The author of '1948' on the 'mistakes' Palestinians made in Israel from the very start

[Beastly Boy]

The Times is attempting to do that, beginning with two conversations with scholars once dubbed the “New Historians” — a loose group of Israeli revisionists who, in the 1980s, reexamined their country’s heroic origin story. As the interviews — one with Benny Morris...

Benny Morris is one of the most quoted and best known scholars of the Israel - Plestine conflict.

The history of this land is riven by two incompatible narratives, Israeli and Palestinian. What can we definitively say about what happened in 1948?

At the end of 1947, the United Nations proposed to divide the country into two states. In 1948 there were 1.3 million Arabs in Palestine and 650,000 Jews there. The Jews said yes, but the Arabs of Palestine said no and started shooting. It evolved into a full-scale Arab-Israeli war. Israel eventually won and 700,000 Arabs were uprooted from their homes, most ending up as refugees in the West Bank and in Gaza. [Some accounts put the number at 750,000.]

Both sides did awful things, which is what happens in wars. The Arabs were the losing side and my view is that if people commit major mistakes in history they pay for them and perhaps that's how it should work out. The Palestinians should have agreed to a two-state solution.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/author-1948-mistakes-palestinians-made-110006137.html

More at the link.

[marybourg]

1. And they were offered a two state

solution again, at least once under Bill Clinton.

But they have never wanted a two state solution. They want Israel wiped off the map and a Palestine “from the river to the sea “. It has been this way for 75 years.

They refuse to compromise, and continue to cause the worsening of their own condition by frequently attacking Israel thereby causing Israel to raise up more and more drastic bulwarks against them.

That’s it in a nutshell and no amount of yelling “apartheid” or “occupation” or “dead babies” is going to change the facts.

[madaboutharry]

2. There is so much to say about this.

A few things:

1. If you walked up to a student on an American university campus they would be unable to in any way whatsoever demonstrate any understanding or even knowledge of the United Nations Partition or what followed in 1948.

2. Nothing will ever change until everyone understands that any hope of peace, any hope of a prosperous future for Palestinians, and any hope of an end to terror will take a two-state solution in which no one gets everything they want but rather gets what they can live with.

3. Add me to the list of pessimists.

[Martin68]

3. "my view is that if people commit major mistakes in history they pay for them." I'd be interested to hear

how you would apply this principle to American mistakes in regard to Native Americans, slavery, and Vietnam.

[marybourg]

7. If there were some nation(s) powerful enough to inflict payment on us,

we would have paid.

[Martin68]

17. So, in your view, payment must always be forced. Doesn't that mean might makes right and the

most powerful always get away with their crimes?

[brush]

4. What gets me is why was a two-state solution needed back then?

Hadn't Jews, Muslims and Christians lived there for millennia? Why divide it off?

It's like why would the US partition itself into separate areas for all the religious groups living here. What, maybe a state for Catholics, how many for the different protestant sects...New York for Methodists, Michigan for Lutherans, three or four southern states for the white Baptist evangelicals, and what about all the Black denominations like the AMEs and Black Baptists, and of course we can't forget the Muslims, Jews, Presbyterians and on and on.

Seems kind of silly and divisive.

As Rodney King once said: "Can't we all just get along?"

What a concept.

Why didn't that happen in 1947? There was no ban of Jews moving to Palestine right?

[marybourg]

5. Because after 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, in countries

they had lived in for generations, the Allied nations felt they needed a homeland of their own - and didn’t want them all in their own countries - preferably where they been ousted from centuries earlier. And, while Muslim countries had largely been more tolerant of Jews than Christian nations had been, Jews in the Muslim countries were taxed more heavily, had more restrictions against them and were generally not considered citizens. And no, the Palestinian authorities, and the British in their day, were not happy with so many Jews moving to Palestine. A few were OK. As for us all just getting along, well we all can see how that works out, even here on DU.

[brush]

10. No, they've not gotten along from the jump.

There is still no solution as both sides keep working against a two-state solution. And it's probably just wishful thinking and hoping it would work...what with extremists on both sides. Netanyahu/Likud on one side, Hamas on the other.

Hamas of course must go, and IMO I hope the Israelis wrest control from Netanyahu/Likud.

Maybe then negotiation for a Palestinian state can began with honest brokers. And that would not be the US as we are the ones supplying the weapons that have killed thousands in Gaza.

[Buzz cook]

8. There were ristrictions on immigration.

The British controlled Palestine and they didn't want a bunch of refugees and more than maga republicans do.

And of course they weren't very friendly to native Palestinians either.

[Buzz cook]

6. We can't correct the mistakes of the past.

What the Palestinians should have done in the past is pretty much alternative history best left to scifi writers.

