Christopher Vasillopulos

IN his beautiful and profound novel, “Cry the Beloved Country”, Alan Paton wrote about the innumerable tragedies European imperialism implied for black and white South Africans. A powerful plea for reconciliation between the races, the oppressor and the oppressed, his beautiful book nevertheless told bitter truths about the brutal, racist regime and the often criminal and violent responses of the people it tyrannized. In the same spirit I offer this piece. It uses the same structure of a speech the murdered and martyred hero of the novel never lived to give.

It is permissible for the Jews to have claimed a homeland in Palestine. It is not permissible for them to have evicted hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians in the process. It is permissible for the Jews to have gathered up the refugees in camps. It is not permissible to have kept them, who now are five million, there in abominable conditions for as much as 60 years.

It is permissible for Israel to have defended itself against Arab attacks. It is not permissible for Israel to thereby confiscate all but 10-12 percent of Palestine.

It is permissible for Jews to use their influence and money to win support in the US and the UK for their objectives in Palestine. It is not permissible for Jews to label everyone who expresses sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians as anti-Semitic or Nazis. It is permissible for Israel to be a Jewish state. It is not permissible to pretend that it can be a Western-style democracy, when double standards based on Jewishness are built into the Basic Laws of the Israeli state. It is permissible for Israel to recruit Jews from around the world to immigrate: The Right of Return. It is not permissible for Israel to deny Palestinians the same right, especially since most of them were coercively exiled. It is permissible for Israel to subsidize Jewish immigrants. It is not permissible to settle them on Palestinian land. It is permissible to have occupied Palestinian territory in the wake of war. It is not permissible to continue to occupy Palestine indefinitely. It is permissible for Israel to defend itself against criminal and terrorist acts. It is not permissible to punish, maim, kill, torture, or terrorize the innocent in the process.

It is permissible to interrogate suspects and prisoners. It is not permissible to torture or imprison them without due process. It is permissible for Israel to regulate water, electricity, garbage collection and other essential services in the territories it controls. It is not permissible to suspend these services to punish Palestinians for alleged support of dissidents.

It is permissible for Israel to defend its borders (indistinct and unofficial as they are). It is not permissible to use border checks to harass or punish Palestinians. It is permissible for Israel to have defense forces. It is not permissible to use it as an aggressive, invading army.

It is permissible for Israel to have weapons of mass destruction, estimated at between 200-400 nuclear warheads. It is not permissible to deny their existence in an effort to deny deterrent capability to its neighbors.

It is permissible to consider Jerusalem, Hebron and other towns as religiously significant. It is not permissible to deny the same claims by Muslims or Christians. It is permissible for Jews to want to live in peace and security. It is not permissible to deny this possibility to Palestinians. It is permissible for Israel to exist. It is not permissible for Israel to deny this right to Palestinians.

Alan Paton died before his beloved country freed itself from colonial oppression. How many Palestinian “Alan Patons” will die before their beloved country will free itself from its oppressors?

— Dr. Christopher Vasillopulos is professor of political science and international relations at Eastern Connecticut State University.

David Cesarani, The Guardian

The comment surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary mostly focused on the character of the Jewish state in its sixth decade and its apparently unending struggle with the Palestinians. Little attention was paid to Britain’s role in the emergence of Jewish statehood and its responsibility for the nakba, the Arab catastrophe in 1948. Yet if there was ever an appropriate moment for historical self-reflection, surely this is it.

After Britain was awarded the mandate for Palestine by the League of Nations, in 1922, colonial policy in Palestine was to oversee the development of both the Jewish and the Arab sectors, as cheaply as possible or at a profit. Yet the two sides were not evenly matched.

The worldwide Zionist movement poured investment and immigrants into Palestine. During the 1920s neither arrived in impressive quantities. But after the Nazis took power in Germany the trickle of impoverished immigrants from Poland turned into a flood of comparatively well-off German Jews. By the 1930s the Jewish sector of the economy, fortified by exclusive practices, was overwhelming the Arab one.

Palestinian farmers were blighted by undercapitalization and hampered by a patronizing colonial administration that believed in preserving their “picturesque” way of life. When they saw the demographic balance tilting, the Arabs attempted to seize the levers regulating immigration, but they were no match for the Zionist politicians and their allies in London. Having lost faith in the political process and British good will, they turned to armed revolt. Between 1936 and 1939, the British security forces crushed the Arab rebellion in Palestine. Social and economic decay was now compounded by defeat.

