The Middle East that could have been

Efraim Karsh argues that the Palestinian-Jewish struggle might have ended peacefully in 1947-- if only Arab leaders hadn't opted for war


Ephraim Karsh
National Post
14 May '10

"There is no place in Palestine for two races. The Jews left Palestine 2,000 years ago. Let them go to other parts of the world, where there are wide vacant places."

--Hajj Amin Husseini, 1936

"We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their place. All our aspiration is built on the assumption--proven throughout all our activity in the Land of Israel --that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs." --David Ben-Gurion, 1937

On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partition of Palestine into two independent states -- one Jewish, the other Arab -- linked in an economic union. The city of Jerusalem was to be placed under an international regime, with its residents given the right to citizenship in either the Jewish or the Arab state.

For Jews all over the world, this was the fulfillment of a millenarian yearning for national rebirth in their ancestral homeland. For Arab political and intellectual elites, it was a shameful surrender of (a however minute) part of the perceived pan-Arab patrimony to a foreign invader. In Jewish localities throughout Palestine, crowds danced in the streets. In the Arab capitals there were violent demonstrations.

"We are happy and ready for what lies ahead," the prominent Zionist official and future Israeli prime minister Golda Meyerson(Meir) told thousands of revellers in Jerusalem. "Our hands are extended in peace to our neighbours. Both States can live in peace with one another and co-operate for the welfare of their inhabitants."

To this, however, the response of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective "government" of the Palestinian Arabs, headed by the militant ex-mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Husseini, was an all-out war. In the five-and-a-half months between the passing of the UN resolution and the end of the British mandate, the former mufti's forces, assisted by a sizeable pan-Arab irregular army, carried out thousands of attacks on their Jewish neighbours in an attempt to prevent them from establishing their state.

This failed, and by the time the last British high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, left the country and the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, Palestinian Arab society had all but disintegrated, with 300,000-340,000 of its members fleeing their homes to other parts of Palestine and to the neighbouring Arab states.

(Read full article)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.