A Brief Simplification of a Complicated Conflict: Israel and Palestine
By: Imam Masri
A common misconception about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or an even better name, “Arab-Israeli” conflict?, is that it’s one that is centered on religious or ethnic divisions. The complications behind this conflict, however, revolve around a more historic problem, not a political one. In order to understand the background of one of the most controversial topics of the Middle East, one must read about and acknowledge the origins, the history, and details that shaped this phenomenon, and are even still going on to this day. Although most knowledgable people would trace the conflict's origins to 1948, the year Zionists declared Israel as declared as a state, there are decades of turning points beforehand that shape the conflict.
During the late 20th century, anti-semitism was aging across European countries. The Austrian Atheist Theodore Herzl declared Jews would need a safe haven, more specifically, a state designed just for Jews from all over the world to accumulate and settle.
This political ideology became known as Zionism by 1897, named after the religious site of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and after many years of aspirations by leaders and followers, British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour signed the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promising all of Historic Palestine as a "homeland for Jews".
While this may seem like a logical and harmless situation, it's important to be aware of the racism of the ideology. First of all, declaring a state exclusively for just one religious or racial group is ethnocentrism, and the devastating effects that Zionism had on the indigenous population was built on such racism and continues to be in effect to this day.
After World War I, The British finally occupied present-day Palestine and Jordan in 1920 and mandated them as one in order to establish the preparations of the "Jewish State". This encouraged vast Jewish migrations from Europe to the area, thus creating primarily tiny settlements around historical cities and even Palestinian villages known in Hebrew as "Kibbutzim" or "Yishuvim".
The Indigenous Palestinians had absolutely no problem with these immigrants because they were unaware of the newcomers' colonial intentions. Incitements and riots riveted across all of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, with clashes that resulted in mass casualties of both Jews and Arabs, and Zionist attacks on
Palestinians and British militia, such as the hanging of British soldiers and the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. That's when the British finally decided to withdraw, and hand the problem over to the newly formed United Nations, who on November 1947, proposed Resolution 181, the partition of two states west of the Jordan River, one Jewish and one Arab.
While many Palestinians and even some Zionists rejected the partition, the majority within the U.N agreed, and they formally went with it. From that point on, Zionist militias executed many strategies that would make way for their new ethno-state.
According to Israeli Archives and expatriate historian Ilan Pappe, many of these documents, one of them being labeled as "Plan Dalet" described systematically expelling the residents of the main cities, and of Palestinian towns and villages. Another document ordered to "cleanse" the towns as it is ritual to cleanse Passover bread. These militias were gangs at the time, who were provided weapons by the British and committed atrocities up until the end of 1949. Two of the most prominent of these gangs were the Haganah and Irgun.
Aside from the expulsion of habitants from their homes, they also rape the village's women and killed the elderly. A recently released documentary called "1948: Creation and Catastrophe"* recalled a disturbing incident that took place in the now obliterated village of Deir Yassin. A group of militiamen had taken over a bakery and ordered the baker to throw his son in the oven. When the baker refused, one of the men hit him on the head with a gun, pushed his son in the oven, and then pushed him in afterward. This is an eerie repetition of what Jews have endured in Europe during World War II, which goes to show that from that point, Zionists became a mirror image of their worst nightmare. The very same documentary also noted that besides physical tactics of expulsion, militiamen used fear to drive out nearby villagers.
While they clearly performed various massacres, many gang members would drive around military tanks with giant speakers that radiated the sound of screaming for miles to ensure that not a trace of Arab would remain in sight. Such tactics are all defined as ethnic cleansing. By Oct.
1949, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees and more than 530 villages and towns were demolished.
Ethnic cleansing didn't stop there, however. To this day, the Israeli government systematically prevents the expansion of Palestinian homes and towns and evicts Palestinians, even those who are citizens of Israel, from their own property to make room for Jewish residents, as seen with the Bedouin evictions from the Negev desert in March 2018 and settlement expansions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which defines the second aspect that activists and other parts of the media emphasized in various discussions regarding the conflict: Apartheid.
Why Should We Care? What Can We Do?
As many people may know, Apartheid (derived from the Afrikaans word meaning "separateness") was a system of racial segregation between the native black majority and colonial white minority in South Africa from 1948-1994. Apartheid finally fell thanks to international recognition, and then solidarity which primarily involved economical isolation through boycotts. That being said, it's important to acknowledge the plight of the Palestinian people because in 2019, ethno-nationalism and any other form of discrimination should be unacceptable in the eyes of society, even if it's affecting a group you know nothing about. So with solidarity that encourages self-determination, justice, and most importantly, return and restoration, a final solution can be established for all peoples living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: democratic rights and majority rule.