Ironically, at just this moment, with Europe on the brink of war, Britain conceded everything the Palestinian Arabs had demanded short of immediate independence. A white paper in 1939 decreed that Jewish immigration would be limited to paltry numbers and after five years the population, inevitably comprising an Arab majority, would determine the country’s future.

The war changed everything. Palestinian Jews volunteered in large numbers for the British army; thousands received training and combat experience. Winston Churchill, the wartime prime minister, was pro-Zionist and edged British policy back toward partition. Attitudes toward Zionism were transformed by the mass murder of the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe.

After the war the Labour Party was swept into office. Traditionally it was pro-Zionist, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, were impressed when the military said they needed Palestine for strategic reasons. And with the British economy drained by six years of warfare, Bevin wanted to avoid anything that would antagonize the oil-producing states.

So the white paper was retained and the Royal Navy ordered to prevent the survivors of Nazi genocide reaching Palestine. Jews around the world were enraged by what seemed a heartless policy. It made no difference to them if Attlee and Bevin sincerely believed that the refugees from the ghettos and camps would be better off living securely in the countries from which they had been kidnapped by the Nazis.

Bevin also believed that Britain and the US had to cooperate in world affairs. Yet President Truman repeatedly deferred to the electoral calculus that gave American Jewish voters a say in foreign policy. If Britain had acceded to Truman’s call to admit 100,000 Jews from Europe into Palestine in 1945 it would probably have had to put down a few Arab riots, but might still have been there a decade later. Instead, Attlee and Bevin tried to get American loans and help to stay in Palestine while at the same time placating the Arabs. This policy was doomed and merely provoked an armed Jewish uprising that the police and army were ill-equipped to suppress.

Jewish terrorists tormented the security forces. Sniping, roadside bombs, mines and massive explosions, such as the King David Hotel bombing, drove the troops mad. In reprisal, police and soldiers repeatedly attacked innocent Jews, most viciously, in August 1947, after the Irgun hanged two British sergeants in revenge for the hanging of three of their fighters. (There were anti-Jewish riots in England, too.) While a political solution seemed as elusive as ever, senior officers in Palestine warned Whitehall that they were loosing control of their own men.

Britain’s role in Palestine may have been conveniently forgotten because it was a diplomatic and military defeat of immense proportions, ending in squalid acts of vengeance. Recently released documents in The National Archives confirm Jewish suspicions, denied at the time, that in February 1948 British Army deserters used truck bombs to blow up a stretch of Ben Yehuda Street, in Jerusalem, killing 52 people.

However, the Palestinians were the chief victims of British policy. After the UN announced the partition of Palestine in November 1947, Bevin ordered the army and the administration to remain strictly neutral. He had made it clear that the British would not enforce any solution, least of all one they thought was unfair to the Arabs. Unfortunately, this policy had the opposite effect to what was intended.

Bevin may have hoped the Arabs would overwhelm the Jews in the communal war that raged for the next six months. But the Palestinian Arabs lacked any national organization. Their fighting forces were village-based militias. They could cut roads and isolate Jewish settlements, but they were never a real threat to incipient Jewish sovereignty. Moreover, by maintaining the status quo, the British effectively defended the Jews when they were at their weakest.

As a result, the Jews were able to consolidate the territory assigned to them by the UN and expel most of its Arab population. After Israel declared its independence in May 1948, civil war was superseded by invasion. British even-handedness now took the form of an arms embargo. Yet it hurt the Arabs more. The Israeli forces were being equipped mainly from the Soviet bloc. The armies of Egypt and Jordan depended on British supplies and, in the latter case, British officers. Britain in effect contributed to Israel’s survival by hobbling the armies that were attempting to wipe it out at birth. The Arab invasion proved to be half-hearted and ineffectual, yet it gave Israel wholly reasonable grounds for seizing more territory and displacing more Arabs.

Bevin was occasionally bothered by these developments. But he withheld recognition from Israel more out of sheer spite. The two countries nearly came to war when Israeli Spitfires shot down several RAF planes patrolling over the Egyptian border in January 1949. This aerial humiliation capped a disastrous chapter in the end of the British Empire. We may think it is best forgotten, but by refusing to enforce a settlement that the British government did not like it condemned the Palestinians to a far worse fate. And that is something to think about.

Seth Freedman, The Guardian

In sharp contrast to last week’s Independence Day celebrations on the streets of West Jerusalem, the east side of the city took on an air of mourning Thursday, as the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) was marked. All over Gaza and the West Bank, demonstrations took place to commemorate the fate that befell the Palestinian people in 1948, and — despite their residing inside Israel proper — East Jerusalem residents were just as eager to make their voices of protest heard.

