THE ORIGIN OF THE PALESTINE-ISRAEL CONFLICT - Second Edition

As the periodic bloodshed continues in the Middle East, the search for an equitable solution must come to grips with the root cause of the conflict. The conventional wisdom is that, even if both sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational “terrorist," who have no point of view worth listening to. Our position, however is that the Palestinians have a real grievance: their homeland for over thousand years was taken, without their consent and mostly by force, during the creation of the state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes - on both sides - inevitably follow from this original injustice.

This paper outlines the history of Palestine to show how, this process occurred and what a moral solution to the region's problems should consist of. If you care about the people of the Middle East, Jewish and Arab, you owe it to yourself to read this account of the other side of the historical record.

Published by: Jews for Justice in the Middle East, P.O. Box 14561, Berkeley, CA 94712

1. Early History of the Region

2. The British Mandate Period (1920 - 1948)

3. The UN Partition of Palestine

4. Statehood and Expulsion - 1948

5. The 1967 War and Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza

6. The History of Terrorrism in the Region

7. Jewish Criticism of Zionism

8. Zionism and the Holocaust

9. Intifada 2000 and the Peace Process

10. Views of the Future

11. General Considerations

12. Conclusion I - for Jewish Readers

13. Conclusion II

INTRODUCTION

The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine to reclaim their ancestral homeland in the late 19th century. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs' inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists were then forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to today.

The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true, as the documentary evidence in this booklet shall show. What really happened was that the Zionist movement, from the beginning, looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the indigenous Arab population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as was possible. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).

The Arab community, as it became increasingly aware of the Zionists' intentions, strenuously opposed further Jewish immigration and land buying because it posed a real and imminent danger to the very existence of Arab society in Palestine. Because of this opposition, the entire Zionist project never could have been realized without the military backing of the British. The vast majority of the population of Palestine, by the way, had been Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (over 1200 years).

In short, Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist world-view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants didn't matter. The Arabs' opposition to Zionism wasn't based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of their people.

One further point: being Jewish ourselves, the position we present here is critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic. We do not believe that the Jews acted worse than any other group might have acted in their situation. The Zionists (who were a distinct minority of the Jewish people until after WWII) had an understandable desire to establish a place where Jews could be masters of their fate, given the bleak history of Jewish oppression. Especially as the danger to European Jewry crystalized in the late 1 930s and after, the actions of the Zionists were propelled by real desperation.

But so were the actions of the Arabs. The mythic "land without people for a people without land" was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919. This is the root of the problem, as we shall see.

Last modified: July 19, 2007