One of the ways that ‘Pro-Palestine’ propaganda tries to frame the argument, so to speak, is to prey on the prevailing ignorance outside the Middle East of the relevant history and contemporary collective guilt in the culture about the colonial past.
What they are effectively disguising is that the colonial past that is most relevant to the history here is that pertaining to the Ottomans, an Islamic empire which effectively collapsed after a long decline at the end of WWI.
Britain, France and others then intervened, at least in part in order to effect a transition to stable, post-colonial government, though of course they were also looking after what they saw as their own geopolitical interests.
In simple terms, the chosen ‘international’ solution, which was then voted on by the UN after WWII, was to allocate 97% of the former Ottoman territory to Arab rule, and 3% of it to Jewish rule.
It was then already appreciated, correctly, that an Arab minority would tend to fare better within a Jewish state than vice versa. And the outline of this solution was being put in place long before the Holocaust generated a sudden, acute Jewish refugee crisis in Europe.
This plan did not involve any ‘theft’ of land at all, as all property claims were to be respected, no matter who was running the various new ethno-nationalist governments in the region.
Britain surrendered part of its mandate to the new Jewish entity and this then took over ownership of land which had been state-owned, but any Arabs living within Israel were to retain their private ownership rights. Ditto, any Jews living inside the Arab controlled areas.
It strikes me that there was no fundamental injustice involved in this arrangement, but the Arabs nevertheless appeared to believe that Jewish self-rule goes against the natural order of things and acted accordingly.
Those of us not directly involved might then conclude that Zionism is the belief that this was a fair and practical post-colonial political division, while Anti-Zionism is the contrasting conviction that only Arab Muslims should ever hold power in the Middle East.
The British had called their mandate Palestine in reference to an ancient Roman colonial designation, not because they thought of the Arabs who lived there as a distinct people living within an existing territorial entity which either they or the Turks before them had ‘occupied’. There is precious little evidence to suggest that the Arabs themselves did either.
Indeed at the time of partition it was the Jews who were more likely to call themselves ‘Palestinian’ and the official name of the mandate in the local language (Hebrew) on all official documents was anyway ‘The Land of Israel’. So-called Palestinian identity is a later construct, from the 1960s.
What a subset of the Arabs affected by the 1948 war refer to as the Nakba, portrayed as the theft of Arab lands in and around the new, post-colonial Jewish state, occurred primarily because of the combined Arabs’ attempt to take the full 100% of the former Ottoman territory.
This war of extermination waged against Israel backfired. Some Arabs were ultimately driven away by the victorious Israeli defenders, yet many also left because they were told to get out of the way by the various invading armies, who clearly assumed that they would win and that the end result would be more land, not less, for Arabs. And many of the fleeing Arabs were seasonal migrants, not people with long-term roots in what is now Israel (yet somehow they too were later designated as hereditary ‘refugees’.)
A substantial number stayed put however, and are now Israelis, making up around a quarter of the population overall and enjoying a range of basic civil rights which no Arab living within their own original allocated area currently enjoys.
It is also important to note that more Jews were displaced — their property effectively stolen, their livelihoods ruined — in the larger Arab area than Arabs were in the Jewish-controlled zone during this bitter conflict which kicked off in 1948. And for the Jews this became a genuinely existential fight across the whole Middle Eastern region.
Given the level of propaganda distortion that wells up from screechy activists all the way into more mainstream media, you would be forgiven however for thinking that the Arabs, uniquely, suffered profound loss as a result of this war that they started. For the Nakba myth has been carefully framed to paint them as the victims of some sort of cosmic colonial injustice, when in fact they were to a large extent the authors of their own misfortune, their Jihad an unwanted extension of their own deep-seated imperialist urge, not some sort of creditable resistance movement against supposedly European settlers.
And remember, they still kept 97% of the former Ottoman territory in the region outside modern Turkey, including the areas beyond Arabia that they had historically taken by force and colonised quite brutally themselves. At least they did, right up until their next attempt to bag the whole lot in 1967.
The zones now referred to as 'occupied’ were until then part of the 97% allocated to Arabs. Gaza was held by Egypt and the 'West Bank’ by Jordan. Nobody then spoke of an ‘occupied’ Palestine, yet if it is occupied now, it was surely also occupied back then.
Then these two nations, along with Syria, started another war designed to wipe the Jewish 3% off the map. And once again they lost, this time ceding an additional chunk of territory as they capitulated.
Israel returned Gaza to Arab rule in 2005 and has repeatedly offered up to 97% (again) of the so-called West Bank as part of a peace deal, even though this area was historically part of the native Jewish Kingdom conquered over and over by later invaders from just about every cardinal direction.
Unquestionably, there are Israeli nationalists who do not want to ever return ‘the West Bank’ to Arab rule. Some are just unrelenting extremists, yet others perhaps sense that the opposing national claim has always been a subterfuge designed to facilitate the eradication of self-rule in the Jewish homeland.
Yet there are also many pragmatists who genuinely crave peace, while apparently recognising that most of the land will need to be surrendered eventually in order to achieve that aim (but, naturally, not before a treaty has been signed, as that would place the Jewish state at the same security risk it suffered prior to the Arab invasion of 1967.)
It is important also to consider that there might be other substantial population groups, such as the Kurds, who have a more realistic-looking right to any lasting sense of grievance about the initial carve up as ratified by the UN, yet they have few western university students in their corner.
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