I headed to Damascus Gate on Thursday morning, to see for myself how high emotions were running amongst the demonstrators — yet before I’d even arrived I was already knee-deep in discussion about the conflict. Upon learning my reasons for crossing the divide into East Jerusalem, my Arab cab driver poured out a stream of invective against the Israeli authorities, bemoaning the situation he and his people had been forced to endure for 60 years.

Beginning with a scathing attack on George Bush — “He only cares about the Israelis; he’s not done a single thing for the Arabs in all his time as president” — he grew steadily angrier and more bitter as we circumvented the Old City walls en route to the protest. “We have no rights in our own land,” he muttered, “and even then the Israelis aren’t satisfied. It’s not enough for them to control us and humiliate us in our homes; now they want to drive us out of Jerusalem completely.”

“It’s a systematic program to get rid of us”, he assured me, sucking furiously on his cigarette. “They make our lives hell — they give us no (municipal services); they don’t let us build in our own neighborhoods, so people are forced to move out as the population grows; and they make us feel as though we don’t belong.” As I got out of the cab, next to a phalanx of border policemen fanning out to encircle the protesters, he beckoned me back to deliver his parting thoughts: “If you think I sound angry now, wait till the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. As long as Israel carries on behaving like this, our rage is only going to get worse.”

His words rang in my ears as I watched nine- and ten-year-old children stand defiantly alongside their parents at the protest. Several of them clutched cheap plastic poles with the UN flag flying atop them in the breeze; the words “Right of Return — 194” emblazoned across them in bold black letters. The children were under no illusion about what measures had to be taken to redress the injustices suffered by their forebears, and demanding the right of return suggested the time for talk of two states had been and gone.

A local shopkeeper told me just as much, asking me not to attach his name to his words, “since this country isn’t quite as democratic as they’d like you to think”. The right of return for Palestinian refugees was, he said, “something we can never give up on, not whilst every Jew on earth is allowed to move here without hindrance. Maybe if they said ‘no more Jewish immigrants — we’re full up’, then I’d consider it, but that’s not going to happen. They let people from Europe and Africa move here, yet refuse to discuss the issue of refugees (who came from here originally).”

“Any agreement with the Palestinian Authority must include the right of return, or at least significant compensation for those expelled. I know that Jews were kicked out of Arab lands too, and they should also be compensated, but on a much smaller scale. After all, they might have lost property, but we lost an entire country.”

At this point, his eyes glazed over and his tone took a marked shift away from the here and now and into the realms of fantasy born out of years of frustration with the status quo. “The truth is, my friend, that Nasser was right. He said that ‘What’s taken by force can only be returned by force’. We’re never going to get what we deserve from the Israelis. The only way we’ll have our dignity restored is when the Arab world stands up and fights for us and our rights.”

“And it will happen”, he declared forcefully, his eyes blazing as he spoke. “It might not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen in the next 50 years. I am one of the most moderate men around here, but — believe me — if an Arab army rises up to fight the Israelis, I’d join them myself. Not the groups carrying out suicide bombings, mind you, but a real army that had the power to take on the Israelis.”

“My son gets so furious when he is humiliated at checkpoints”, he went on. “He asks me ‘why should we deal with these kind of people at all? Better to live under the occupation, sign no agreements whatsoever, and wait for the Arab world to come to our aid’”.

His sentiments were distressingly similar to those of the embattled Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, who bore their oppression at the hands of the Cossacks and others by falling back on waiting for messianic redemption. By retreating into an otherworldly shell, they were able to block out the injustice and iniquities that they were dealt, and focus on a time when they would be delivered salvation by a higher power.

For the shopkeeper, the “Arab world” is the messiah; the white knight who will ride in on his trusty steed to right all the wrongs and restore to the Palestinians their dignity and honor. Despite the last 60 years of history suggesting otherwise — that the Arab world is neither powerful nor interested enough to take serious action on the Palestinians’ behalf — he clings to this belief like a shipwreck survivor to a narrow plank of wood.

As each year passes, and the Palestinians feel ever more scorned by Israel and her allies, it’s no wonder that they seek comfort in droves in the arms of the extremists. Dogmatism and fundamentalism can promise them the moon, whilst the facts on the ground remain the same, and the longer the status quo persists, the stronger groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad grow. For them not to achieve utter domination amongst their people before the 70th anniversary of Israel’s creation, much must be done to convince the Palestinians that there is an alternative — but no one on the Palestinian side is holding their breath.

