Palestine and Israel

A.G. NOORANI

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev; Little, Brown and Company; pages 612, 25.

"At a recent meeting of Israel's Cabinet Acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami made a most unusual statement to his governmental colleagues, one that arguably expresses the most honest and important insight into the fifty-year-old conflict between Israel and Palestinians ever expressed by any Jewish leader. It holds the potential of transforming the Israeli-Palestinian and the larger Israeli-Arab conflict in ways more profound and lasting than any formal peace treaty can hope to.

"As reported by Akiva Eldar in Ha'aretz on November 28, 2000, the statement was made by Ben-Ami in the course of a Cabinet debate over a document prepared by the Prime Minister's office which purported to catalogue a long list of Palestinian transgressions. Ben-Ami opposed the distribution of the document on the ground that no one in the West would be surprised that a people under occupation fails to honour agreements with its occupier: 'Accusations made by a well established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence.'

"It is difficult to grasp fully the importance of these words in the context of the tortured Israeli-Palestinian relationship. They are the first acknowledgement by an Israeli leader that Palestinians are a people under occupation who are struggling for their legitimate rights ."

HENRY SIEGMAN'S comments merit particular attention in India for two reasons. One is that since the Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power at the Centre in 1998, it began to fulfil its well-advertised pro-Israel policy. It is another matter that immediately after the general elections of March 1977, Atal Behari Vajpayee demanded that Israel return to the Arabs the land it occupied in the 1967 war. And that at a public meeting in Delhi where he shared the platform with Imam Bukhari of the Jama Masjid.

On July 2, 2000, his Minister for External Affairs, Jaswant Singh spoke to the Israeli Council of Foreign Relations in Jerusalem of a "tectonic shift of consciousness" and attributed the former estrangement between India and Israel to a "very strong urge among politicians" to continue in office. The Muslim vote, he explained, could not be ignored. "India's Israel policy became a captive to domestic policy that came to be unwittingly an unstated veto to (sic) India's larger West Asian policy."

This was as demeaning as it was factually untrue. He owed no apology or explanation to Israel for a policy pursued by predecessors, Jawaharlal Nehru included, a policy which incidentally earned rich dividends at the United Nations - to Pakistan's chagrin - and was indeed rooted in Gandhi's and Nehru's perceptions on the merits of the Palestine question.

The second reason is that Henry Siegman is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America. He represents a growing body of opinion among American Jews and within Israel itself which acknowledges the wrongs done to Palestinians by Israel.

In this article entitled "Israel: A Historic Statement" (The New York Review of Books; February 8, 2001) Siegman notes that "Israelis have found it painful to acknowledge the injustice that the establishment of the Jewish state inflicted on the Palestinian people for fear that such an acknowledgement would delegitimise the entire Zionist enterprise. They fear it may justify the claim of the most extremist Palestinians that it is not only the Occupied Territories that Israel needs to return but all of pre-1967 Israel as well."

Siegman is opposed to that. All that he urges is that Israeli Arabs "who emphathise with the sufferings of their Palestinians brethren" be not regarded as "traitors to their country" and that Israel should recognise "a sacred obligation to a people that has been greatly wronged, a wrong compounded by keeping the West Bank and Gaza under occupation since 1967."

But let alone the mainstream of Israeli opinion, very many in the West - especially in the United States - tend to be more royalist than the King. A respected columnist like Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times denounced Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the collapse of the talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak last year, in which President Bill Clinton mediated. Arafat, he claims, was offered a historic compromise proposal that would have given Palestinians control of 94 to 96 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza - with all the settlements removed, virtually all of Arab East Jerusalem, a return to Israel of a symbolic number of Palestinian refugees and either the right of return to the West Bank and Gaza or compensation for all the others" (International Herald Tribune, May 23, 2001).

However, even The Economist dubbed it "a half-decent settlement" (May 26, 2001). Siegman tore the Friedman thesis to shreds: "The notion that Mr. Arafat was offered a viable Palestinian state is a fabrication. There is no more reason to have expected him to consider as acceptable (much less as generous) an Israeli offer that would have enlarged Israel's 78 per cent of mandatory Palestine by an additional portion taken from the West Bank and Gaza than to have expected Israel to consider as generous a Palestinian offer that would have removed 10 per cent from Israel's pre-1967 territory.

"Territorial adjustments aside, the conditions attached by Mr. Barak to his proposals at Camp David would have created a Palestinian state in name only, for Israel's present economic and military control of the West Bank and Gaza would have remained essentially in place." He warned that "U.S. efforts designed to achieve Palestinian acquiescence in their own subjugation would be morally unjustifiable, and would only invite renewed and greater violence" (International Herald Tribune, June 8, 2001).

