A History Lesson

"We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is.  We will drench the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood."
Jamal al-Husseni, vice-president of the Arab Higher Committee, Palestinian Arab political organization, November 1947, at the United Nations

Despite that warning over sixty-five years ago the United Nations proceeded to vote in favour of the partition of the British Mandate for Palestine.  One independent state for the then-existing 500,000 Jews who lived there on one-half, including the-then Arab population of 400,000, and another to hold the 725,000 Arabs including the 10,000 Jews then-living in the other half.  Two states for two peoples.

And while the Jews joyously clasped the partition to their hearts, the Arab population rejected it, with the backing of the larger Arab presence in the Middle East.  History records that a combined Arab army attacked the new State of Israel when it declared its independence as a state in 1948.  That assault failed to achieve its purpose and the Palestinians who fled the territory found themselves refugees.

Arab soldiers drag an Israeli fighter who was killed during a battle in Jerusalem, in 1948.  AFP / Getty Images

As refugees settling in other Arab countries they were denied the privilege of citizenship, even while those other Arab countries set about their revenge by emptying their populations of Jews who had lived in North Africa and the Middle East since before the Muslim conquest in the 17th Century.  856,000 Jews were banished from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Aden.

They are now settled in Israel.  The Palestinian Arabs insist they have the right of return to their former homeland, not only the estimated 750,000 that had originally left, but their descendants as well, now numbering roughly two and a half million.  No reparations have ever been offered Arab Jews to compensate for their expropriated land and properties, but Israel has offered to compensate Palestinian Arabs.

The creation of the State of Israel is considered by Arabs to represent a catastrophe, mourned as Al-Nakbah. 

"In the following months, hundreds of thousands [of Palestinian Arabs] fled not under Jewish orders or direct coercion, though to be sure, most sought to move out of harm's way as Zionist troops conquered town after town ...  And most probably believed that they would be returning home in a matter of months if not weeks, perhaps after the Arab armies had crushed Israel", wrote historian Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.

On the 65th anniversary of the date that the UN announced its vote in favour of Partition, Mahmoud Abbas stood before the United Nations, excoriating Israel as an occupying force intent on doing great harm to Palestinians, and passionately exhorting the general membership to grant his people recognition of the state they wish to proclaim as sovereign, bypassing negotiations with Israel, mandated by the Oslo Accords.

The succession of combined Arab military assaults against the much smaller army of Israel would never have occurred had the Palestinians initially accepted Partition.  Their state would have been a reality, and like Israel's 65 years of existence as a state, would have benefited them enormously.  Countless lives, bitterness, rancour and innumerable losses of opportunity to benefit themselves would not have been lost.

The Six-Day War that devastated the combined Arab armies, routed them, and granted Israel an enlarged geography would never had transpired.  No Intifadas, no anguish of bloodshed, no separating wall, no rockets would have resulted.  "It was our mistake.  It was an Arab mistake as a whole", said Mahmoud Abbas in an interview with an Israeli television network last year.  "But do they [the Israelis] punish us for this mistake for 64 years?"

His perspective is askew.  It is the Palestinians who made the initial error, and it is the Palestinians who continue to punish themselves, alongside the Israelis with whom they continue to refuse to bargain in good faith to finally resolve the seemingly irresolvable.  It will be so until and unless they finally feel it is time to push away the past and look toward the future.