Palestinian refugee children (Photo: Matthew Cassel)

By Ramzy Baroud

‘Don’t ask for what you never had,’ is the underlying message made by supporters of Israel when they claim Palestine was never a state to begin with.

The contention is, of course, easily refutable. Following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th Century, colonial powers plotted to divide the spoils. When Britain and France signed the secretive Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which divided the spheres of influence in west Asia, there were hardly any ‘nation-states’ in the region which would fit contemporary definitions of the term.

All borders were colonial concoctions that served the interests of the powerful countries seeking strategic control, political influence and raw material. Most of Africa and much of Asia were victims of the colonial scrambles, which disfigured their geo-political and subsequently socio-economic compositions.

But Palestinians, like many other people, did see themselves as a unique group linked historically to a specific geographic entity. All That Remains by Professor Walid Khalidi is one leading volume which documents a thriving pre-Israel history of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Such history is often overlooked, if not entirely dismissed. Some choose to believe that no other civilization ever existed in Palestine, neither prior to nor between the assumed destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE until the founding of Israel in 1948. But what about irrefutable facts? For example, the Israeli Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post when it was founded in 1932. Why Palestine and not Israel? Whose existence, as a definable political entity, preceded the other? The answer is obvious.

It isn’t the denial or acceptance of Israel’s existence that concerns me. Israel does exist, even if it refuses to define its borders, or acknowledge the historic injustices committed against the Palestinian people. The systematic and brutal ethnic cleaning of the majority of Palestinian Christians and Muslims from 1947 to 1948 is what produced a Jewish majority in Palestine and subsequently the ‘Jewish state’ of Israel.

Also worth remembering are the equally systematic attempts at dehumanising Palestinians and denying them any rights. When Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, compared Palestinians in a Jerusalem Post interview (August 2000) to “crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more,” he was hardly diverting from a consistent Zionist tradition that equated Palestinians with animals and vermin. Another Prime Minister, Menahim Begin referred to Palestinians in a Knesset speech as “beasts walking on two legs.” They have also been described as “grasshoppers”, “cockroaches” and more by famed Israeli statesmen.

Disturbingly, such references might be seen as an improvement from former Prime Minister Golda Meir’s claim that “there were no such thing as Palestinians…they did not exist.” (June 15, 1969)

To justify its own existence, Israel has long subjugated its citizens to a kind of collective amnesia. Do Israelis realise they live on the rubble of hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns, each destroyed during a most tragic history of blood, pain and tears, resulting in an ethnic cleansing of nearly 800,000 Palestinians?

As Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, nothing is allowed to blemish the supposed heroism of its founding fathers or those who fought in its name. Palestine, the Palestinians, and an immeasurably long relationship between a people and their land hardly merit a pause as Israeli officials and their Western counterparts carry on with their festivities.

While some conveniently forgot many historic chapters pertinent to the suffering of Palestinians, Israeli leaders — especially those who took part in the colonization of Palestine — were fully aware of what they did. David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, warned in 1948, “We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.” By ensuring that Palestinians were cut off from their land, Ben Gurion has hoped that time will take care of the rest. “The old will die and the young will forget,” he said.

Moshe Dayan, a former Israeli Defence Minister also had no illusions regarding the real history beneath Israel’s momentous achievements. His speech at the Technion in Haifa (April 4, 1969) was quoted in the Israeli daily Haaretz thus: “We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village.”

Israel has, since its foundation, laboured to undermine any sense of Palestinian identity. Without most of their historic land, the relationship between Palestinians and Palestine could only exist in memory. Eventually though, memory managed to morph into a collective identity that has proved more durable than the physical existence on the land. “It is a testimony to the tenacity of Palestinians that they have kept alive a sense of nationhood in the face of so much adversity. Yet the obstacles to sustaining their cohesiveness as a people are today greater than ever,” reported the Economist (May 8, 2008).

Living in so many disconnected areas, removed from their land, detached from one another, fought with at every corner, Palestinians have not just been oppressed physically by Israel, but physiologically as well. There are attempts from all angles to force them to simply concede, forget, and move on. It is the Palestinian people’s rejection of such notions that makes Israel’s victory and ‘independence’ superficial and unconvincing.

