Miguel,
I do indeed speak brashly, but what is going on in the West Bank is simple
and straightforward. Israel is using its military might, supplied by the
United States, to kill people. This is a simple fact.
Whining? I don't think so. Name calling is hardly rational discussion, but
even if it were, and even if I did, does that make it invalid? I have no
tolerance for the suicide bomber either. I have disgust for all the sides,
for there are more than Israelis and the Palestinians involved in the death
and destruction.
However, the right of the British Empire to scrape out a country from a land
where people are already living is questionable at best. While I have not
done research on the time, my recollection of the actions of the Jews in
creating Israel is that they were not particularly gentle.
Some history quickly gathered from the Net:
-----------------------------------------------------
In May 1939, the British published a White Paper that marked the end of its
commitment to the Jews under the Balfour Declaration. It provided for the
establishment of a Palestinian (Arab) state within ten years and the
appointment of Palestinian ministers to begin taking over the government as
soon as "peace and order" were restored to Palestine; 75,000 Jews would be
allowed into Palestine over the next five years, after which all immigration
would be subject to Arab consent; all further land sales would be severely
restricted.
The British trained Jewish commando units, the first elements of the famous
Palmach --the strategic reserve of the Haganah--and they also gave Jewish
volunteers intensive training in sabotage, demolition, and partisan warfare.
Ironically, this training proved indispensable in the Yishuv's efforts after
the war to force the British to withdraw from Palestine.
By 1943 as news regarding Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe increased, the
Irgun and Stern Gang stepped up harassment of British forces in an attempt
to obtain unrestricted Jewish immigration. In November 1944, Lord Moyne, the
British ministerresident in Cairo and a close personal friend of Churchill,
was assassinated by Lehi. Lord Moyne's assassination alienated the British
prime minister, who until then had supported a Jewish national home in
Palestine. Subsequently, no British government considered setting up a
Jewish state in Palestine. The assassination also led the Jewish Agency's
clandestine military arm, Haganah, to cooperate with the British against the
Irgun.
The British position in Palestine at the end of World War II was becoming
increasingly untenable. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors
temporarily housed in displaced persons camps in Europe were clamoring to be
settled in Palestine. The fate of these refugees aroused international
public opinion against British policy. Moreover, the administration of
President Harry S Truman, feeling morally bound to help the Jewish refugees
and exhorted by a large and vocal Jewish community, pressured Britain to
change its course in Palestine. Postwar Britain depended on American
economic aid to reconstruct its war-torn economy. Furthermore, Britain's
staying power in its old colonial holdings was waning; in 1947 British rule
in India came to an end and Britain informed Washington that London could no
longer carry the military burden of strengthening Greece and Turkey against
communist encroachment.
Despite American, Jewish, and international pressure and the recommendations
of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the new Labour Party government
of Prime Minister Clement Atlee and his foreign minister, Ernest Bevin,
continued to enforce the policy articulated in the White Paper. British
adamancy on immigration radicalized the Yishuv. Under Ben-Gurion's
direction, the Jewish Agency decided in October 1945 to unite with Jewish
dissident groups in a combined rebellion against the British administration
in Palestine. The combined Jewish resistance movement organized illegal
immigration and kidnapping of British officials in Palestine and sabotaged
the British infrastructure in Palestine. In response Bevin ordered a
crackdown on the Haganah and arrested many of its leaders. While the British
concentrated their efforts on the Haganah, the Irgun and Lehi carried out
terrorist attacks against British forces, the most spectacular of which was
the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946. The latter
event led Ben-Gurion to sever his relationship with the Irgun and Lehi.
By 1947 Palestine was a major trouble spot in the British Empire, requiring
some 100,000 troops and a huge maintenance budget. On February 18, 1947,
Bevin informed the House of Commons of the government's decision to present
the Palestine problem to the United Nations (UN). On May 15, 1947, a special
session of the UN General Assembly established the United Nations Special
Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), consisting of eleven members. The UNSCOP
reported on August 31 that a majority of its members supported a
geographically complex system of partition into separate Arab and Jewish
states, a special international status for Jerusalem, and an economic union
linking the three members. Backed by both the United States and the Soviet
Union, the plan was adopted after two months of intense deliberations as the
UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29, 1947. Although considering
the plan defective in terms of their expectations from the League of Nations
Mandate twenty-five years earlier, the Zionist General Council stated
willingness in principle to accept partition. The League of Arab States
(Arab League) Council, meeting in December 1947, said it would take whatever
measures were required to prevent implementation of the resolution.
Despite the passage of the UN partition plan, the situation in Palestine in
early 1948 did not look auspicious for the Yishuv. When the AHC rejected the
plan immediately after its passage and called for a general strike, violence
between Arabs and Jews mounted. Many Jewish centers, including Jerusalem,
were besieged by the Arabs. In January 1948, President Truman, warned by the
United States Department of State that a Jewish state was not viable,
reversed himself on the issue of Palestine, agreeing to postpone partition
and to transfer the Mandate to a trusteeship council. Moreover, the British
forces in Palestine sided with the Arabs and attempted to thwart the
Yishuv's attempts to arm itself.
In mid-March the Yishuv's military prospects changed dramatically after
receiving the first clandestine shipment of heavy arms from Czechoslovakia.
The Haganah went on the offensive and, in a series of operations carried out
from early April until mid-May, successfully consolidated and created
communications links with those Jewish settlements designated by the UN to
become the Jewish state. In the meantime, Weizmann convinced Truman to
reverse himself and pledge his support for the proposed Jewish state. In
April 1948, the Palestinian Arab community panicked after Begin's Irgun
killed 250 Arab civilians at the village of Dayr Yasin near Jerusalem. The
news of Dayr Yasin precipitated a flight of the Arab population from areas
with large Jewish populations.
-----------------------------------------------------
Hardly "a few Jews" gathered in Palestine. Begin sounds a lot like Arafat
in that last paragraph, doesn't he? Only he had clandestine support from
Europe and the United States, rather than from Arab states that are far less
able to supply arms and equipment. And the attack on the King David hotel
sounds a lot like the things that Israel has been seeing lately.
The tag line of your comments, that "there can be no hysterical sympathy for
the deaths of gunmen who send out
children to kill" is simply wrong in its direction. I agree with your
statement, whether you are talking about Palestinians and Arabs or whether
you are talking about U.S. congressmen sending teenagers to Vietnam. But
the people who are dying in the Middle East are, for the most part,
innocents, people going about the day to day process of living. And if you
are keeping score, the Israelis are much more efficient at killing than the
lone gunmen and suicide bombers. I don't think that mass murder can be, as
you describe, a triumph.
Darryl Brashier
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