Is the problem 1967, or 1948?
Carlo Strenger in the U.K. Guardian breaks down how critics of Israel do the cause of a two-state solution disfavor when they keep bringing up 1948:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more than 100 years old. Israel is, no doubt, not doing what it should to end the occupation of the territories conquered in 1967. Along with many others in Israel I am committed to ending it. But there are many Palestinians and others who endorse their just cause who take every opportunity to return to what happened in 1948 – which is not constructive.
Abe Hayeem's recent article is typical of this tendency, in that he seamlessly moves from Operation Cast Lead (which was conducted in an indefensible manner – even though Hayeem might have mentioned the years of shelling of southern Israel by Qassams for minimal balance) to Tel Aviv's Centennial Festivities by pointing out that the history of Tel Aviv is part of the expropriation of 1948. In doing so, they time and again raise the question whether Israel's existence is legitimate. Instead of working towards the realisation of the two-state solution, they keep the option in public discourse that Israel will disappear from the map.
Full column here.
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May I note the following since I was at the UN during and after the pa;rtition debate in 1947? I got the distinct impression then tjat ,many of the delegates from Europe who voted for partition did so because they knew the Arab mind-set of the time. The Arab delegates referred many times to “throwing the Jews into the sea” and they followed up with trying to do so in 1948, when five Arab armies, including one led by a British officer, moved onto the borders of the newly declared state of Israel. Fortunately for the Jews, they were able to withstand the attack, despite the heavy loss of life. And the Western countries and the Arabs were not able to fulfill their desire for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem, that Hitler and the Grand Mufti wanted to provide.
Let’s recall that the League of Nations voted unanimously (51-0) in 1922 that a Jewish state - and an Arab state - should be established in the Holy Land under the Mandate for Palestine, a quarter-century before the Holocaust, Britain subsequently expropriated 77% of the Mandate for a Judenrein Arab state, Transjordan, but the League and its successor UN never repudiated the Mandate. When the Arabs rejected the 1947 GA recommendation for yet another Arab state West of the Jordan, and then invaded the new Jewish State (and again later), they caused their own undoing.
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Gary Katz
10/15/09 05:23 PM
I don’t think the problem is that Arabs don’t want Jews living amongst them. I think the problem is Arabs can’t stand Jews ruling “sacred Muslim land.” Muslim hegemony is very important to the Muslim psyche. Wherever they ruled over Jews, their conditions for tolerating the Jewish presence included telling little rules like a synagogue must be lower in height than a mosque. Little reminders of Muslim superiority (or Jewish subservience). Therefore, little Israel is like a grain of sand stuck in their eye. Tiny but painful.
Israel should offer to abandon its settlements only after all the Christians who were forced out of southern Lebanon get to return to their homes. Or after the Shiites and Sunnis who were ethnically cleansed from their respective neighborhoods in Iraq get to return home. You get the idea.