In the dark shadows of history's tainted twists and turns lies the saga of Palestine—a tragic tale of deception, dispossession, and unyielding resilience. From the murky origins of the Balfour Declaration to the contentious UN Partition Plan, the Palestinians have weathered betrayal and loss. Their struggle, a testament to human fortitude, echoes far beyond the region, reminding us of the enduring pursuit of justice
It was June 18, 2002 when a Palestinian suicide bomber attacked a bus in occupied Jerusalem, killing 19 people. Coincidentally Cherie Blair, the wife of then British Prime Minister Tony Blaire, attended a charity event for Palestinians that day where she was asked whether the public would be deterred from donating money because of the latest suicide bombing in Israel. In response, she said: “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress.”
Mrs Blair’s statement was deemed by British diplomats and other officials as something of an embarrassment, particularly because it condemned neither the assault nor the assailant. Rather, she seemed to emphasise the need for a change in Israel’s policies. Spurred into action by the need to “neutralise” the remarks of the well-known human rights lawyer by giving it a spin, the British prime minister’s office immediately issued a statement that read: “What Mrs Blair was saying is a statement of the obvious. There is a consensus that many Palestinians feel they have no hope.
“She is not seeking to justify the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers in any way. The prime minister has said many similar things himself — mainly that you have to give hope to people through a political (peace) process while at the same time ensuring security for the people of Israel.” The prime minister later defended his wife’s remarks personally, and therefore, directly.
However, nothing seemed to cut it, as the opposition and the pro-Israel lobby opened a sharp attack on Mrs Blair for what they called “justifying the suicide attack”. In the face of severe pressure, she eventually had to authorise the issuance of an apology on her behalf!
After consulting her, the prime minister’s office said “if any offence has been taken from the interpretation of her comments then Mrs Blair is obviously sorry. None was intended and it goes without saying that she condemns the atrocity today in the strongest possible terms, along with all right-minded people”.
The unprecedented apology tendered by the wife of a sitting British prime minister on the matter must have sent shockwaves through swathes of populations across the world that could relate to the cause of Palestinians. Such people may not have fully supported the use of violence to achieve strategic goals, but they understood why the Palestinian youths were resorting to extraordinary measures in a desperate bid to force a change in Israeli policies. They thought that after having seen all their dreams of self-rule dashed in the previous half a century, the Palestinians were rightly frustrated.
At the same time the episode served to boost the morale of every Jew on the planet as they became doubly sure of the great power Israel had come to wield over the Western leaders, especially the Britons among them. The incident must also have reinforced a false notion among the ordinary Jews regarding the “truthfulness” of their cause. Previously too the Israeli officials were quite “in your face” over such issues, but the episode apparently made them even more cocky.
Matters have grown so bad in the last two decades since Mrs Blair’s apology that even a hint of opposition to their policies makes Israeli leaders kick up a storm in the Western media. As for Western academics and journalists, why would they want to create problems for but themselves by going out on a limb for a cause that’s not even their own? Not everyone can be a Robert Fisk or an Edward Said after all.
All this has made the Western media more and more pliant towards Israel and the Jewish leaders more and more arrogant. Representatives of the Israeli government have increasingly been assuming the tone and tenor of self-obsessed paragons of virtue. They pounce upon every critic of theirs as if their case for ruling — no lording it over — the historic region of Palestine is airtight; in other words, beyond reproach.
Closer examination, however, reveals that Palestine was usurped — nay grabbed — by the Zionists through large doses of deceit as well as complicity with victors of the two great wars, mainly the British government. There are public documents which give a lie to the sanitised image of every Jewish leader, and with him every British or American accomplice of his.
Seeds of discontent and deceit
Foremost among such documents is the Balfour Declaration, a letter dating back to 1917 that was written by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in Britain, and which declared the British government’s support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The letter was quite vague in that it talked about a home for the Jews (and not a state) in a region that was then a part of the Ottoman Empire. The declaration was ostensibly aimed at gaining full support of the Jewish community at the height of World War I, in which the Ottoman and British empires were in opposing camps.
The operative part of the infamous letter said: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
What’s notable is that the natives of Palestine were not mentioned in the letter by ethnicity or religion, rather they were collectively referred to as “non-Jewish communities.” Historical events that took place later showed that despite an assurance to the contrary the British and the Jews proceeded to violate each and every right of the natives in their quest to achieve their joint objective.
Imposed immigration
The first hurdle they faced were numbers — the number of Jews living in Palestine as opposed to the number of Arabs residing there. Their answer to the problem was immigration. So between 1922 and 1946 serious efforts were made to send as many Jews as possible from Europe to Palestine. As a result, the number of Jews that stood at only 83,790 in 1922 rose to 174,606 in 1931, 463,535 in 1940, and 528,702 (30.39 percent of the total population) in 1944, according to the website of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. Between 1922 and 1944 the number of Muslims living in Palestine rose from 589,177 to 1,061,277 (61.01 percent). The alleged excesses committed against the Jews by Nazi leaders also may have played a part in the mass migration of Jews to the region. What needs to be stressed here is that Palestinians had no role in how the Jews were treated by Nazi Germany.
