The Balfour Declaration - describes the period from 1917 to 1939 as the first declaration of war. Before World War I “many prescient Palestinians had begun to regard the Zionist movement as a threat, the Balfour Declaration introduced a new and fearsome element.” (24)
Lord Balfour referred to the Arabs “as the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” (24)
Zionists such as Chaim Weizmann secured the support of the British during world War I. (24)
Once the British occupied Palestine they would not allow the population to be informed of the Balfour Declaration. Soldiers traveling through Syria or Egypt found out and protested to the British Foreign Office. They were horrified that their home would become a home for European Jews. (26)
Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi understood this danger more than most of the Palestinian population. Believed that the Jews would expel the Arabs. (26)
There were two newspapers which criticized the alliance between the British and the Zionists. “And the danger that it posed to the Arab majority in Palestine.” (28)
A new rail line built in 1929 favored the Jewish settlers and the Palestinians were ignored. Some wrote of the complacency of the Palestinians in the face of this threat. (29)
Palestinians organized and had “a series of seven Palestine Arab congresses which demanded Palestinian independence, “rejection of the Balfour Declaration, support for majority rule, and ending unlimited Jewish immigration and land purchases.” The British dismissed them. (31)
After the Nakba the Palestinians were devastated. 80% of the Palestinians were “forced from their homes and lost their lands and property.” The origins of this disaster can be traced to their defeat in the rear Revolt of 1939.” It did not help that their were internecine conflict among the Palestinians. (58)
Palestinian experience in World War II was fragmented unlike the Jews who served in cohesive units. (59)
President Truman made Israel a part of “the emerging American hegemony in the Middle East. (60)
The Palestinains did not have an established state, effective relationships with other Arab countries and “this proved to be a fatal weakness militarily, financially, and diplomatically.” (62)
“By contrast, the Zionist movement applied a highly developed understanding of global politics.” (70)
From November 1947 to May 15, 1945 the Zionist paramilitary defeated the Arab resistance which was “poorly armed and organized Palestinians and the Arab volunteers who had come to help them.” (72)
“Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11. Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948.” (72)
Although Jaffa was supposed to be part of the Palestinian Arab state no one challenged Israel’s conquest. Israel argued that this was a spoil of war. (72-73)
As the Jewish forces massacred Palestinians, Dayr Yasin, most notable, “people fled.” Before May 15, 1948, Israel’s date of independence, saw the “expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the ARab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers.” (74) None of these refugees would be allowed to return under Israeli law. More Palestinians have been forced out since 1948 so the Nakba is “an ongoing process.” (75)
The Nakba is one of the most significant events in Palestinian history. For over a thousand years there had been an Arab majority; after the Nakba Palestine, or Israel, became a Jewish majority. (75)
The experienced and British led Arab Legion of Jordan “succeeded in keeping Israel from conquering the West Bank and Was Jerusalem.” (77)
One of the Zionist lies is that Israel was outnumbered and outgunned in 1948. The opposite is true. The British would not allow the Arab Legion to attack areas assigned by the UN to the Jews. (77)
The State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA opposed the Truman Administration’s support for Zionism. However, this would quickly change. (79)
The 160,000 Arabs who remained in Israel were viewed “as a potential fifth column. Until 1966, most Palestinians lived under strict martial law and much of their land was seized (along with that of those who had been forced from the country and were now refugees). (82)
The Palestinians, formerly the majority in their own country, bow found themselves “a despised minority” ruled by outsiders. (82)
King Abdullah of Jordan annexed the West Bank after the 1948 War and gave the Palestinians their Jordanian citizenship. This refutes the Israeli claim that the Arab countries refused to allow the refugees to enter their countries. (84)
The Arabs were not happy with King “Abdullah’s fealty to the hated British colonial masters, his opposition to Palestinian independence, and his widely rumored contacts with the Zionists.” (84)
The 1948 defeat of the Arab armies at the hand of Israel caused political turmoil in the nearby Arab nations as well as great fear of Israel’s military. The latter also because the Israelis conducted military reprisals against Arab villages for refugee attacks or they trying to return to their homes. The United Nations reports of these attacks differed from the Israelis view as well as the view in the American press. (87)
An attempt to establish a Palestinian government in exile or in Gaza failed because of lack of support from the Arab countries. (87) This would see the last of the participation of “the Palestinian old guard” in politics. Few Palestinian organizations survived the Nakba. (88)
