NATIONS AND IDENTITIES
What has anyone done for the Palestinians? A reply to David Stone
Monday March 29, 2021
Pot-washing at Rafah refugee camp, Dec 2020 (Shutterstock)
“Israel has tried over decades to give Palestinians their own state.”
“Israel has gone to unparalleled lengths to improve the lives of Palestinians living outside Israel.”
“Israel has taken major risks in voluntarily ceding land to the Palestinians to bolster peace efforts.”
These are but three of the inflammatory and false statements made by David Stone in his article series. Much of the inaccuracy stems from Stone’s erroneous belief that there is a Jewish National Home with sovereignty over what we now know as Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. It is from this belief that he can conclude that Jews have consistently sacrificed large swathes of their land to appease Palestinians and Arabs. To understand why this is a fallacy we must retrace history.
A brief history
Prior to the British Mandate in 1917 the area now known as Palestine and Israel was under Ottoman rule. As the Ottomans retreated, Britain asserted control of the region under the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 which, as Stone rightly comments, divided the spoils of the war. Prior to 1917 Jews made up three per cent of the total population. By 1947 the Jewish population had increased to 33 per cent. Why?
Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, saw the very real need for a Jewish homeland that would give the Jewish people the security and the belonging they needed. Throughout the late 1800s and the early 1900s discussions took place as to where this should be — Madagascar, East Uganda, Fugu, were a few of the ideas discussed and voted on. Eventually a decision was made for it to be the region we now consider to be Israel-Palestine. In 1897 a report to the rabbis of Vienna on the prospects for a Jewish state in Palestine concluded that “the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”
Britain had promised the region to the Arabs under the Hussein-McMahon agreement, essentially: “If you help us with the war effort we will help you.” The Balfour Declaration similarly promised the region to the Zionists as a place to develop a Jewish National Home. Despite this, the British government was capable of anti-Semitic legislation. In 1905, Parliament passed the Aliens Act that restricted immigration of “unfavourable” immigrants. The Act included reference to the “troublesome” nature of Jews taking a different day of worship to the Christian Sunday and therefore disrupting the day of rest.
And so the result: a small section of land promised to two peoples, one of which was already living there, with another yet to arrive. As immigration soared, with the Jewish population rising to 33 per cent by 1947, so tensions between the communities rose also. In a bid to quell tensions, Britain decreed no more immigration into the area. This lead to a rise in violence against the British, in particular from the self-declared Jewish terrorist organisation, the Irgun. In 1948 Britain handed the huge mess over to the United Nations and left the region. The next day Israel declared itself a State.
The War of Independence – The Naqba
Now we understand the competing claims to territory and understand that neither a Jewish National Home nor Palestine actually existed, in recent history, in what we now know as Israel, Palestine and Jordan, we can begin to unpick Stone’s assertions.
Stone writes about Israel’s War of Independence. This is the war that saw the British leave and the Israeli State declared. For most countries, where colonialist powers leave and independence is achieved, there would be cause for celebration, but, in the case of Israel, Britain merely facilitated the transfer of a new colonial order.
1948 saw for one side Independence Day, for the other the Naqba (disaster).
On May 14, 1948, the Jewish state was declared and the regular armies of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Transjordan entered the region. In the ensuing war, Zionist military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians, destroyed over 530 villages and took control over 78 per cent of the region. The remaining 22 per cent is what we now know as the West Bank and Gaza.
One particular example of the brutal acts committed against the Arabs during this period, is the Deir Yassin massacre. On April 9 1948, Jewish forces entered Deir Yassin, with Jewish authorities reporting one Arab as killed. The following day, the chief Red Cross representative in the area discovered some 250 corpses, including women and children. This is not to say atrocities were not and do not continue to be committed in reverse.
Stone refers to a promise made by Israel to take 100,000 Palestinian refugees back, a number which insults those refugees now displaced. The desire of Palestinians’ to return to their homes, in what is now Israel, is their legal right. In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194(III) affirming the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and to obtain restitution and compensation. In the same vein, Resolution 2535 recognised “that the problem of Palestine Arab refugees has arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights under the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
However, in 1993 there were nearly three million Palestinians registered with UNRWA as refugees, a number that increased to 3.8 million in 2000, and which stands at 5.3 million today. With such a large number of refugees, return now would reverse the creation of the Jewish State and render Jews homeless and vulnerable. Thus, despite the legal right of return, and despite the desperate living conditions of millions of Palestinians in refugee camps that have been so long in existence that they are like impoverished towns, return for these Palestinian refugees is not possible.
Jerusalem
Jerusalem is considered the religious centre of the world — where Mohammed is thought to have ascended to heaven, where Jesus was crucified, laid to rest and rose again and the site of the Jewish city of David and first and second Temples.
The UN partition plan Stone talks of did not, in any way, deprive anyone of Jerusalem. And as we have come to understand, it cannot be seen to be depriving Jewish people of more of their homeland as they were not, at the time, living there and it was not under their rule, but that of the Ottomans and later the British. Jerusalem has always remained separate in negotiations. The 1947 UN partition plan granted the city special international status, ensuring it did not belong to either side. Negotiation after negotiation has either left Jerusalem out of the discussion or came to a deadlock over its status, as both parties see it as their capital.
In reality, there has been a progressive land grab over Jerusalem by Israel, with most recently President Trump declaring Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv. The Palestinian vision is for East Jerusalem to be the recognised capital of their future Palestinian state.
Since 1967, Israeli policy has aimed at separating Jerusalem from the West Bank and obstructed the growth and development of the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem. These policies range from land confiscation, construction of settlements, utilisation of zoning, planning laws to limit Palestinian expansion. A 712 km long separation wall confines non-Israeli Palestinians to the West Bank and makes Jerusalem impassable unless you have an Israeli-issued permit, which are given only in extremely limited circumstances.