The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which was subsequently set up to come up with possible solutions to the violent and widespread clashes that had started engulfing large parts of Palestine due to the growing influx of foreigners into the region, put the number of Muslims at 1,076,780 and that of Jews at 608,230 as on Dec 31, 1946. According to the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’, however, “nearly 1.4 million Arabs lived in Palestine when the war (for Israeli independence) broke out”. During the conflict more than 400 Arab villages disappeared and Arab life in the coastal cities, especially Jaffa and Haifa, virtually disappeared, says the respected encyclopaedia. The number of Muslims displaced due to the war likely topped 700,000.
Regardless of the exact numbers of Jews and Muslims living in Palestine on the eve of creation of Israel in 1948, it is crystal clear that Muslims had a comfortable majority in that part of the Middle East then. And yet they were ultimately deprived of their entire homeland. How did that come to pass? For one, no effort was ever made to officially ascertain their opinion on the issues at hand! Non-
A non-democratic move
According to a document posted on the official UN website (un.org) and entitled ‘Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1947 (Part I)’, in the midst of rising tensions between Jewish immigrants and residents of Palestine the control of the area was handed over to the British by the League of Nations. On the matter the self-explanatory paper says: “The origins of the Palestine problem as an international issue, however, lie in events occurring towards the end of World War I. These events led to a League of Nations decision to place Palestine under the administration of Great Britain as the Mandatory Power under the Mandates System adopted by the League. In principle, the Mandate was meant to be in the nature of a transitory phase until Palestine attained the status of a fully independent nation, a status provisionally recognised in the League’s Covenant, but in fact the Mandate’s historical evolution did not result in the emergence of Palestine as an independent nation.
“The decision on the Mandate did not take into account the wishes of the people of Palestine, despite the Covenant’s requirements that ‘the wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory’. This assumed special significance because, almost five years before receiving the mandate from the League of Nations, the British government had given commitment to the Zionist Organisation regarding the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.”
The above document that remains in plain sight on the UN website goes on to reveal that during the period of the mandate, the Jews continued to work towards the establishment of their state. The Arabs in the meantime saw what was transpiring around them as a betrayal, especially as they too had been promised self-rule once the British mandate ended. “The indigenous people of Palestine, whose forefathers had inhabited the land for virtually the two preceding millennia, felt this design to be a violation of their natural and inalienable rights. They also viewed it as an infringement of assurances of independence given by the Allied Powers to Arab leaders in return for their support during the world war. The result was mounting resistance to the Mandate by Palestinian Arabs, followed by resort to violence by the Jewish community as the World War II drew to a close,” says the UN paper.
The controversial UN partition plan
In 1947, Great Britain took the dispute to the UN, which to the utter dismay of the Palestinians proposed a disastrous scheme. Under the plan Palestine was to be carved into two states — one for the Jews and the other for the Arabs — while Jerusalem was to be administered internationally. To the horror of the natives, some 55 percent of their land was awarded to the Jews under the UN plan even though the latter accounted for only about 30 percent of the total population of Palestine. As it turned out, some extra land had been allocated to the Jews in anticipation of immigration of their future generations to the holy land! Arabs, who had been calling for self-rule over the entire territory were shell-shocked at the outcome of the UN-supervised exercise.
The Palestinians as well as the neighbouring Arab countries therefore decided to boycott the talks. However, their boycott did nothing to stop the ball that had been set rolling by the British in connivance with the Zionist Organisation. In time the member countries of the world body were asked to vote on the plan and the dubious scheme was approved by a majority. Thirty-three of the member states voted in favour of the plan while 13 voted against it. Ten of the countries abstained. (Both Pakistan and India voted against the plan.)
The Jews had already accepted the UN plan and when Britain’s Mandate for Palestine ended they promptly proclaimed independence. War broke out immediately afterwards, as the neighbouring Arab countries attacked the region when it came under Jewish control. However, the better trained and equipped Israeli forces managed to capture 70 per cent of the Palestinian lands, with Jordan only seizing West Bank and Egypt the narrow Gaza Strip. This way the Palestinian people were effectively robbed of their entire homeland.
Summing up the tragic situation, the UN document cited above says: “One of the two States envisaged in the partition plan proclaimed its independence as Israel and, in a series of successive wars, its territorial control expanded to occupy all of Palestine. The Palestinian Arab State envisaged in the partition plan never appeared on the world map and, over the following 30 years, the Palestinian people have struggled for their lost rights.”
Eminent historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who had dealt directly with the Palestine Mandate in the British Foreign Office before attaining the status of a respected scholar, wrote in 1968: “The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to world peace.”
Nizamuddin Siddiqui is an author who teaches journalism at the Hamdard University, Karachi
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer