The historical facts of Israel’s violence in Palestine are so disquieting, and the ways in which they were carried out, they simply cannot be ignored.
The violence culminated in Israel's ruthless 1947-49 "War of Independence," in which at least 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were expelled from their homes – half before any Arab armies joined the war. At every point in the war, Arabs were outnumbered by Israeli Zionist organizations such as the Irgun. The resulting humanitarian disaster is known among Palestinians and others as ‘The Catastrophe,’ or al Nakba in Arabic. Zionist forces committed at least 33 massacres and destroyed 531 Palestinian villages and towns. Author Norman Finkelstein states: “According to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ‘in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.’”
It is important to note that in 1947, Jewish land ownership was under 7%, yet the UN General Assembly proposed partition and granted the "Jewish state" ABOUT 60% of the total area of Palestine.
Would Americans cede sovereignty and over 60% of its land to a foreign minority, say Canadians, who actually owned under 7% of the land? If such a plan is unthinkable for an American, then how can one ask Palestinians to make a similar sacrifice? Perhaps that’s why the partition agreement was not so “agreeable” to Palestinians.
The Israeli government at the time pursued a policy of non- compromise, in order to prevent the return of the refugees "at any price" (as Ben Gurion himself put it), despite the fact that the UN General Assembly had been calling for this since 11 December 1948. Palestinian villages were either destroyed or occupied by Jewish immigrants, and their lands were shared among the surrounding kibbutzim. The law on "abandoned properties" - which was designed to make possible the seizure of any land belonging to persons who were "absent" - legitimized this project of general confiscation as of December 1948. Almost 400 Arab villages were thus either wiped off the map or “Judaized”, as were most of the Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a report drawn up in 1952, Israel succeeded in expropriating 73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7,800 shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and - most important of all - 300,000 hectares of land, (“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”, by Benny Morris)
In 1967 Israel launched its third war and seized even more Palestinian (and other Arab) land: Sinai and Gaza Strip were captured from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Menahem Begin noted: 'In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.' ("Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle.")
Yitzhak Rabin: "I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it." (Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Chief of Staff in 1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/68)
In November 1967, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242 which laid down a formula for Arab-Israeli peace whereby Israel would “withdraw from territories occupied in the war in exchange for peace with its neighbors.” This was never honored by Israel.
Instead, Israel militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip – the remaining 22% of mandatory Palestine – and began building settlements (only for Jewish Israelis) on land confiscated from Palestinian Muslims and Christians. It has demolished more than 18,000 Palestinian homes since 1967. In 2005 Israel returned Gazan land to its owners, but continues to control its borders, ports, and air space, turning Gaza into a virtual concentration camp where 1.5 million people are held under what a UN Human Rights Commissioner described as “catastrophic” conditions.
We should applaud the courage of a new breed of Israeli historians for daring to revisit historical realities of Israel’s founding. One of these historians is professor of History at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Benny Morris. What Morris has opened to public scrutiny are the "original sins" of the state of Israel. Sixty years after the event, the time is long overdue to bring an end to a logic that has generated so much war, and to find a way for the two peoples to coexist. This can only be done by pulling away the veil over the historical origins of the tragedy.
American taxpayers give Israel approximately $7 million per day – far more than we give to all of sub-Saharan Africa. In its 60 years of existence, Israel, a nation the size of New Jersey, has received more of our tax money than any other country on earth. While most Americans are unaware of these facts (studies have shown that media report on Israeli deaths at rates up to 13 times greater than they report on Palestinian deaths) our governmental actions make us responsible for a continuing catastrophe of historic proportions – and which is, in addition, creating extremely damaging enmity toward the US itself.
As more and more U.S. citizens across a spectrum of politics and ethnicities become informed on this issue, they are demanding that their elected representatives change current U.S. policies.
In the world’s recent history, the Berlin Wall has fallen, Northern Ireland has achieved peace, and South African Apartheid has ended.
Change is possible and justice attainable – but only when people are informed.