Friday, October 04, 2002

 

Reading Part IV of NPR's The Mideast: A Century of Conflict

I'm already starting to get cloudy on the timeline for the formation of Israel. It's always taken me a lot of effort to memorize details like dates and names and I never seem to be able to keep what I memorize long-term. What I know so far: Zionist ideal of establishing a homeland happened in 1897. In 1917, British announce support for Jewish state in Balfour document. Then in 1922, Britain was given a mandate by the League of Nations to bring the territory to independence. Throughout the 20s and 30s, conflict builds between the Arabs and the steady stream of Jewish immigrants. In 1937 because of conflicts between Jews and Arabs, Britain proposes partitioning Palestine. 1939, Britain repudiates Zionism and the Jews turn against the British. After WWII there is an outpouring of sympathy for the Jewish and it results in the United Nations partitioning of Palestine in 1947. The following year, 1948, David Ben-Gurion announces the formation of the state of Israel. All this within half a century.

After Israel is established in 1948, it faces opposition from Arabs on all sides. The Arabs are not happy and do their darndest to get rid of them but Israel manages to survive even with the Arab states arrayed against them. Then in 1967, events changed the balance of power in the Mideast. Because of some misinformation from Russia, Syria believed that the Israelis were planning to attack them. The Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in a show of support to Syria took the offensive, blocking off the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli oil shipments and moving troops towards the Israeli border on the Sinai penninsula. The Israelis tried to exercise diplomatic options in order to gain US support but finally they responded with military force on June 5th, 1967. The ensuing battle lasted only six days and completely decimated the Egyptian forces and gained territories for the Israelis in the Sinai penninsula, the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza. Most important, politically and socially, was the capture of East Jerusalem and important religeous sites like the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. These sites had been restricted to Jews despite the armistice agreements from 1948 and it meant a lot to all Israelis to have access to them again. For the Arabs, the defeat of Nasser demonstrated that the Palestinians couldn't rely on Arab leaders to help their struggle. The Palestinians turned to guerilla forces and the struggle since this turning point has focused on just gaining back land they feel was taken from them.

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Thursday, October 03, 2002

 

Thoughts on Mideast History

One of my big questions regarding the Mideast conflict surround Zionism and both how the state of Israel came to be and whether it is justified. I know that the history of the region and relations between the Jews and Arabs is much more complex than just the snapshot that I'm getting from this NPR series but I'm surprised by how successfully the state of Israel was established, especially considering that it was acquired by immigrants (for the most part).

Without going into the rationale or justification behind it, it seems to me that the land that became Israel was stolen from the native Arabs, not unlike (some may argue) how we stole America from the Native Americans. It's very much a might-makes-right situation. From that basis, it's hard not to sympathize with the Palestinians because they have a viable right to the land as well. I'm very confused by this. How does one determine ownership rights in this situation? How far back do you have to look and how do you determine what constitutes ownership? I imagine there's no easy answer.

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Reading Part III of NPR's The Mideast: A Century of Conflict

For reference, World War II lasted from 1939-1945.

We left off in 1939 on the eve of World War 2. Palestine is under British control and they're having a hell of a time keeping peace between the ever-growing number of Jews and the native Arabs. Throughout the 30s the area has been in a constant state of unrest, manifesting in the Arab Rebellion in 1935. Britain brokered the idea of partitioning Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs but neither side was willing to accept that option. By the end of the decade Britain was ready to give up their support for the Jewish state and tried to alleviate the situation by putting limits to Jewish immigration to Palestine, which was still under their control. Zionists turned against their former allies.Then the war hit

During the war, Zionists set aside their differences with Britain to fight against the Axis. But as the war ran down in the mid-40s hostilities between Zionists and Britain returned. The confrontation took place on diplomatic stages and in appeals to world compassion. With the war ending there were many Jews from Germany who needed to be resettled. For obvious reasons, Germany wasn't an ideal locale and Palestine was seen by many as an appropriate option. At the same time though, Jewish militants were organizing in the territory and striking out against the British. Zionist leaders initially helped the British fight the terrorism of these militant groups but as hostilities intensified and Palestine became an armed camp, Zionist military joined the fight against the British. Many of the leaders of the Zionist militia, like David Ben-Gurion, Manachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir would later go on to become leaders of Israel. Finally, in 1946 British gave up trying to solve the Palestinian problem and turned it over to the newly formed United Nations.

The United Nations favored the plan to partition Palestine first raised by the British in 1937. This was seen as a humane solution by many who felt that the Jews needed restitution after the events in Germany. The Arabs leaders wouldn't hear of partitioning Palestine - the UN proposed giving the Jews 55% of Palestine even though they had previously owned only 7% - but weren't organized enough to argue against the UN ruling. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted for partitioning.

The following year, May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the formation of the independent state of Israel on the day after the British ceded control. In retaliation, the Arab forces in the region; Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq attacked the Jewish state. The Jews fought the war on four fronts and because of the unorganization of the Arabs were able to repel them and end up with occupying 78% of Palestine, even more than allocated them by the UN. The Arab Palestinians who formerly occupied these lands became refugees, being ordered to leave, forced to leave, or leaving of their own accord. The Palestinians ended up fleeing to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, and what is now the West Bank. And it is from these camps that the Palestinian Movement was born.

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They've found the funniest joke in the world

It goes like this:

"A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head.

The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: 'My friend is dead! What can I do?'

The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: 'Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.'

There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: 'OK, now what?'

I found it amusing but I have a hard time believing it's the funniest joke in the world. I think they mean to say it's the most universally funny joke of the one's that they studied.

