Once again, the Israelis and Hamas, the militant group in the encircled Palestinian territory of Gaza, are at war. As at the last count, just a week into the fighting, the death toll from both sides has already exceeded five thousand and, from all indications, many more could still die unless sanity prevails promptly. For a proper understanding of the origins of the conflict between the Arabs and their Jews cousins, we must go back to the beginning because they are indeed of the same family if the creation accounts of the Bible, Torah and the Koran are to be believed.
From a scientific point of view, DNA analyses of both the Jews and the Arabs people point to a common ancestry, thus suggesting that what we are witnessing is simply an unending family feud amongst the children of Abraham, who is their common progenitor, one lineage after Isaac and the other after Ishmael.
For millennial, both the Jews and the Arabs have inhabited the land that is today referred to as the Levant or Palestine but for some reasons many Jews went into exile/exodus and dispersed all across the globe. Some historical accounts say that the initial exodus began when the Assyrians attacked and destroyed the Jews land of Israel, then followed by the Babylonian’s destruction of Judah and then the Romans conquest of Judea culminating in the rulership of the Christians and later the Muslims. The rise of Islam following the religious conquest by Prophet Mohammed (SAW) and his followers of most of the lands of Asia, North Africa and Europe further made many Jews to flee.
Over time, Diasporan Jews became very power lobby groups in most of Europe and the United States and they then began to push for eventual return, at least, some of them, to their homeland. So, when the defunct Ottoman Empire’s hold on the Levante ended with the First World War and Britian was awarded the mandate powers over Palestine, an opportunity arose to formally address the Jews (homecoming) agenda. The first major development in this regard was the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, wherein an official British statement was made in support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
The principles of the “Declaration” were subsequently adopted by the victorious Allied Powers as a major agenda for a post-WW1 League of Nations and it was therefore not unexpected that it was eventually inserted into the Mandate instrument issued to Britain under the League of Nations. The Arab inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine resisted the Declaration because it immediately created an impetus for Jewish accelerated return to Palestine.
Arab resistance to the “homeland” idea was swift and extensive and by 1939, the British government was forced to impose a limit of 75000 on Jewish emigration into Palestine and stipulated further that all Jewish immigration should stop by 1944 unless the Arabs agreed to such additional inflows. Of course, they never agreed but it did not stop the Jewish migration which indeed increased in the aftermath of the Second War World when many Jews were massacred by Hitler and his other European allies in what became known as the Holocaust.
Many of the returning Jews came with a lot of money and started buying up lands from the residents’ Arab communities. When the United Nations, the post-WW2 successor to the League of Nations passed a resolution in 1947 recommending the partitioning of the Palestinian territory between the Arabs and the Jews, the Arabs expectedly revolted and a civil war broke out (1947-1948) and the Jews came out the victorious party.
Arabs fighters were ill-prepared against the sophisticated weaponry and devastating fighting acumen of the Israelis who had recently acquired combat experiences in Europe, a development which set in motion the panicked fleeing of the Arabs while the conquering Israelis proceeded to seize substantial portions of Arab lands and deliberately made their future return impossible. That defeat and the subsequent removal for more than seven hundred thousand Arabs from their lands constitute what the Palestinians till date refer to as the ‘Catastrophe’ or Nakba.
Over the next 75 years starting from 1948, the Palestinians have been losing additional lands to the Israelis after each war and today, what is left for them cannot realistically support their population. The international legal order which is organised around the values that are clearly enunciated by UN Charter as well as international public opinions have been demanding that the Israeli government return the occupied Palestinian territories to them but they are instead claiming inalienable ancestral rights over the same territory over which they trace its inheritance to Abraham, their common Patriarch.
While the maltreatments of the Palestinians have spawned an extraordinarily strong anti-West sentiments and anger in the Arab world, a situation that culminated in the bloody 9-11 jihadists attack on America, the same can no longer be said of the various Arabs regimes that have since abandoned the Palestinian people while barefacedly cozying up to the Zionist state of Israel. There is actually the belief that the current Hamas ill-fated invasion was aimed in part to scuttle the ongoing diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. From all indications, most of the Arab governments have thrown the Palestinians under the bus leaving them to their own fate. What was once a united Arab engagement has gradually been degraded from being “Arabs/Israelis” to “Palestine/Israeli” and now finally to “Hamas/Israeli” conflict.
With each passing day, the possibility of a Palestinian recovery of their lands from Israelis’ occupation diminishes, a development that is now forcing observers to ask if the Arab’s refusal of the 1947 partition arrangement as well as other subsequent arrangements (the Camp David Accord, etc.) was not a big mistake as was also admitted by Mahmud Abbas in 2011 when he said that “the Arab rejection of United Nations Partition Plan (1947) was a mistake” but which he hopes to rectify.
The “either all or nothing” demands of successive Palestinian leaders is proving to be a mistake. It is remarkable that when the Arabs nations flatly rejected the UN Partition Plan, an influential Egyptian newspaper correctly prophesied that “We stand for partition because we believe that it is the best final solution for the problem of Palestine…rejection of partition … will lead to further complications and will give the Zionists another space of time to complete their plans of defense and attack… delay of one more year which would not benefit the Arabs but would benefit the Jews, especially after the British evacuation” (The Al Mokattam). The Arabs did not only give the Jews an additional year to consolidate, so far, they have given them 75 years!
The only group that appears to have benefited from the emerging nightmare are the Islamic clerics who have successfully wrestled influence and authority from the Palestinian political class,who have been variously exposed as corrupt and lacking in strategic thinking; superstitious religious proclamations have replaced calculated strategic thinking in the enclave while the rest of the world has moved on. When you contrast the photos of Palestinians women fleeing from the Nakba of 1948 with those fleeing within Gaza today, you will discover that Palestinian women of that era were generally not hooded in heavy Burka or Hijab; they looked very much secular and modern then than now.
Tragically, the social and economic lives of the average dwellers of Gaza have been stunted at the antediluvian age when donkeys and mulls served as means of transportation. Imagine what an independent State of Palestine could possibly have become today if they had accepted the partition arrangement in 1947 and proceed to live side by side with their Israeli neighbours while peacefully competing with each other developmentally. The trajectory of the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians does not envisage a quick fix soon, especially when both sides are stubbornly holding on to their “birth right” claims over the same piece of land. In the circumstance, it is only God, possibly with the cooperation of Abraham, who can equitably resolve their disagreements because, as they say, wherever the laws are equal, equity takes over.
Source: Independent