Sixty years after their Catastrophe (Nakba), Palestinians still remember their past and present injustices. Of course more than mere remembrance is necessary; Palestinians need to find a common ground for unity — Christians and Muslims, poor and rich, secularist and the religious — in order to stop Israel from eagerly exploiting their own disunity, factionalism and political tribalism.

But, despite Israel’s hopes and best efforts, Palestinians have not yet forgotten who they are. And no amount of denial can change this.

-Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

Bertrand Russell wrote: The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people.

By Ron Forthofer

After WWII, political pressure increased for a Jewish state instead of a homeland in Palestine. This pressure was due in part to the terrible guilt felt by people in the U.S. and other nations over the horrific suffering of several groups during the Nazi era, especially that of the Jews during the Holocaust. The pictures detailing the wretched conditions of Jews barely surviving the concentration and extermination camps and of the piles of bones from some of the millions killed were incredibly powerful.

In addition, a weakened Britain was ready to end its control of the Palestine Mandate partly due to the burden of maintaining 100,000 troops there and partly due to the guerilla campaign waged by Jewish terrorists. One additional factor in the British decision to end the mandate by May 1948 was the intense pressure put on Britain after it prevented Holocaust survivors from entering Palestine.

This decision by the British prompted the United Nations to form the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) on May 15, 1947. The committee issued a majority report on August 31, 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states and an U.N. administered area around and including Jerusalem. Three members (India, Iran and Yugoslavia) of the eleven nations on the committee voted instead in favor of a single federal state with separate Arab and Jewish constituent states. Australia abstained. The U.N. General Assembly discussed the partition resolution in November.

Before that session, on September 22nd, Loy Henderson, director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, warned Secretary of State George C. Marshall of the dangers of partition. Here is an excerpt of his comments:

“The UNSCOP [U.N. Special Committee on Palestine] Majority Plan is not only unworkable; if adopted, it would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.

“The proposals contained in the UNSCOP plan are not only not based on any principles of an international character, the maintenance of which would be in the interests of the United States, but they are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [U.N.] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based.

“These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race against persons outside of Palestine.”

The U.S. State Department was firmly against the partition. However President Truman overrode the Department. In 1945, Truman spoke to four U.S. ambassadors to Arab countries and bluntly said: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

On November 29th, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 calling for the partition passed. Following the adoption of the resolution, Arab countries proposed to query the International Court of Justice on the competence of the General Assembly to partition a country against the wishes of the majority of its inhabitants. This attempt was narrowly defeated.

Jews generally welcomed the partition plan while Palestinians and Arabs strongly opposed it. Palestinians supported a one democratic state solution. They also were outraged that the U.N. General Assembly was taking their land against their will and giving it to another people. For perspective, in 1947 Jews owned about 6% of the land in Palestine and accounted for about 1/3 of the population. The partition gave Jews control of about 55% of Palestine, including most of the coastal area.

Some of the numerous people who have commented on the injustice of this situation are quoted next. In 1956 David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, told Nahum Goldman, the president of the World Jewish Congress: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister-designate in 1947, made a similar point saying the Zionist plan neglected “one not unimportant fact…Palestine was not a wilderness or an empty, uninhabited place. It was already somebody else’s home.”

In 1956, Moshe Dayan, a military hero to Israelis, said: “What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.”

Shortly before his death in 1970, Bertrand Russell, one of the leading philosophers of Western thought during the 20th century, summarized the issue very well, saying:

“The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.”

After the partition passed, fighting began almost immediately and quickly escalated. On March 19th, 1948 the situation had become so critical that the U.S. renounced partition as unworkable and called for a U.N. trusteeship. It was too late.

Commenting on the fighting, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote: “In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948.” As a result of these atrocities and other military actions, about 250,000 Palestinians had already fled their homes before Israel declared its independence on May 14th. Fighting intensified when, on May 15th, neighboring Arab countries sent troops to aid the beleaguered Palestinians. Contrary to Israeli propaganda, Israeli forces substantially outnumbered Arab forces in battles and were also better armed. By the end of the fighting in 1949, Israel controlled 78% of Palestine and had driven approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. These Palestinians lost their lands, homes and most of their possessions. Israel also destroyed well over 400 Palestinian villages. There is debate about whether or not the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was planned or simply happened as a result of the fighting. It is clear that the removal of large numbers of Palestinians was necessary if Israel were to be a majority Jewish state.

On December 11, 1948 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 that, among other items, called for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes or for compensation to those choosing not to return. Unfortunately, the world has not yet dealt with the terrible effects of the Nakba.

