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Yusuf Diya was fully conscious of the pervasiveness of Western anti-Semitism. He had also gained impressive knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism, specifically its nature as a response to Christian Europe’s virulent anti-Semitism.
Palestine already had an indigenous population that would never accept being superseded.
Herzl grasped the importance of “disappearing” the native population of Palestine in order for Zionism to succeed.
with the smug self-assurance so common to nineteenth-century Europeans, Herzl offered the preposterous inducement that the colonization, and ultimately the usurpation, of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country.
This condescending attitude toward the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population of Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day.
the essentially colonial nature of the century-long conflict in Palestine.
the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.
For over a century, the Palestinians have been depicted in precisely the same language by their colonizers as have been other indigenous peoples.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued by a British cabinet and committing Britain to the creation of a national Jewish homeland, never mentioned the Palestinians,
Jabotinsky wrote in 1923: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’”
(the largest single group being the victims of massacres at the behest of the Ottoman authorities in 1915 and 1916—Armenians, Assyrians, and other Christians).
Balfour Declaration—comprised a single sentence: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
This overwhelming majority of the population was promised only “civil and religious rights,” not political or national rights. By way of contrast, Balfour ascribed national rights to what he called “the Jewish people,” who in 1917 were a tiny minority—6 percent—of the country’s inhabitants.
the British Empire was never motivated by altruism.
Lloyd George convinced the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow representative government in Palestine. Nor did it.
Within a little more than a decade after World War I, Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis all achieved a measure of independence, albeit often highly constrained and severely limited. In Palestine, the British operated with a different set of rules.
The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to
no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.
With discriminatory immigration laws in place in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, many German Jews had nowhere to go but Palestine.
Winston Churchill, who succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, was perhaps the most ardent Zionist in British public life.
Zionism is a colonizing venture
only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”
Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property.
New York in particular, then and now the city with the largest Jewish population in the world.
the 1946 blowing up of the British HQ, the King David Hotel, with the loss of ninety-one lives.
LIKE A SLOW, seemingly endless train wreck, the Nakba unfolded over a period of many months.
the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948.
Most of Palestine’s Arab urban population thus became refugees and lost their homes and livelihoods.
the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.
in 1948 Israel in fact outnumbered and outgunned its opponents.
only about 6 percent of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948.
Accustomed to being a substantial majority in their own country and region, they suddenly had to learn to make their way as a despised minority in a hostile environment as subjects of a Jewish polity that never defined itself as a state of all its citizens.
The Palestine issue thus became a political football exploited at will by opportunistic politicians,
In October 1953, Israeli forces in the West Bank village of Qibya carried out a massacre following an attack by feda’iyin that killed three Israeli civilians, a woman and her two children, in the town of Yehud. Israeli special forces Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians.
the gruesome events in the Gaza Strip were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern of behavior by the Israeli military.
“the Arab Cold War,” when Egypt led a coalition of radical Arab nationalist regimes opposed to the conservative bloc headed by Saudi Arabia. The flash point of their rivalry was Yemen, where a revolution against the monarchy in 1962 led to a civil war in which much of Egypt’s military became entangled.
in the case of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, full withdrawals have not taken place for over half a century, in spite of decades of sporadic indirect and direct negotiations.
Kissinger said in another context, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or dwellings which are undefended is prohibited. —Article 25, Annex to the Hague Convention, July 29, 18991
Israel in its true light as a callous occupying power.
the Palestinian Declaration of Independence adopted at a meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers on November 15. Drafted largely by Mahmoud Darwish, who was aided by Edward Said and the respected intellectual Shafiq al-Hout, the document formally abandoned the PLO’s claim to the entirety of Palestine, accepting the principles of partition, a two-state solution, and a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Israel had effectively secured veto power over US positions in any peace talks,
the use of force only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism, and bolstered the support of external actors.
The United States was not just an accessory: it was Israel’s partner.
This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It’s not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass. —Edward Said1
In the decades following 1993, the strip was cut off from the rest of the world in stages, encircled by troops on land and the Israeli navy by sea.
Founded at the outset of the First Intifada in December 1987, Hamas had grown quickly, capitalizing on the currents of popular discontent with the PLO that had emerged for a variety of reasons.
a more militant Islamist alternative to the PLO,
Only the use of force could lead to the liberation of Palestine, Hamas argued,
Hamas was an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood,