While this is true, terrorism - reprehensible in itself - will only alienate international public opinion. The suicide-bombing at a Tel Aviv discotheque on June 1 cost Palestinians a lot of sympathy. They would do well to abide by peaceful methods of agitation.

Yasser Arafat has to reckon with the collapse of the 1993 Oslo accords, the three to four million refugees and the growing despair of his people. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will accept Palestinian sovereignty as an interim measure only in 43 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza, leaving Palestinians with a state in less than half of the West Bank. "The more than seven years of Oslo promises have yielded only greater poverty, greater loss of Palestinian lands and greater Israeli control over Palestinian lives. Palestinian disillusionment is too deep to be dissipated by new promises. It will end only with the actual withdrawal of Israel's military and the end of the stranglehold that they exercise over every aspect of Palestinian existence... And a document in which he renounced all further claims against Israel, a condition that Mr. Barak insisted on, was seen by him as signing his own death warrant" (Siegman: International Herald Tribune; March 2, 2001).

In the last decade alone, the number of Israeli settlers over Arab lands has nearly doubled, to nearly 100,000. The Oslo deadline for a final settlement (1999) passed unfulfilled. Israel still occupies more than 80 per cent of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel's proposal "would have left the Palestinians with a mutated statelet in five chunks, all subject to Israeli fiat," as Chris Hedges pointed out (Foreign Affairs, January-February, 2001). Arafat's stature diminished after the 1993 Oslo accord. He gave up nearly 30 per cent of the territory that the 1947 U.N. General Assembly resolution on partition defined as Palestinian. He was given little more than 20 per cent of what Palestine was till 1948 when Israel was established. What are a mere 50 years in a nation's history? Memories shape national feeling.

If Palestinians were to recognise Israel with its pre-1967 borders, they would be conceding 77 per cent of Palestine. Acceptance of the Israeli proposals will not end the conflict. It will be "the end of hope".

The Holocaust, one of the greatest crimes in history, won support for the Zionist cause. But archival disclosures have now established that Britain was bent on establishing a Jewish state on Arab land ever since it acquired control of Palestine. Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner, signed this receipt at that time: "Received from Major-General Sir John J. Bols, K.C.B. - One Palestine, complete." As a member of the Cabinet under Prime Minister Lloyd George Samuel, an ardent Jew had worked hard for a Jewish state. The Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary, A. J. Balfour, had grown up on the Bible but learnt the wrong lessons. They were known as "Christian Zionists".

Tom Segev, the Israeli journalist and historian, was born in March 1945 in Jerusalem. Both his parents came to what was then Palestine in 1935 as refugees from Nazi Germany. His father was killed during the first Arab Israeli war, in 1948. One of Israel's best-known journalists, Segev's weekly column is published in Ha'aretz, the major Israeli daily newspaper. His first book 1949: The First Israelis, is considered the cornerstone of Israel's "new historiography".

This is a school steeped in learning and inspired by a passionate commitment to the historical truth. Ilan Pappe, a Haifa University scholar, is the most outspoken among them. In an interview with Dan Perry of the Associated Press, he gave a resounding "Yes" to the question "Was Israel born in sin?" He amplified: "The Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab... We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time" (The Asian Age, December 24, 1997).

WHAT Segev has done with the aid of stupendous research is to expose a sustained record of deceit that was practised on the Arabs by the British who took over Palestine, technically under a Mandate from the League of Nations after the First World War. "For more than 700 years the land had been under Muslim rule". The Balfour Declaration 1917 said that British "views with favour" the aspiration of the Zionist Jews to establish a "national home" for the Jewish people in Palestine.

"For all practical purposes, the British had promised the Zionists that they would establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The Promised Land had, by the stroke of a pen, become twice-promised. Although the British took possession of 'one Palestine, complete', as noted in the receipt signed by the high commissioner, Palestine was riven, even before His Majesty's Government settled in.

"The British kept their promise to the Zionists. They opened up the country to mass Jewish immigration; by 1948, the Jewish population had increased by more than tenfold. The Jews were permitted to purchase land, develop agriculture, and establish industries and banks. The British allowed them to set up hundreds of new settlements, including several towns. They created a school system and an army; they had a political leadership and elected institutions; and with the help of all these they in the end defeated the Arabs, all under British sponsorship, all in the wake of that promise of 1917. Contrary to the widely held belief of Britain's pro-Arabism, British actions considerably favoured the Zionist enterprise.''

