to support the partition of Palestine was influenced by domestic politics and vigorous Jewish lobbying.

Enter the UN

Pressure at home and abroad made the British return its mandate of Palestine to the United Nations. In turn, the UN, through Resolution 181, recommended that Palestine be divided into an Arab state and a Jewish state and Jerusalem to be put under international administration. The Jews were for it. The Arabs were against it.

At that time, there were about 600 thousand Jews and about 1.2 million Arabs in Palestine. It was a partition with the makings of a road to hell paved with good intentions, such as an economic union with open borders between the Jewish state and the Palestinian state.

As soon as the UN passed the partition resolution, Israeli underground groups and Arab irregulars came to blows. The partition gave more impetus to their mutual intolerance expressed through the series of wars.

War historians point out that the defeat of the Arabs in the ensuing wars was caused by their failure to organize and unite. Israel held decisive victories because its fighters and intelligence gathering were better organized and its clandestine arms shipment was timely.

Pain on Both Sides

Still, no win or loss in war can bridge the unwieldy differences. What was the 1948 War for Independence for Israelis is Nakba (Disaster) for the Palestinians. That war caused more than half a million Arabs to flee Palestine to become refugees in neighboring Arab countries.

The Jews meanwhile point out that about as many Jews who have lived in these neighboring Arab countries were stripped of their property, rights and nationality.

The main reason for Arab opposition to Israel is the belief that Palestinian land was wrested from them by the British Empire and later by Israel itself in 1948 and again in 1967.  They take it that this land grabbing continues today in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are punctuated by Israeli settlements and roadblocks manned by Israeli security.

There is also the belief that the Arabs are being made to pay for Western guilt over the Holocaust and the blowback of the West’s past appetite for colonization.

(Sept 2006)