A Short History of Palestine from 1900

 If Hamas set out to draw the world’s attention to the plight of the Palestinians, they succeeded beyond their fondest dreams. Contrary to what Israel would have you believe, October 17, 2023 did not come out of nowhere. Hamas may have in their charter a resolution to kill all Jews but there is no record of them saying such that I have found. On the other hand there is a long history of Israeli Zionists desire to kill all Palestinians including statements by Netanyahu.

“The Palestinians have never been at war with Jews; they have been resisting a unilateral settler colonial project whose declared aim is the take-over of their homeland, the transformation of Palestine into Israel and the erasure of the Palestinian people, its culture and heritage. Calls to “end the violence” are not enough. On the contrary, they create a false dichotomy between military conquest, occupation, displacement, repression and the war crimes of a settler state on the one hand and the resistance of a colonized people with no state of their own, no army and no support from the major political powers on the other. Under the guise of “security” and “self-defense,” the United States and Europe have supported Israel’s killing and displacement of Palestinians – routinely described as “terrorists” – while ignoring and even justifying Israeli state terrorism.” Israeli Committee Against HouseDemolitions

 The subject of on-going Israeli genocide of Palestinians is something I said I would not blog about. I changed my mind. Robert Reich’s substack column Howto understand the politics of Israel and Palestine? was interesting reading though he danced around too many things for my liking. It was the comments section that really got to me. One commenter repeated every Zionist lie I ever heard.

This map shows how Israel has over time taken over Palestinian lands. Brought up to today would show even less green area. An article purporting to prove the map false begins by stating that Palestine never existed. How stupid do they think we are?

Many of us grew up in a culture that believed the Jews were God’s chosen people, that they were entitled to reclaim their ancient homeland after the Holocaust of WWII. We believed no one lived there except a few wandering Bedouins and that the Israelis made the desert blossom like a rose.  We believed that the surrounding Arab states first attacked Israel on May 15^th, 1948, and that the Palestinians were asked to leave by their leaders so they could more easily destroy Israel.

We believed that Israel was under existential threat in 1967 and that the preemptive 6 day saved the country. We believed that the Palestinians and other Arabs constantly attacked Israelis because they were Jews. We believed Israel was a democracy and that Arabs living in Israel had the same rights as Jews. We believed that the Palestinians were offered a two-state solution and rejected it every time. Most importantly we believed that opposing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or opposing Zionism was opposing Judaism and was antisemitic.

These are lies promoted by Zionists to justify Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Land and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. These lies are propagated by the well-oiled and sophisticated Hasbara, Israel’s PR machine. It is reinforced by pro-Israeli organizations such as ADL and AIPAC. However, in the past 20 years, Israeli historians have begun validating Palestinian claims so they can no longer be ignored.

The truth is that Israel is a European settler colony and like all settler colonies was established by killing the indigenous people or driving them out or forcing them into small fully controlled enclaves. Promised by God or Manifest Destiny.

Judaism and Zionism are very different. One is religious, the other political. Judaism is a monotheistic religious belief practiced by Jews, an ethnoreligious group and nation by continuation through descent or conversion of the ancient Jewish people. Zionism is a nationalist political movement based on Jewish Supremacy and the inferiority of Palestinians based on the biblical concept of the "Return to Zion", a way of proving the occupation is legitimate. By conflating anti-Zionism with Anti-Judaism and calling it antisemitism, the Zionists have legitimized antisemitism, as decent people everywhere oppose Israeli Zionist treatment of Palestinians. This is very dangerous to Jews everywhere who may be lumped in with Zionists.

In 1938, Ben Gurion described the conflict with the Arabs as "in its essence a political one... politically we are the aggressors and they [the Arabs] defend themselves." From the beginning, Zionist ideology, the goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine necessitated ethnically cleansing the land of Palestine, displacing and dispossessing the Arab population.

Israel is touted as the only democracy in the Middle East. It is a democracy for Jews only. Palestinian citizens of Israel have over 30 laws narrowly defining what they can do and where they can go. They can vote and have their own political party. Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza live in a police state and are subject to the whims of the IDF.

When Israel declared itself a nation May 14, 1948, most of the Jews had arrived only in the last few decades. From 1882 onwards, thousands of Eastern European and Russian Jews began settling in Palestine; pushed by the anti-Semitic persecution and pogroms they were facing in the Russian Empire, and the appeal of Zionism promising a Jewish Homeland. In 1882 there were 24,000 Jews in Palestine, increasing to 50,000 by 1900. There were about 88,000 in 1922 when the total population was officially 750,00, roughly 12%. By 1939, the Jewish population had increased to 445,000 out of a total population of about 1.5 million, roughly 30%.

The Zionist Organization also acquired land to settle the Jewish immigrants, buying from absentee landlords and displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants.  In 1920, Jewish holdings in Palestine were about 2 1/2 per cent of the total land area.  By 1939, they had increased their holdings to over 5.7 per cent of the total land area.

The Ottoman Empire fought on the side of Germany in WW I. The British and French seized and divided up the Middle East according to a series of Mandates from the newly formed League of Nations. The Palestinian Mandate, lasting from 1920 to 1947, included a strongly worded version of the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration was a letter written in 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild, in which he expressed the British government's support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It marked the true beginning of an Israeli state.

Palestinians openly warned against the motives of the Zionist movement in the press as early as 1908. They regarded the Zionist Organization’s activities to increase Jewish immigration to and land holdings in Palestine as colonization of their ancestral land by foreigners.  Not yet politically organized, the Palestinians vented their anger through violence.  Anti-Zionist riots erupted in 1920, 1921, 1929, eventually culminating into a full-scale rebellion from 1936 to 1939. The British authorities violently crushed the revolt, destroyed at least 2,000 Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps and subjected them to violent interrogation, including torture, and deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders.

Britain tried to control the situation by halting all Jewish immigration to Palestine from 1939 onwards and announcing that instead of partition, Palestine would in 1949 become a unified independent State with both Jews and Arabs sharing in government administration and rule. This was rejected by both sides.

In 1944, several Zionist armed groups (Irgun headed by Menachim Begin, Lehi (aka Stern) and Haganah) declared war on Britain for trying to put limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine at a time when Jews were fleeing the Holocaust. The Zionist paramilitary organizations launched a number of attacks against the British – the most notable of which was the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 where the British administrative headquarters were housed; 91 people were killed in the attack.

In 1947, the British turned the disaster they had created over to the United Nations.

To be continued