Most Arab nations “hindered” Palestinian resistance to the Israelis, King Abdullah foremost. One reason, any attacks on Israel by guerrilla forces would result in severe retaliation from Israel. As a result Fatah formed in 1959. (89)
Egypt became a leader in the Arab world with the revolution of 1952. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, “sought to avoid in particular to avoid providing Israel.” Years later Yasser Arafat and other Fatah leaders spoke of Egyptian intelligence arresting, torturing, and harassing Palestinians trying to fight Israel. (90)
Israel’s inflicted massive and disproportionate casualties particularly against the Gaza Strip for Palestinian attacks. The West Bank also suffered from Unit 101 commanded by Ariel Sharon who in 1953 “blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians.” This in response to a Palestinian attack that killed three Israelis. Jordan did as Egypt by imprisoning and even killing possible Palestinian “infiltrators”. (91)
Ben-Gurion ordered the attacks to force the Arabs to recognize Israel. Interesting Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett believed this counterproductive. Nevertheless, both did not want to allow the “return of Palestinian refugees to their homes.” (91)
Seemingly related, Ben-Gurion proposed a full scale attack on Egypt in 1955. The attack would take place in 1956. (91)
Major military leaders throughout Israel’s history implemented Ben-Gurion’s aggressive policies. These generals were Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon. Nothing has changed throughout Israel’s history. (91-92)
Before attacking Egypt in 1956 the Israelis attacked Egyptian police stations and villages killing many Egyptian soldiers and civilians, including Palestinian. This caused the Egyptians to try to build up their military. First, they purchased from the West which refused so they agreed to buy weapons from Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, the Egyptians began helping the Palestinians in their attacks on Israel which most Arab governments did not like. Thus, Israel launched the “Suez War of October 1956.” (91-92)
Israel swept through Gaza killing more than 450 people, “most of them summarily executed.” (93) No one in Israel or America heard of this. (94)
The tensions building before the Six Day War of 1967 caused many American Jews to fear for the Jewish state as Arab leaders shouted what turned out to be empty threats. (96) President Johnson did not believe Israel was in danger as the Pentagon assessed that Israel would win in just a few days. Besides, the Arabs were not ready to attack. And,“Israel’s military was far superior to the militaries of all the Arab Staes combined. . . . Yet, the myth prevails: in 1967, a tiny, vulnerable country faced constant, existential peril, and it continues to do so.” (97)
Rashid Khalidi addresses causes of the Six Day War. One was the increase in Palestinian commando attacks on Israel. Two, “the Israeli government had recently begun to divert the waters of the Jordan River to the center of the country despite great Arab popular dishes and even greater impotence on the part of the Arab regimes.” (97)
Egypt was fighting in the Yemeni civil war and so had limited soldiers for its own defense. They didn’t help the situation by moving more of their soldiers in to the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt also wanted to aid the Syrians who sponsored Palestinian attacks from their territory. This gave the Israelis the opportunity to attack in self defense. (98)
The Arabs felt tricked by the Americans who claimed they would restrain the Israelis. However, it became known that the Johnson administrations had given the Israelis the “go-ahead for its surprise attack.” (104)
The Americans allowed the Israelis to keep the conquered territory and the United Nations Resolution 242 was ambiguous on the subject. As a result the Israelis have colonized the West Bank and controlled Gaza and the Golan Heights. Again, the Palestinians were never consulted; “instead it contains a bland reference to a just solution of the refugee problem.” (105-106)
This meant that the issue was the Arab refusal to recognize Israel. (106)
In 1969 Israeli Prime Minister claimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians . . . they did not exits.” However, another writer pointed out that she held Palestinian identity papers while living in Palestine under the British. Khalidi argues that “she thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.” (106)
“1967 marked an extraordinary resurgence of Palestinian national consciousness and resistance to Israel’s negation of Palestinian identity, a negation made possible by the complicity of much of the world community. In the words of one seasoned observer: A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.” (108)
“Fatah was founded in Kuwait in 1959 by a group of Palestinian engineers, teachers, and other professionals, headed by Yasser Arafat.” (114)