Should the Palestinians accepted a two state solution in 48. I'm not sure they really had that choice. They didn't have a government that could negotiate with either the Jewish refugees or the UN. The bordering Arab states and Egypt saw a war as a possible way to increase influence and territory. British colonialism certainly didn't contribute to a peaceful resolution.

There are so many should haves in history. IMHO the Palestinians and their allies should have welcomed the Jewish refugees with open arms as long lost brothers and sisters. Once violence became inevitable the Palestinians and their allies should have chosen civil disobedience and non-violent resistance on a massive scale.

Again, IMHO that last is still an option. But it is dependent on international support and aid.

[Aussie105]

9. British colonial arrogance . . .

The Brits were a superpower around the world at the time and thought that if they controlled an area, they could do what they liked with it.

The UN agreed with them in 1947.

It gave the diverse groups of Jewish people around the world a focal point on the globe to gather to.

Unfortunately, the UN decision became a point of conflict.

Israelis: We are promised a homeland by our Bible!

Palestinians and the Middle East in general: It doesn't work that simply!

Followed by 75 years of tensions and conflict.

That brings us to the mess the area is in today.

I can see how we got here, but I refuse to take sides. No point in doing so.

A lasting solution needs to be found soon.

[brush]

11. I agree with you. I've stayed impartial also.

The bad actors on both sides opposing a two-state solution must go so negotiations can begin to finally create a Palestinian state.

[Basic LA]

12. How dare Palestinians have hard feelings.

Palestine was always their home. Then suddenly after WWII they were swarmed and ousted and driven into camps. They should be more grateful to their colonial overlords. Wouldn't you be?

[madaboutharry]

13. Your post is historically inaccurate.

There was no Palestinian country in 1947. It was British Mandate Palestine, controlled by Great Britain.
Jews have always lived on this land.
The area of British Mandate Palestine was fairly divided between Jews and Arabs. The Jews said yes, the Arabs said no.
Every attempt at peace and a two-state solution, going back 75 years, was meet with Arab refusal to live with a Jewish nation next door.
The Arabs who lived there were not "swarmed and ousted and driven into camps." The surrounding Arab nations encouraged them to leave, invaded Israel and started a war while promising them that the Jews would be defeated and driven out.
Israel was not founded to be a colonial overlord.

Has there been wrong from both Jews and Arabs, yes there has been.
However, your post demonstrates a serous lack of knowledge on the history between Israel and the Palestinians.

[Basic LA]

14. It was their home. Now it's not.

It didn't happen because they got an F in history class. They were displaced and dispossessed. That's the simple root cause everyone can see. That's what needs to be acknowledged if Israel is to have the safe and peaceful homeland it deserves.

[madaboutharry]

15. This is not what you said in your post.

Part of the history that you also ignore is that after the establishment of Israel, 800,000 Jews living in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, and also Egypt were expelled and forced to immigrate to Israel.
This is a repeated sad story of history.
They could have had a country many times over. That is a fact.

[Basic LA]

16. Not what I said in my post?

I purposely used the word Home, not Country. All you say is true historically. But this an immediate problem of life and death. Where do we go from here, that's the question. Two state, one state, or what? Have the last word.

[lees1975]

18. This issue goes back to before 1948. The Balfour Declaration, from Britain, following World War 1, is the background.

https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire following World War I by the Triple Entente, mainly Britain and France, set the British on the path to figuring out how to benefit their empire by controlling the territory and going after its resources. The Balfour Declaration, written by British Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur James Balfour, was a statement of sympathy to the aims of Zionism, which aimed to establish in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people. Balfour's declaration also included some idealistic goals, one being 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."

Obviously, there was a realization that since only a very small number of Jews were resident in Palestine itself, with most of the Jewish population being scattered across Europe, and in other Arab provinces of the Middle East, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine could result in the displacement of the Arabic population that had lived in Palestine for centuries, and it also could result in the expulsion of Jewish populations from the other countries where they existed as an ethnic and religious minority. If an independent Jewish state was established, then some countries, especially where anti-Semitism was running high, might consider Jews as foreign nationals rather than citizens, and expel them.

Empires can do as they please. I don't know if the reasoning was to allow slow, gradual Jewish immigration into Palestine, so that adjustment could be made to their presence by the Arabic population already there, and perhaps some measure of acceptance, or to use the Jewish presence to further their own interests. I'm not convinced that, under the right circumstances, with progressive, tolerant indigenous leaders in charge, that a single, democratic state could not have existed in Palestine under which both Jews and Arabs could live in peace. Up to this point in the history of the world, human intellect and reason has not been educated enough to become powerful or effective enough to bridge deep-seated religious differences and allow people to live side by side, sharing the same land, in peace.

The idea that there's something in history entitling one group of human beings to take the land, property and prosperity of another is the root of the problem. But trying to solve problems by war or terrorism is ineffective, immoral and inhumane. It's been tried now for 75 years. Maybe both sides are tired enough of the results to try something different now.