FORUM: Israel’s history indeed ‘complicated’
I remember May, 1948. I was nearly 7, in a Jewish Sunday school class, when our teacher told us that many Jewish people had left Europe to start a new life in Palestine, and now they had created a new country, Israel. We had no idea how anyone creates a country, but attention quickly shifted to her next announcement: Israelis were now fighting a war against “the Arabs,” who wanted the land for their own country.
They say you learn everything you need to know in kindergarten, and I was already two years older. My hand shot up. “Who was there first?” I asked. “The Arabs,” said my teacher. “Well then, why should the Jews turn it into their country? Why don’t they share?” She thought a moment, then gave me the answer many Americans have been giving themselves and others for nearly seventy years: “It’s complicated.”
Growing up, I deepened my knowledge of Judaism and its emphasis on justice. I also became a professor of political science. I learned that Israel’s history was indeed “complicated,” especially because, as a would-be “Jewish state,” its behavior often fell short of elemental standards of social justice at the heart of Judaism and other faiths. That view has never been popular in my generation, but it is happily gaining ground, especially among younger Jews. And more of us older folks have also been speaking up about our long-held reservations.
May 15 is Israel’s independence day. The more I learn, however, the more I am inclined to see it as Palestinians do: a day that marks the start of Israeli military and political oppression of the Palestinian people. For Palestinians, May 15 commemorates the Nakba, the “Catastrophe.”
In 1948, Palestinians were two-thirds of the population in the British mandated colony of Palestine. For 60 years a growing Zionist movement had urged eastern European Jews threatened by anti-Semitic attacks in their home countries to migrate to Palestine, where Zionists openly planned to create a Jewish nation-state on land belonging to indigenous Palestinians.
Though the Zionists were leaving lands of oppression, their political ideology mirrored the ascendant European nationalism of the day: the belief that societies could only be healthy if their members were united by “blood and soil.” This racist philosophy of hostility to outsiders swept over many parts of Europe and contributed to the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust.
In late 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended dividing Palestine: 52 percent to the Jewish minority; 48 percent to the Palestinians. David Ben Gurion, the Zionist leader, seized the opportunity, assuring his partisans they would acquire the remaining land later. Quickly, Zionist militias began a campaign of ethnic cleansing, entering unarmed Palestinian villages and physically forcing the occupants to depart on a moment’s notice, often on foot, with only the possessions they could carry and with no place to go. On occasion, villagers were lined up and massacred, spreading panic across the land and leading other villages to flee before the militias arrived. Neighboring Arab countries sent soldiers to protect the Palestinians, who had no military. By the war’s end, Zionists had forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, half of them before May 15, and Israel had destroyed 500 Palestinian villages. Although refugees have an internationally recognized right to return to their homes, Israel still refuses to permit their return. They and their descendants live in UN refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
The Nakba also increased Israel’s share of the land from 52 percent to 78 percent. Palestinians who remained were subjected to military rule in segregated communities until 1967. Their descendants, now 20 percent of Israeli citizens, face legalized discrimination and racism in most sectors. In the Six Day War of 1967, Israel seized the rest of historic Palestine, beginning the military occupation that is now nearing its 50th anniversary.
For those who believe justice is a universal moral obligation, not a privilege reserved for one’s own race or ethnic group, the month of May is a time to remember the Nakba and to work for justice and freedom for Palestinians, whose lives were destroyed by the establishment of the State of Israel.
Robert Gelbach of Hamden is co-chairman of the New Haven chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Read the article online on the New Haven Register Forum site here.