In his victory speech on June 2, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, the present Prime Minister of Israel, declared:
“We will keep Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty. I declare this here tonight in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people which will never be divided. The government will thwart any attempt to undermine the unity of Jerusalem and will prevent any action which is counter to Israel’s exclusive sovereignty over the city. The government will allocate special resources to speed up building, improve municipal services and reinforce the social and economic status of the Jerusalem metropolitan area.”
Netanyahu has never retracted these words. Green areas were given for public purposes and Palestinian development was not allowed. For example in 1968, 500 acres from Shu’fat village were zoned as a “green area”. In 1994, this was changed and a settlement (2,500 units) was built for religious Jews. Jabal Abu Gheinum (Har Homa), between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, was declared a “green area” since 1968, but has seen construction of 6,500 housing units. In Jerusalem, 86,500 Palestinian residents (out of 270,000) are potentially at risk of their homes being demolished. There are an estimated 200,000 Jewish settlers currently in East Jerusalem.
The Oslo Accords
“Following the 1993-95 Oslo Accords with the PLO, Israel withdrew from large swathes of the West Bank,” Stone asserts.
The Oslo Accords, initially celebrated as both the PLO and Israeli politicians sat across a table and negotiated for the first time, were a disaster for the Palestinians. There was success in the PLO recognising Israel as a state and denouncing terrorism. However no such Palestinian state was recognised in return, but instead a plan towards creating one was agreed. Despite seemingly positive moves, the 5-year interim period given towards a state being created was never realised and the reality was that the West Bank was divided into areas A, B and C.
In Area A, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has, though still not full, civilian and security control; in Area B, the PA has civilian control, but security is maintained by the Government of Israel. In Area C, which constitutes over 60 per cent of the territory of the West Bank and the only contiguous area, Israel maintains full civilian and security control. The division of the land has been described as the Swiss Cheese effect and essentially pushes Palestinians into small, city areas, making travel between the areas difficult, disrupting families, farming, trade and education. The recent “deal of the century” saw Trump propose (with no discussion with the PA) a Palestinian State in these city blobs, joined up by tunnels and a few key connecting roads.
The number of Jewish settlers increased from 110,000 on the eve of the Accords in 1993 to 185,000 in 2000, during the negotiations over a final status. By 2018, the number of settlers stood at 430,000. Settlement expansion into the West Bank and the associated restrictions and demolition of homes and infrastructure continue to destroy the livelihoods of Palestinians. Such expansion and restrictions are a major cause of Palestinian poverty. The denial of rights and freedom, such as unequal access to land and resources give unfair advantages to the settler population. In the first five months of 2020, OCHA (the UN office for humanitarian affairs) documented 143 attacks attributed to Israeli settlers, resulting in Palestinian injuries (38 incidents) or in damage to Palestinian property (105 incidents). These incidents led to the injury of 63 Palestinians, including 13 children. Adalah, a human rights organisation, has further information on settler crimes and human rights abuses against Palestinians.
The increase in settlements has seriously undermined the notion that Israel was sincere about making way for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
And although not discussed in Stone’s piece, it would be biased and unbalanced not to assess the casualties inflicted by Hamas, the terrorist organisation governing Gaza. Up to November 2019, Palestinian armed groups in Gaza fired 1,378 rockets towards Israel, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. Attacks by armed groups in Gaza killed four Israeli civilians and injured more than 123 Israelis.
In the same time period lethal force by Israeli forces resulted in the killing of 71 and injuring 11,453 Palestinians in Gaza, OCHA reported.
Summary
Stone concluded:
“Israel has tried over decades to give the Palestinian people their own state. Palestinians living in Israel enjoy full civil rights, unlike those living in neighbouring Arab states. Further, Israel has gone to unparalleled lengths to improve the lives of Palestinians living outside Israel even while being attacked by them. Lastly, Israel has taken major risks in voluntarily ceding land to the Palestinians to bolster peace efforts, unfortunately to no avail.”
A factually supported conclusion would acknowledge that Palestinians, in their millions, have been driven from their homes into a smaller and smaller area of land. The land they now live in is blighted by military control, inhumane checkpoints and a barbaric separation wall. In some areas they are at constant threat from their homes being demolished, settler attacks or military presence.
Now for some suggestions towards a solution.
Hamas, the terrorist organisation in control of Gaza, continues to attack Israel’s civilians via rockets and Israel responds with air strikes in return. Hamas continues to make unrealistic demands of return of land, with some factions of the organisation demanding the whole land to be under an Islamic State. This view is not held by the leaders of the West Bank and continues to cause political division among Palestinians. With this political split and while Hamas exists in the form it does, there is no opportunity for Palestine to become a State that includes both the West Bank and Gaza.
Einat Wilf, a former Labour member of the Israeli Knesset, writes in The Atlantic: “Whatever each side thinks about the invented nature of the other, both sides can agree that they each are equally deserving of living in a state where they can be masters of their own fate.” She argues that what needs to happen now is a brutal division of the land — akin to a divorce settlement —with no continued hope of return for Palestinians and no continued claim to the whole land mass by the Israelis.
The territorial encroachment into the West Bank and East Jerusalem by Israel needs to cease. Gaza and the West Bank need to become politically unified once more and, if this has to involve Hamas, then Hamas needs to accept Israel as a state and renounce terrorism, just as the PLO once did, leading to the creation of the PA.
This year we will see elections held in the West Bank and Gaza for the first time since 2006. Maybe we will see a step in the right direction. We have already seen Netanyahu fail to gain a majority yet again, so perhaps it is the end of a long run of right-leaning parties running Israel and, with that, some sort of conclusion to the conflict can be found. As long as factions of both sides lay claim to the whole area there will be no resolution.
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