60 Years of Israel, 60 Years of al-Nakba

Israel at 60

By Patrick Seale


	Former Palestinian residents of West Jerusalem who fled their homes in 1948, and their descendants, walk in front of their former homes in the West Jerusalem neighborhoods of Talbyie and German Colony on May 11, 2008, in a silent remembrance of their plight (AFP photo/Joe Klamar.)

FOR ALL ITS achievements over the past six decades, Israel has failed one crucial test: integration into and peaceful co-existence with the Arab world around it. Although it claims to want security above all else, it has refused to take the steps necessary to ensure it. How can this puzzle be explained?

Israel has managed to sign peace treaties with two Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, and has shadowy relations with one or two others, but it has not made peace with the Arab peoples. On the contrary, for much of Arab and Muslim opinion, Israel remains an object of hate, a pariah state whose legitimacy is more than ever contested.

There seem to be at least three main reasons for this unhappy state of affairs: Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians; its insistence on military dominance over the whole Middle East; and its close alliance with a belligerent America.

As is well known, Israel’s birth in 1947-48 was accompanied by the forced expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The massacres and other crimes committed then—the massive seizure of land and property, the destruction of a whole society—might have been forgiven, and a reconciliation effected, had Israel recognized its responsibility for creating the refugee problem, and had it sought to compensate the refugees, and allow some of them back to their homes.

Instead—and especially since 1967, when it occupied the remaining parts of Arab Palestine—Israel has sought to wipe Arab Palestine off the map altogether. It has settled, and continues to settle, hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, thereby ruling out any realistic possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its relentless land hunger has been accompanied by a shocking indifference to Arab life. Not content with 78 percent of historic Palestine, Israel seems determined to seize more, and still more, land.

Israel has, in fact, behaved as if it believed that its own state-building enterprise would risk being undercut and de-legitimized by any concession to Palestinian rights or Palestinian nationalism.

The result of this stubborn intransigence and cruel oppression—in blatant violation of international law—has been to radicalize the Palestinians, their despair finding expression in the first and second intifadas, in suicide bombings, in Qassam rockets, and in the emergence in Gaza of an armed Islamic movement, Hamas—not unlike Hezbollah, its sister movement in Lebanon, itself the product of Israel’s invasion and long occupation of the south of that country.

Far from achieving peace and security, Israel finds itself confronted on its immediate borders by two well-implanted resistance movements, determined to force it to accept a degree of mutual deterrence—indeed, even the tentative beginnings of a balance of power, such as the Arab countries, for all their wealth and weight of population, have never managed to achieve with the Jewish state.

From its very beginnings, Israel has sought to dominate the region by force of arms. This was the principle on which David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, built the state. Under his leadership, the Jewish community in Palestine, numbering in 1947-48 a mere 630,000 people—largely the remnants of European Jewry—managed to transform themselves into the most powerful military force in the Middle East. They smashed the Palestinians, and defeated the weak, divided and disorganized Arab world.

The idea took root among Israel’s leaders that for their country to be strong, the Arabs had to be weak. Accordingly, Israel has sought to undermine, contain and destabilize its neighbors, whenever and wherever it could.

The Zionists enjoyed complicit relations with the Emir Abdallah of Transjordan from as far back as 1921, a relationship that Israel was able to continue with Abdallah’s successors in Amman.

Israel sought alliances with Turkey, the shah’s Iran, and Ethiopia against the Arabs—the so-called “periphery theory.” It backed the Kurds against Baghdad, and the southern Sudanese against Khartoum. It managed to remove Egypt from the Arab military line-up by a separate peace. It sought, with repeated wars, to bring Lebanon into its orbit in order to checkmate Syria. It secretly armed Iran against Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Its biggest triumph has been not just to forge a close relationship with the United States—a relationship in which American Jews play a crucial role—but to influence American Middle East policy to the extent that the Israeli tail has often seemed to wag the American dog.

It is doubtful that the United States would have attacked Iraq had it not been for relentless pressure from pro-Israeli neo-cons, anxious to remove any potential threat to Israel from the east—the very same people who are today urging America to attack Iran, on the pretext that Iran’s nuclear program poses an existential threat to the Jewish state.

It would take a miracle—and a radical change of policy—for Israel to live at peace in the region. It would require it to withdraw from Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territory; to accept a balance of power with its neighbors, rather than always seeking supremacy over them; and to stop inciting the United States, and indeed the whole of the Western world, against the Arabs and Islam.