The British entered Palestine, with Arab support, to defeat the Ottoman Empire and, the Arabs believed, to secure the independence of Arab lands from Ottoman control. The promise was made in Sir Henry McMahon's letter of October 24, 1915 to Sharif Husain. Britain reneged on it contending that it did not include Palestine. However, A Special Correspondent disclosed in The Times (April 17, 1964) fresh evidence of British documents in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University which proved the denials to be false.

Segev documents the immigration policy designed to create a Jewish majority on an Arab land. Not one landmark, not one significant detail in the record, is omitted. The book abounds with profiles of personalities and stories of human interest. Let alone High Commissioner Samuel, the first British Governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs "was a Zionist". The Arabs did not stand a chance. They did not have a single leader comparable to Chaim Weizmann, who had access to the highest in London, or David Ben-Gurion.

There were those who foresaw what was afoot and its consequences. Lt. Gen. Walter Congreve, who commanded the British troops in Egypt and Palestine, "expressed the hope that the Balfour Declaration would be revoked. 'We might as well declare that England belongs to Italy because it was once occupied by Romans,' he wrote, claiming that many of the military administration's officers shared his opinion. They were convinced that the Zionists wanted to flood the country with Jews, especially with lower-class Jews from Russia, Poland and Romania, so as to create a Jewish majority in Palestine. When they got strong enough, Congreve argued, the Jews would crush the Arabs, expel them from their land, and get rid of the British as well."

As the author notes, "the Zionist dream ran counter to the principles of democracy. The Zionists sometimes argued that they were speaking in the name of fifteen million Jews against half a million Arabs. The fact that these Jews had not yet 'returned home' did not diminish their right to determine the fate of their country."

Discussing Ben-Gurion's views on "the transfer" of the Arab population well before Israel came into being, he writes: "The notion of population transfer is deeply rooted in Zionist ideology, a logical outgrowth of the principle of segregation between Jews and Arabs and a reflection of the desire to ground the Jewish state in European, rather than Middle Eastern, culture... The Zionists' plans for the new state were based on the assumption that a large Arab minority would remain. But the tragedy of the Arab refugees from Palestine was a product of the Zionist principle of separation and the dream of population transfer. The tragedy was inevitable, just as the war itself was inevitable. The number of refugees reached approximately 750,000. Some planned their departure, some fled, and about half were expelled." They now assert a right to return to their own homeland.

Under the U.N.'s partition plan of 1947, the Jewish state would have included more than half a million Arabs, slightly more than the number of Jews then living within the proposed boundaries.

Segev puts paid to the Holocaust theory. "There is ... no basis for the frequent assertion that the State was established as a result of the Holocaust". The British administration, especially in the last years of the mandate, left behind a shadow Jewish regime ready to take over.

The author's research led him to an interesting encounter: "The Zionist movement made great efforts to establish a link with Gandhi to garner his support. Gandhi expressed his sympathy for the persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany but rejected the Zionist programme, partly because it involved the use of British force against the Arabs. He expressed a qualified understanding for Arab terrorism and suggested that the Jews of Palestine not fight the Arabs even if they tried to throw them into the Dead Sea; the world's sympathy would save the Jews in the end, he believed. In turn, Ben-Gurion made some non-committal statement about the liberation of India. Just as Gandhi could not support Zionism because he opposed British rule in his country, so Ben-Gurion could not support freedom for India because he favoured the continuation of British rule in Palestine."

Gandhi wrote in Harijan in 1938, "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense as England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The Mandates have no sanction but that of the last war..." (Quoted by Suneet Chopra; Frontline; February 4, 2000).

It is this national perception which shaped Nehru's policy when another world war led to Israel's establishment. He knew how it had come about. The truth is being acknowledged even by some Israeli scholars. The Sangh Parivar will not. For the edification of such, Ilan Pappe has edited a commendable volume of essays on "revisionist" history (The Israel-Palestine Question; Routledge; pages 278; 15.99). It explodes many myths.

While reckoning with historical truths one must not ignore the realities of today. Israel has come to stay. Conciliation, based on justice, is the need of the hour. Edward W. Said has been a relentless critic of the manner in which Arafat has conducted himself in this quest. His essays are a documented critique of Arafat's policies. (The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After; Granta Books, London; Penguin India; pages 345; 10). He applauds the revisionist Israeli historians and says emphatically: "I am totally in favour of peace by co-existence, self-determination, and equality between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples on the land of historical Palestine and I am therefore exactly the opposite of an opponent of peace." He urges Arafat to adopt the Gandhian course of a non-violent struggle.

One cannot help asking - when will Indian and Pakistani scholars and intellectuals acquire and display the honesty, moral courage, intellectual equipment and vigorous analysis of Israel's "revisionist'' historians? On issues like the partition, Kashmir, the nuclear dimension and the border dispute with China?