Where the Desert Meets the Sea

by Werner Sonne

The Jews insisted on finally getting their own homeland—on claiming, once and for all, the biblical land of their forefathers. Encouraged by the (later broken) promises of the British Mandate authority and morally strengthened in their claim by the Holocaust before a world audience, they set out early on to acquire land in Palestine. This was soon reflected in the number of inhabitants: in the early 1920s, Palestine had been home to around six hundred thousand Arabs and eighty thousand Jews. By the 1940s, the number of Arab inhabitants had doubled, and the Jews did everything in their power to increase their population through new waves of immigration, both legal and illegal. After the founding of the State of Israel, some 750,000 Arabs left the conquered area and the number of Jews reached 650,000—in other words, a massive population shift had taken place. No wonder the Israelis called the struggle for control in what was then Palestine a “war of independence,” while the Arabs called it the Nakba, the “catastrophe”—one that continues for Palestinians to this day.