On present form, it looks as if Israel might need another six decades to grasp that Middle East security is indivisible—in other words, that its own security cannot be won at the cost of the insecurity of its neighbors.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. Copyright © 2008 Patrick Seale. Distributed by Agence Global.

Remembering the Palestinian Nakba

By Nasser Barghouti and Bassemah Darwish

Nearly 30 years since she had seen her Northern Galilee home in what she called “48 Palestine,” Rasmiya Barghouti was finally given a permit by the Israeli military authorities to visit. She decided to take two of her daughters and four of her grandchildren with her.

It took less than three hours to reach Safad, renamed Tsvat by Israel after 1948. The van stopped in front of the white stone home that held her childhood memories. She proceeded to the familiar metal door, where she knocked. A large Eastern European woman opened the door; the two argued. Rasmiya returned to the van, her hardened face wet with tears. Her only words were: “She wouldn’t let me in! She still has the same curtains I made with my mother.”

They proceeded in silence, as she wept discreetly, to lunch at a hotel on Lake Tiberias where her youngest grandchild grew hyper. Instead of imposing her usual military-style discipline on the child, she encouraged him to splatter water and make even “more noise”—a shock to the rest of the family.

The Israeli waiter hurriedly came to the table demanding, in Hebrew, they stop the raucous behavior. It was then that her defiance exploded into cursing the waiter in Arabic. “We can do whatever we please! This is my father’s hotel!” she yelled. Until that moment, her children and grandchildren had been sheltered from knowing anything about her dear loss.

The rage of this Palestinian woman was born out of seeing her childhood home, from which she was forced to leave in 1948, now occupied by a stranger who would not even allow her in. She’d seen her father’s hotel, which he was never allowed to vacate, taken over by strangers. For the first time since her violent dispossession in 1948, she was allowed to visit her homeland, but not to return. Because millions of other Palestinian refugees are denied even such a visit, Rasmiya was considered “lucky.”

While Israel celebrates 60 years since its establishment, Palestinians everywhere commemorate the “Nakba” (“Catastrophe” in Arabic) that befell them after armed Jewish militia raided their homes and expelled them.

The exclusionary Zionist vision of creating a Jewish state in Palestine meant the elimination of the indigenous, “non-Jewish” population. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe writes: “…on 10 March 1948…veteran Zionist leaders, together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

Pappe explains how Jewish militias, the future armed forces of the state of Israel, carried out a plan of large-scale intimidation and siege, setting fires to Palestinian homes, planting mines, destroying more than 500 villages, and exercising other terrorist activities. In the end, nearly 800,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and into refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere.

Rasmiya’s family was among this wave of refugees. This massive ethnic cleansing completed the first phase of the compulsory “transfer” that the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, advocated in his address to the Jewish Agency Executive as early as 1938. Thus the Palestinians had become the victims of the victims of Europe.

Ten years ago, the late Edward Said commented on the “Israel at 50” celebrations: “I still find myself astonished at the lengths to which official Israel and its supporters will go to suppress the fact that a half-century has gone by without Israeli restitution, recognition or acknowledgment of Palestinian human rights…the Palestinian Nakba is characterized as a semi-fictional event…caused by no one in particular.”

The same stubborn refusal to recognize the Palestinian Nakba characterizes the “Israel at 60” celebrations in the U.S. media today. For Palestinians, denial of the Nakba is tantamount to denying the Holocaust for Jews.

Remembering the Nakba is even more compelling given what former President Jimmy Carter describes as an apartheid-like system that Israel has built to entangle the Palestinians in a seemingly endless cycle of hopelessness and violence. Israel still denies millions of Palestinian refugees their U.N.-sanctioned right to go back to their homes simply because they are not Jewish. Israel continues its 41-year-old military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel continues to impose its savage blockade on the Gaza Strip. Israel continues to build its illegal wall and settlements on occupied Palestinian land. And Israel continues to treat its own “non-Jewish” population as second-class citizens.

Can any conscientious person, then, celebrate Israel at 60?

When Israel has made reparations for its shameful past; when it has conformed to international law and universal human rights; when it has ended its brutal oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine; and when it has allowed Palestinians to practice their right to self-determination on their own land, we can all celebrate. Then, even Rasmiya’s descendants may celebrate.

Nasser Barghouti is a Palestinian-American and president of the San Diego Chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Rasmiya Barghouti was his grandmother. Darwish, a San Diego County resident, is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian-American. She lived in occupied Palestine while teaching at Birzeit University. This op-ed first appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune, May 7, 2008. Reprinted with permission.