Fatah launched its first attack against Israel by sabotaging a “water pumping station in central Israel.” However, the Egyptians worried that this would provoke Israel. In addition, with this attack “Fatah deliberately tried to show up the Arab states for their lack of true commitment to Palestine. Fatah’s appeal to the Arab population led to “early success of the Palestinian resistance groups.” (115) In the end however, these attacks contributed to Israel attacking Egypt in June 1967. Western countries had the image of tiny Israel against large, hostile Arab nations. The Arabs believed that Israel, especially with nuclear weapons, was incredibly powerful. (116)
The Arabs nations created the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Six-Day War in order to counter Palestinian independent actions. However, “militant resistance groups took over the PLO.” (116)
“Hardline Zionists” believed that Israel replaced Palestine. Mere mention of Palestine or Palestinians “constituted a moral threat to Israel.” Zionists associated Palestinians with terrorism and hatred” in their world wide public relations campaign. (117)
Evidence supporting Miko Peled’s recent arguments that Israel is not an invincible force, Khalidi recounts a March 1968 Israeli attack in Jordan against Palestinian soldiers. This was less than a year after the Israeli victory of 1967. However, the Jordanian army and the PLO forced the Israelis to withdraw. (118)
Overall however, the PLO failed to develop “a successful guerrilla strategy that might have countered the superiority of Israel’s conventional forces or the limitations of being based in Arab countries vulnerable to Israeli military pressure.” (119)
In the 1970s the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked commercial aircraft. In addition, Palestinian arrogance in Jordan led King Hussein to use military force to push them out. (121)
Israel attacked Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon. (121)
The Camp David peace process of 1979 between Israel and Egypt froze out the Palestinians just as Begin designed it to do. It also allowed “unimpeded colonization of the Occupied Territories occupied in 1967, and put the Palestine issue on hold.” (135)
Israeli Likud prime ministers, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu “were implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood. . . . Ideological heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, they believed that the entirety of Palestine belonged solely to the Jewish people, and that a Palestinian people, with national rights did not exist.” (136)
More attacks on the PLO occurred. In 1982 the U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig signed off on “Ariel Sharon’s plans for Israel to finish off the organization and with it Palestinian nationalism.” (137)
Currently, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman does not have a good record of accurate analysis of world affairs. However, in 1982, Village Voice columnist Alexander Cockburn quoted Friedman as telling his editors, “You are afraid to tell our readers and those who might complain to you that the Israelis are capable of indiscriminately shelling an entire city.” (139)
Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon had much more destruction than before. Ariel Sharon did not inform the Israeli leadership of “his real goals and his operational plans.” Defeating the Palestinians in Lebanon would, he believed, destroy Palestinian nationalism. (142)
The New York Times did not print Thomas Friedman’s descriptive of “the Israeli bombardment as indiscriminate.” (147)
The Israelis used car bombs to terrorize and kill civilians, including rescuers of previous Israeli bombings. One Mossad officer described this as “killing for killing’s sake.” (149)
The United States supported Israel’s core war aim: the defeat of the PLO and its expulsion from Beirut.” (149)
“Begin and Sharon, had early on convinced President Reagan and his administration that the PLO was a terrorist group aligned with the evil Soviet empire and that its elimination would be a service to both the United States and Israel.” (149)
Khalidi fiercely criticizes “the capitulation of the leading Arab regimes to American pressure.” (150)
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon could not have occurred without U.S. consent. (151)
The people of Lebanon resented “the PLO’s heavy handed and often arrogant behavior . . . eroded popular support for the Palestine cause in general and especially for the Palestinian presence in Lebanon.” In one instance a senior PLO official killed a Lebanese couple he felt disrespected him. (151)
PLO attacks on Israeli civilians also damaged their cause. (152)
The Israelis pressured the Reagan administration to ignore concerns for civilians and block international rules to protect them. (154)
American diplomat Ryan Crocker witnessed Israel’s complicity in the Christian Lebanese forces slaughter of refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps. (158)
Israeli documents released in 2012 demonstrate Sharon’s planning to have the refugees murdered. American diplomats were outmaneuvered by the Israelis. (159)
The 1967 Six Day War the U.S. gave the go ahead for Israel to attack. (161)
As for the Lebanon War “Sharon told Haig exactly what he was about to do in great detail.” The U.S. supplied the weapons. (161) The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon “produced the first significant and sustained negative American and European perception of Israel since 1948.” (164)
Rather than destroying the PLO the invasion relocated them inside Palestine. (165)
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