The past and current Israeli dispossessions of Palestinians represent grave violations of human rights. However, it is arguable that the U.N. partition resolution was an even greater crime. In a misguided effort to atone for the horrific human tragedy of the Holocaust, the U.S. led the effort that forced Palestinians to pay the price for atonement. The partition plan stole Palestinian land and gave it to another people without much if any consideration for Palestinian rights. Truman’s support for this partition trumped U.S. interests, morality and international law, not to mention the rights of Palestinians. Shamefully, the U.S. continues to support the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.

-Ron Forthofer is a retired professor and former Green Party candidate for Congress in 2000 and for Governor of Colorado in 2002. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Editorial: Distortion of Truth

Khaled Al Maeena , Arab News

3 May 2008

Did we hear it right? Did US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in London for a major meeting on the Palestinian situation, really attack Arab states for not doing enough to help the Palestinians? Incredibly, yes.

What hypocrisy. What gall. The US has done more to harm and oppress the Palestinians than any other state apart from Israel — and still does so. She herself has been intimately involved in that story of injustice. As secretary of state, she has been in the driving seat of US policy toward Israel for the past three years. During that period, did the US cut its massive bulwark of financial, military and political support for the Israelis, which enables them to withstand international demands for a meaningful and just peace? No. Did it stop using its veto at the UN to block condemnation of Israeli oppression, most recently the devastating blockade of Gaza? No. US policy over which she in part presides has continued to support the Israelis wholeheartedly, permitting them time after time to keep the peace process in limbo.

Arabs are not going to be lectured by the Americans of all people about not doing enough for the Palestinians.

For Rice to suggest that Arab states should concentrate on how much they can do for the Palestinians, not how little, is especially offensive. Arabs have done more than anyone else to keep Palestinian hopes alive, unlike the US. Over the years, Arab states have shouldered the financial and military burden of supporting the Palestinians. Billions upon billions of Arab dollars, dinars, dirhams, riyals and pounds have been spent directly and indirectly helping them. The idea that Arab governments sit down to work out how little they can do for the Palestinians is a downright fabrication, a slander. The fact that a number of Arab states have not paid up financial pledges to the Palestinian Authority for this year is wholly irrelevant. The year is not yet half way through. The money will be paid — and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Algeria, has already been paid.

The implicit suggestion that Arab support for the Palestinians is all words and no action is deliberate distortion of the truth. It is an attempt to divert attention from the reality that the Bush administration’s peace process will not work.

Oxfam, not an Arab body, has this to say about what Rice could have done for the Palestinians: “Words are not enough. They must be followed up with decisive, immediate action by Israel and the international community to reverse the effects of the… blockade of Gaza, which has diminished its 1.5 million people to a drip-feed existence.” One word from Rice will do it.

When Arabs see US putting pressure on Israel to make concessions, when they see US action not words, making a Palestinian state a reality, then they may be inclined to listen to US moralizing about the situation. Till then, less twisting of the facts and a little more honesty would go a long way to recoup American credibility in Arab eyes.
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Khaled Al-Maeena is Editor-in-Chief of Arab News [which was voted recently as the Middle East's leading English language daily ], Senior columnist, Asharq Al-Awsat, Al Madina, Urdu News, Gulf News. Khaled Al-Maeena is a well-known businessman, journalist, editor, PR consultant and media personality in Saudi Arabia. He received his education in several countries including the United States, Britain and Pakistan.
Among many of his media and diplomatic achievements was that he represented Saudi Arabia at several important summit meetings in the Arab World; the Arab summits of Baghdad and Morocco, for example. He was a member of diplomatic delegations to the People’s Republic of China and Russia, after relations with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were established with them. He led the Arab News team throughout the Gulf crisis and is accredited with being the first person to bring newspapers back into liberated Kuwait.

Terrorism — Compare and Contrast
Tanya Hsu

Last week in Arab News, columnist Fatin Bundagji wrote of a letter from an American, rather typical of the refrain we have heard for the past five years. Accusing Ms. Bundagji of “conveniently” forgetting that Arab terrorists attacked the US, the writer implied that America has every right to retaliate against anybody, an individual or nation, it considers an enemy. Thus the rightful invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, neither state having had anything to do with 9/11 whatsoever.

It is fallacious logic. One cannot compare apples to oranges.

No Arab nation has ever attacked the United States. The same cannot be said of the West, who has for the past century been invading the Middle East repeatedly in its quest for control of the region’s resources. Instead, the argument should be made with all elements being equal.

