Lessons History

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 16 November 2004 11:22:58

Since the death of Arafat, I've been doing a lot of reading about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

And the greatest sadness of this whole affair is this: after fift-six years of fighting, the Arabs of Palestine are going to get less than what they were offered in 1948.

You read that right.

Basically, the UN in 1948 offered a partition of Palestine into six zones - three Jewish, three Arab. It would involve displacement of peoples on both sides (Jewish people had legitimately bought land in places like Jericho and Hebron, but they would have had to move out - similarly, Arabs in the Jewish zones would have to move too). The Arab zones were a bit on the north-west border with Lebanon, the Gaza strip and (a larger than today) version of the West Bank. On top of this, Jerusalem would have been an "internationalised" city, i.e. it wouldn't be run by either side.

Israel accepted this. Israel declared independence on this basis.

The Arabs didn't. In fact, six countries, plus some of the displaced Arabs within Palestine, declared war on Israel. Not, it would seem, because the Arabs of Palestine weren't getting a fair deal, but, to put it bluntly, because of anti-Semitism. The position of the Arab countries in 1948, and right up to Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1978, was that they wanted to destroy Israel. When you think of this as only three years after the end of the Holocaust, that's not a nice thing to say to anyone.

Now, here's the bitter, twisted irony of the whole thing. After the '48 ceasefire, Gaza and the West Bank are occupied - by Egypt and Jordan. In 1964 the PLO is set up to oversee not the establishing of an Arab state in Palestine (after all, two Arab governments already control the notionally "Palestinian" areas), but the removal of Israel from the map. (Please note, it's not till 1967 that Israel actually occupies these territories in response to increased attacks organised from them.)

So Arafat, I suppose, must be credited with bringing the PLO from there to where it is now - negotiating for a return to the pre-67 Green Line, a Palestinian state in the bits they already had, the bits they were already given.