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Wednesday, October 02, 2002

 

Part II of NPR's The Mideast: A Century of Conflict

First of all, I feel embarassed because I don't know the years when World War I occurred [1914-1918]. This is significant because those events coincide with the next stage in the Mideast conflict after the congress of World Zionist Organization in 1897. That meeting set the political agenda for Zionism, one that was to be pursued throughout Europe in the subsequent decades. But significant political progress didn't occur for Zionism until 20 years after the congress, in 1917, when England expressed its support of a homeland for Jews in the Balfour Declaration.

The declaration came about as a result of lobbying by Chaim Weizmann, the local Zionist representative, in Britain. Weizmann managed to gain audiences with some very important figures in British politics at the time including David Lloyd George who would become prime minister in 1916 (question to self: what does the prime minister do?). These officials warmed to the idea of a Zionist presence in Palestine, apparently because, as good Protestants, they were sympathetic to the Jews returning to Zion but also because of the political benefits - support for the Zionist movement would gain suport from U.S. Jews for entering the war (WWI?) as a British ally and would likewise engender support to keep Russia in the war on the British side. In November of 1917, the British foreign secretary, James Balfour, made the declaration in a letter to Lord Rothchild (?). This support was received warmly by Jews but not so good by Arabs who found out about it. The Balfour Declaration, in addressing support for establishing the Jewish state, failed to address the rights of Arabs who made up 92% of the population of Palestine at the time. [I'm a little unclear about what authority Britain had to make such a declaration - I think Palestine was still part of the Ottoman empire at this time.] This sidelining of Arabs from the decision-making process is a pattern that continues even today.

At this point, the borders of a Palestinian state had not been delineated. But in 1916, Britain and France established modern borders in the Sykes-Picot agreement. The area that would become Palestine was part of Syria and was intended to be split between Britain and France. But then, at the end of the war (WWI?) Britain seized Palestine for its own with the help of Arabs under the command of T.E. Lawrence loyal to the Sharif of Mecca. Later, in 1922 the (newly formed?) League of Nations made Palestine a mandate of Britain to bring the territory to independence. Basically it was Britain's burden to create the state of Palestine. Britain had its hands full with this charge due to the reluctance of either the Jews or Arabs to co-exist peacefully in the territory. As Jews immigrated to the territory they started establishing themselves. The Arabs, naturally, were reluctant to cede land that they already inhabited to these newcomers. Riots broke out throughout Palestine throughout the 20s. Then, in the 30s as Hitler begins to come to power in Germany and new persecutions of the Jews begins, a huge influx of Jewish immigrants comes to Palestine. In 1935, the friction caused by this new wave of immigrants causes the Arab Rebellion, where Arabs sought their own Arab state. They attacked Jewish settlers and British troops. The Jews staged reprisals and the British tried to counter the terrorism by attacking the homes and families of Arab bombers. But the British couldn't suppress the violence and in 1937 they proposed partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. Neither the Jews or Arabs supported the plan and it died. Britain eventually suppressed the Arab Rebellion but gave up trying to solve the problems between Jews and Arabs. By 1939, on the eve of World War II, Britain conceded their role in Palestine and published a white paper that was interpreted as repudiating Zionism and the Balfour Declaration. Now that the ball had gotten rolling in Palestine and gotten away from the British, they tried to absolve themselves of responsibility leaving a messy situation that continues to this day.

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Tuesday, October 01, 2002

 

Today I started into part I of NPR's series on the The Mideast: A Century of Conflict.

The zionist political movement was founded in 1897 by the World Zionist Organization meeting in Basel, Switzerland at the instigation of Theodore Herzl. Although some Jews had carried the idea of returning to Zion, the biblical Israel for centuries, Zionism had no concrete movement behind it. Herzl was a journalist and playwright who saw the idea of Zionism as a secular idea until he covered the Dreyfuss case in France where an officer in the French army, Alfred Dreyfuss, was convicted of treason because he was Jewish. This inspired the conception in Herzl that Zionism needed to pursue a political goal to address the "Jewish question" - Jews needed a place to go where they could escape the persecution that followed them wherever they migrated.

In 1897, Herzl gathered 250 of his followers in Basel, Switzerland to open the World Zionist Organization, an organization that would adopt a political program for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Palestine at the time was a state on the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire. It was inhabited by Arabs who didn't identify themselves as Palestininan Arabs but were simply farmers who co-existed with the few Jews that also lived in the region. Following the Congress, Herzl lobbied leaders throughout Europe to back the Zionist goals. In doing so he telegraphed to Europe the idea of the Jewish state, an idea that would come to fruition more than half a century later.

This is heavily summarized. I'm so unfamiliar with this history and am such a poor absorber of information that I had to keep referring back to the article to make sure that I had my facts right. So what I understand is that Jews have been persecuted throughout Europe and probably throughout the world for centuries. This notion of Zionism arose from a cultural concept of Jews returning to Zion, the name for the biblical Israel. This is a concept that probably stems from the bible for Jews but until the late 19th century no one had really thought of how to achieve it. Theodore Herzl didn't really start out as a man with a political agenda until he was motivated by the Dreyfuss Affair in France. Spurred by that event, Herzl formulated his ideas on the solutions to the persecution of Jews into a pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, or "The Jewish State" published in 1896. This may have been the first political expression for the creation of a Jewish state and it manifested into the first Zionist congress the next year. So when they say that Zionism was born in the late 19th century, people are referring to the political movement promoting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Israel doesn't actually get established until after WWII (1949?) but the seeds for it were planted at the turn of the century by Theodore Herzl.

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Middle East Lesson

NPR offers a 7-part series on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute

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