http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/orl-opd-reese072601.column
In 1947-48, Palestinians became victims
Charley Reese, July 26, 2001
Let's play let's pretend.
Pretend you live in Miami-Dade County, Fla., and you evacuate the area
because a bad storm is bearing down on it.
After the storm passes, you drive back but are met by military
roadblocks. "You can't come back," you're told.
"What do you mean I can't come back? I have a home and business
there," you say.
"Not anymore," the soldier says. "All of your property and possessions
have been declared abandoned property and now will be used by us. So
turn around. You've got 49 other states you can live in, but you're
never going to the home you abandoned."
Now, let's pretend that after NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, the
Yugoslavian government said it was willing to negotiate a cease-fire,
but the Albanian refugees could not return to Kosovo. Do you think the
United States would have agreed to that? I don't think so. I think the
United States would have said to Yugoslavia the right of refugees to
return to their homes is non-negotiable and, if you try to stop them,
you'll have to get through us first.
Well, this is exactly what happened to 700,000 Palestinians in
1947-48. By what one journalist called a "psychological warfare
campaign punctuated with some well-timed massacres," the Israelis
drove these people out of their homes and villages with nothing much
but the clothes on their backs.
Then, at a peace conference, the Israelis said first off that no
refugees would be allowed to return nor would they be compensated for
any property lost. That was Israel's original sin. It was also our
original sin because the United States government did nothing and it
should have insisted on the refugees' return.
Zionists, however, were not acting in an arbitrary manner. The Zionist
ideology, on which the current state of Israel is based, demands a
Jewish state defined as a state with a Jewish majority, a Jewish
government and Jewish laws. Small, non-Jewish minorities can be
tolerated, though in practice in Israel they have been treated like
second-class people. But a plural state is out of the question.
The problem the Zionists faced in 1947-48 was this: Despite their best
efforts, they had not succeeded in persuading a sufficient number of
Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Consequently, even in the territory
allotted by the partition of Palestine to the Jews, there were so many
Palestinian Arabs that the early Zionists knew they should soon equal
or exceed the Jews in number.
In 1919, there were 57,000 Jews and 533,000 Arabs in Palestine. The
Jews owned about 2 percent of the land. In 1946, the imbalance
remained. There were 608,000 Jews and 1.2 million Arabs. In 1946, Jews
owned only 7 percent of Palestine.
An Arab majority was unacceptable to Zionist ideology, so they
practiced ethnic cleansing.
So, for the same reason they drove them out in the first place, they
could not let them back in. The Arab governments said if the refugees
could not return, then they would not sign a peace treaty. This
original sin -- the disposition of 700,000 Palestinians -- bred the
conflict which rages to this day and will continue to rage until the
Palestinians get justice or everybody on both sides are dead.
I know that it's difficult. The Israelis have done a superb job of
creating a racist stereotype of Palestinians in the minds of most
Americans. But try, for a moment, to put yourself in their shoes back
in 1947-48.
You had a family, a farm or a business or shop. You had friends and
relatives in a village where your ancestors had lived for centuries.
Then, in the blink of an eye, you are torn from your roots and cast
into a foreign country with no possessions, no money and no state you
can call your own.
These people and their descendants still live in those camps, at least
those the Israelis haven't killed during their periodic bombing and
shelling. These are the people Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak told Yasser
Arafat that he must agree can never return or be compensated for their
losses. That alone would have prevented Arafat from signing the
agreement.
It is this expulsion, not the establishment of the state of Israel,
that Palestinians mean when they speak of the "Catastrophe." It was
not only a cruel act of ethnic cleansing, but it was one of the
greatest robberies in the history of mankind. Imagine if you could
suddenly gain ownership of Miami-Dade, with all its businesses,
inventories, bank accounts, houses, farms, and crops. Palestine was
no Miami-Dade County, but the Palestinian possessions were
nevertheless quite a pile of loot for the Israelis.
This happened, by the way, before Jews left the Arab countries. It
most defintely was not a population transfer. The Palestinian victims
of ethnic cleansing had nothing to do with what happened to Jews in
other Arab countries later.
Copyright © 2001, Orlando Sentinel