The 9/11 attacks were terrorist acts, to be certain, but not by an Arab state. One must compare a terrorist to a terrorist, and contrast the results. An example of an American terrorist who did attack Arabs on their own soil would be Baruch Goldstein.

Born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, Goldstein walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Jerusalem on Feb. 25, 1994, at 5.20 a.m., opening fire on 500 Palestinian Muslims at a Friday-morning prayer in Ramadan. Spraying the worshippers with his automatic rifle, he emptied 110 bullets in less than a minute and a half. Thirty Palestinians were killed immediately, and three were trampled to death in the ensuing panic. Those who fought back beat Goldstein to death. More than 20 further Palestinians were killed the same day in retaliation for Goldstein’s death, including fiver killed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Deaths of Arab civilians at the hands of this American terrorist amounted to 1/500ths of a percent of the total Arab population in Israel. The 9/11 attacks resulted in the deaths of 1/1000ths of a percent of the total American population. In other words, comparing terrorist act to terrorist act, one man alone, Goldstein, massacred twice as many Arabs in a single incident as per capita deaths on 9/11. If one includes all Israelis, Muslim and Jewish citizens alike, Goldstein still murdered half as many per capita as those who were killed in the US on 9/11.

Yet not one Arab state launched a retaliatory attack on Israel. No one invaded Israel; not a single Arab nation decided that the Israeli people should pay the collective price for a massive act of civilian terrorism. In fact, Israel and America barely raised an eyebrow, and Goldstein was praised in New York by the Jewish extremist organization Kahane Kach. Instead, Baruch Goldstein was buried as a martyr and hero in Israel.

Today pilgrims visit Goldstein’s gravesite daily, his burial plaque reading: “Here lies the saint, Dr. Baruch Kappel Goldstein, blessed be the memory of the righteous and holy man, may the Lord avenge his blood, who devoted his soul to the Jews, Jewish religion and Jewish land. His hands are innocent and his heart is pure. He was killed as a martyr…”

Meanwhile, the US continues to cite 9/11 to justify a war resulting in the death of over one million Iraqis (according to the British Opinion Research Business report in 2007).

As for US troop casualties, the Pentagon releases only death reports for troops killed on the field, from bullets or bombs (4,000). They do not include deaths sustained “not in direct combat”, e.g. those who die during evacuation, Humvee accidents, hospital deaths, those killed off duty, or private contractors (as many in Iraq as US troops). Also not included are suicides: 120 traumatized veterans kill themselves per week, according to a CBS 2007 investigation.

Thousands will die of cancer or kidney toxicology from depleted uranium exposure; thousands more have been infected with “Sandfly Disease” that can be fatal. Little wonder that the Pentagon bans the publication of photos of caskets flown home under cover of darkness.

If sheer statistics account for a sound argument, more than a million have paid the price for 9/11. How many more before the US is satisfied? As Dick Cheney himself said after the 1991 Gulf War (146 US troops killed), as to why the US left Iraq: “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?…not very many”. George W. Bush this week announced that it “makes no sense” for the US to retreat from Iraq, and suggestions to the contrary are unpatriotic. But his vice president said in 1991, “I do not think the United States wants to have US military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all.” If the US did that, Cheney prophesied in 1991, it would cause the US to be “involved in a civil war inside Iraq (that) would literally be a quagmire.”

Neither Iraq, Afghanistan, nor Saudi Arabia was responsible for 9/11, in the same way that America was not responsible for the Goldstein massacre. One must compare military state action to military state action, not terrorist to nation state.

The equation seems simple:

Arab kills Americans = mass retaliatory military force required in revenge that is morally justifiable.

American kills Arabs = hero.

Aijaz Zaka Syed

Opinion polls fascinate me. They are, if honestly conducted, perhaps the best possible way of gauging public opinion. At a time when spin is the norm and global media is controlled, manipulated and dictated by powerful corporate interests and governments, it’s not easy to get a clear picture on any given issue.

This is especially true when the story involves marginalized minorities and dispossessed groups. And of late the Muslims have been at the receiving end. After the disintegration of Soviet Union, the West found itself a new enemy in Islam.

The 9/11 attacks in the US and 7/7 strikes in the UK were only excuses, not the causes, to hasten this process. They might have contributed to the current hysteria against everything Islamic but they never were the Original Sin as we’ve been given to believe.

Myths like this have been demolished in a most interesting survey conducted by Gallup. What makes this opinion poll like no other is that it was conducted over a period of six years, beginning after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Gallup conducted research in 35 Muslim countries, interviewing more than 50,000 people, to come up with what it calls the first comprehensive survey of Muslim world opinion.

