History
does not justify
either Israel or Palestine
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
November 17th,
2004
LONDON - To be blunt, there is no
Israel and no Palestine. At least not in a continuous
historical sense, as there is a France or an Egypt, a
China or a Thailand. Without the British there would be
neither a modern Israel nor Palestine.
The Jews claim that they are merely
returning to their roots, unwinding the clock to Old
Testament times. But if every group of ethnic kin with an
ancient pedigree did this where would we be? The Indians
could reclaim North and South America, the Moguls Russia
and the Hottentots South Africa.
The Jews left what was relatively
recently named Palestine a long time ago. In AD 70 after
the Jewish insurrection the Romans destroyed the
Jerusalem Temple and the Jews began a new exodus to
Babylonia, in modern day Iraq. This large-scale Jewish
settlement of Babylonia endured until the eleventh
century. Other Jews went to Egypt, the Romans enslaved
many and others were dispersed by war and catastrophe to
Italy, Spain, Gaul and Eastern Europe. Judaism also
spread by proselytism. By the late Middle Ages the
heartland of Jewish settlement was the Polish-Lithuanian
state.
The Jews did not begin to settle
again in Palestine until the late 19th century. But it
was only after the fall of the Ottoman Empire that the
British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, strongly backed
by prime minister David Lloyd George, a religious man who
saw the Zionist cause as one that must be supported by
Christian charity, issued his declaration that the
government "views with favor" the aspiration for a Jewish
"national home", that the settlement of Arab land began
in earnest.
The next generation of British
politicians and administrators, faced with a bloody Arab
revolt that they had to mercilessly repress, felt that
Lloyd George and Balfour had made a terrible
mistake.
But if there are reasonable
questions to ask about the legitimacy of the Jewish
colonisation of Palestine one can also question the roots
of Palestinian nationalism.
Before British rule there were
places called Palestine in the region but they were not
states and Jerusalem was not their capital. The states
that did exist were not called Palestine. The name
appears first in late Roman times as the name of a
province and the name survived for a short while in the
early Arab empire but then it disappeared. The people of
these times had deep rooted, sometimes complex identities
but being Palestinian was not one of them.
During the long Ottoman era
Jerusalem was only the capital of a district of the same
name. It and other districts in the area were under the
authority of larger provinces, governed from Damascus,
Sidon or Beirut.
It was the British who created a
formal entity called Palestine with delineated boundaries
and made Jerusalem its capital.
The British were perpetually strung
on the horn of a dilemma. The Arabs were convinced that
they had been promised a state of their own if they
helped the British overthrow the Turks and dismember the
Ottoman Empire. This is why the Jewish historian, Tom
Segev, describes this piece of land as "twice promised".
It is also why the UN in 1947 decided, given the reality
of Jewish settlement and Palestinian nationalism, that
what the British had ruled as "Palestine" had to be
divided in two.
The prime minister of Israel, Ariel
Sharon, is trying to ride the tiger of modern day
Zionism. Having himself fed the beast for most of his
political life with the meat of a Jewish return to all
biblical lands he now attempts a compromise with a
withdrawal from Gaza that risks the assassin's bullet
from those settlers still imbued with the Zionist
dream.
Yasser Arafat for most of his
political life held fast to the idea that the
Palestinians did not want partition. They wanted it all,
as the British had promised them. Arafat later appeared
to mellow, yet what he told audiences when he spoke in
Arabic sometimes suggested that the compromise of
partition that he envisaged was but a first step to
driving the Jews one day into the sea.
Neither side will find the road to
peace unless there is some modesty in their approach to
the other. In the end the two sides, if they truly want
peace and development above all rather than their myths
and the near continuous war they bring, must return to
the principles of a reasonably fair division as
negotiated at Camp David with President Bill Clinton, and
refined at the subsequent negotiations at Sharm el-Sheik
and Taba. The truth is that neither side has a cast iron
claim to their own state on the land the British called
"Palestine", and the sooner their leaders tell their
people that the sooner there might be honest discussions
about a peace.
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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