The Acre and the Goat

I did manage to get through Part 3 of NPR's radio show on Middle East: A Century of Conflict. Also a couple more essays from Edward Said's The Politics of Dispossession. I am now at a very intersting review of the shaping of American foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine. More on this soon.

Continuing my previous recap of the historical events in the tumultous history of the middle east:

The Creation of Israel

• By 1939, Britain was finding it difficult to control the strife between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In not small measure, the millions of Jewish immigrants into Palestine as a result of the holocaust before, during and after WWII did not aid to the situation. The world at large, was generally sympathetic about the injustice done to the Jews. Britain did place a ceiling limit on the immigration, this only enraged the Jews and wide protests against the British resulted. This was also the time that saw the rise of future Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, and the extreme right-wing Yitzhak Shamir.
• By 1946, Britain handed over the problem to the UN, which had just been formed a year ago. The Jews were being offered 55 percent of Palestine when in fact they had owned only 7% of the country. 450,000 Palestinians were going to end up within the Jewish state, and they did not see any reason why they should go along with that kind of inequality. According to historians, the Arabs were not politically organized to handle the situation.
• The UN General Assembly voted for the creation of Israel, and thus Israel was born. Immediately full scale war broke out, but the Arab armies were weak and disorganized and Israel ended up occupying more territory (78%) than it was granted. The majority of Palestinians became refugees, and Palestine - the geographical term Palestine - disappeared from the map.
• The Palestinians fled to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, and what is now called the West Bank. Thousands with their children and grandchildren live in those camps until now. And from those camps would spring the Palestinian movement -- the guerrilla fighters and bombmakers and political leaders -- who would continue to fight Israel and challenge its right to exist, down to this day.

The Acre and the Goat - the title for this post comes from Ed Said's book. In one of the essays, Said addresses the general ignorance in the West about the origin of the situation in Israel, due to the silence of most Western intellectuals on what happened in Palestine in 1948 and the effects of an extremely efficient American and Israeli propaganda machine. The view is widespread in the West that the Zionists settled in a largely uninhabited land in 1948 and that they 'made the desert bloom'. Nothing could be further from the truth, Said says. About 750,000 Palestinians, 70 % of the population, were forcefully made to flee their homes and became refugees in surrounding countries. Before 1948, only about 7% of the land in Palestine was owned by Jews. This increased to about 50% after 1948. In 1967, the Israelis annexed East Jerusalem and occupied the rest of historic Palestine. One of the founding fathers of Zionism is supposed to have remarked that their plan was to acquire all the land in Palestine 'acre by acre, goat by goat', hence the title.

Said also doesn't spare Arafat and his followers in the PLO, criticising their undemocratic, corrupt and brutal practices, including the widespread use of torture. Although the Jews have suffered the holocaust, this does not give them right to oppress others, he says, at the same time he distances himself from other Arabs who think the Holocaust is not their problem. Sadly, most efforts at peaceful dialogues with sympathetic Israelis is frowned upon in much of the Arab world as 'normalization' with Israel.

The least I can say is that I am deeply saddened by this conflict. I wish there were a peaceful way of resolving this...how many more millions have to die....but then, that is me...