The results have also given birth to a book called, Who Speaks for Islam? What a billion Muslims really think by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed.

The poll and the book offer a much-needed reality check on the relations between the West and Muslim world. Some of the findings are genuinely surprising even for someone like me who has been obsessed with the issue.

Many conclusions of the poll only go to confirm what we in the Muslim world have always known but couldn’t succeed in putting them across to our friends in the West. For instance, the fact that it’s not Islamic teachings that drive some individuals to violence but historical injustices inflicted and perpetuated by some Western powers.

Which is why one so hopes that the urgent message this poll seeks to convey reaches the Western audience — and the wider world. It would be such a shame if it doesn’t. Because, as Dalia Mogahed argues in the book, this ostensible conflict between Islam and West is far from inevitable.

Many concerned commentators have repeatedly argued that what is fuelling the so-called clash of civilizations is not some absurd hatred of Christian West sanctioned by Islam but Western ignorance about Muslims. The poll backs this argument.

Most Muslims, regardless of where they live, whether in Saudi Arabia or Iran, are surprisingly well informed about the West and its values and ideals. In fact, most of them admire the West for its scientific achievements, economic progress and celebration of knowledge and excellence. The West is admired for the political freedom, democracy and rights it offers its people.

There are other findings that are equally interesting. Contrary to common perceptions in the West, the majority of respondents think men and women have equal rights. A whopping 94 percent of Indonesians share this view. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation. In Iran, the figure is 89 percent. And in Saudi Arabia, it’s 73 percent.

A great majority of Muslims also believe a woman can work outside her home in any job for which she is qualified (88 percent in Indonesia, 72 percent in Egypt and 78 percent in Saudi Arabia). And they also believe women should be able to vote without interference (87 percent in Indonesia, 91 percent in Egypt, 98 percent in Lebanon).

And what about the supposed Muslim sympathy for terrorism? While 6 percent of the Americans think attacks involving civilians are “completely justified,” in Saudi Arabia this figure is 4 percent. In Lebanon and Iran, it’s 2 percent.

And mark this, it’s important. The majority of Muslims absolutely rejects violence and terrorism. In fact, many of the respondents quoted Qur’anic verses to point out that extremism goes against Islamic teachings.

Going by these findings, would any reasonable person in his right mind blame Islam for extremism and violence? And remember, the survey was not sponsored by Al Jazeera, Bin Laden’s favorite channel, but by Gallup, the biggest name in the business.

So what is it then that drives the West and Muslim world apart? The answer lies in Western indifference, nay casual contempt, for a billion believers and all that they believe in. I am not saying this; Gallup poll does.

Again this shouldn’t come as a surprise. While admiring Western values such as democracy and freedom, Muslims feel these values are conveniently cast aside when it comes to applying them to Muslim world.

More than 65 percent of Egyptians, Jordanians and Iranians believe the US will never allow people in the Middle East to run their own affairs and chart their own course.

When the Gallup pollsters asked Muslims around the world what the West could do to improve relations with the Muslim world, the most frequent responses called for greater respect for Islam and treatment of Muslims as equals, not as inferior.

The Western contempt for Islam, especially the ignorance of Americans, is not something imagined by us. The poll findings speak for themselves. The majority of Americans (66 percent) admit to having “some” prejudice against Muslims; one in five say they have “a great deal” of prejudice. Almost half do not believe US Muslims are “loyal” to their country; and one in four doesn’t want a Muslim as a neighbor!

Given these views, is it any surprising that Muslims are invariably portrayed as terrorists in the US media, including that big propaganda machine called Hollywood?

If the Muslims harbor some degree of anti-US sentiment, it’s not because of what the Americans are but because of what they do or have been doing in the Muslim world. But how would you explain the deep-seated paranoia and Islamophobia in the US and West?

Whatever its causes, this divide is unfortunate and unnatural. Because there is a great deal lot that unites the Muslims and Americans. In an increasingly materialistic world, they continue to hold on to their belief in God.

Unlike in Europe and much of the world, religion plays a healthy role in the day-to-day life of the Americans as well as Muslims. They both cherish universal values like honesty, truthfulness, hard work, accountability and being always loyal to your family.

Just look around. What we have in common is much more than what we do not. Which is why this divide is such a tragedy. We Muslims want to bridge this gulf. Is the other side equally willing?

Recommended External Links :

1. Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think

2.Muslim World