The Underrepresented Context of the Israel-Palestine Partitioning

One of the worst injustices done to Israel, perhaps even more dangerous than the bombs that Hamas and militant allies throw at buses and kindergartens, is the journalistic malpractice carried out by those who misrepresent the formation of Israel as starting as a question of what to do with Jews and Palestinians. As was previously covered in the article Middle East Fact or Fiction Part 1, the Palestinians were not the chief target of the "two state solution", nor was the concern of abolishing a country, which itself had never existed.

The most important truth that is often overlooked was that a nation known as Palestine was not in existence when the idea of forming Israel came about - primarily because the independent nations that make up the Middle East now likewise didn't exist. After World War II there was a massive partitioning of the Middle East where the Imperial French and British powers there withdrew and replaced colonial governments with independent leaders with British defined borders. How had Britain come upon this territory? That likewise is a misrepresentation - when the world let out a sigh of relief with the final collapse of the Caliphate in the early 20th century thanks to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the regions were essentially stateless. Common political thought at the time was wholly encouraging of imperial expansion - it could be argued that World War I was the final catalyst to end the Imperial Age, blossoming the world into the Modern Age.

Between internal pressure and the decline in support for international empires, these governments began to slowly pull out of the Middle East and grant independence to the Orient. The problem that arose, of course, was that none of these regions had a history of independence, there was no accepted border for a non-centrally controlled Middle Eastern nations, the closest one could find were the Medieval kingdoms that existed in splinters. Other than that, there had rarely been a time that the amount of territory in question had not been under the control of a central power of some sort - and Great Britain was simply uninterested in seeing a Second Ottoman Empire.

From the end of World War I to after World War II, France and Britain continued to sign off a number of mandates - in many ways appeasing the Arab Nationalists who had thrown in their weight behind Nazi Germany during World War II under the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

This is one of the keys to truly understanding the Israel-Palestine issue. Many people mistakenly believe that, when growing up with existing nations their entire lives, that these are longstanding nations, or that they are nations that have always been, or have a historic claim to the region. This kind of mindset attributes to the fact that many people look at the Mandate of Palestine as a unique event - this is spurred on by the rather myopic teachings of the public school system that treats each subject of history independent of one another rather than a member of a bigger picture that are invariably linked.

As was also reported in the Fact or Fiction article, it was pointed out that the nation of Palestine never actually existed - it was a reference to a region that during the Roman times was essentially referred to as Judea. The word Palestine was later used as an insult to the Arab people there (equating them with Philistines, a name used interchangeably now with Palestinian) and a final and definitive insult to the Jewish people who were driven from the land in 70 A.D. This diaspora is referred to by many anti-Zionist rabbis as God's wrath and therefore see a Jewish state as blasphemous.

The Arab Palestine that was brought up in the Two State Solution, which later turned into the partitioning of the region, no nation, of Palestine from which the name was drawn, into an Arab and Jewish state was not seen as a co-existence between Jews and Palestinians, but Jews and Arabs. The Palestine land wasn't considered something special to ethnic Palestinians - but rather a portion of land that would be given to the Arab National Movement which had been pressing for its independence along with the rest of the Middle East.

Rather than narrowing it down, it is important to look at the entire picture and consider that the partitioning here was much like the rest of the Middle East: they were still in the process of deciding what were the official post-Ottoman borders. In the process, a remarkably small chunk of land was decided to be, amidst the sea of Arab land, a place where the Jews could reside. The urgency of this Jewish land was brought about with the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe - and rather than for the plight of the Palestinian people, the angst this generated in the Arab peoples' was over the slight they felt was dealt to them.

It was not a matter of returning Palestine to the Palestinians, they felt, but the indignity of any of the land they'd demanded from the British for the past twenty years would go to Jews. It was not until the Jordanians began expelling the Palestinians from the Hashemite Kingdom that there came a true voice for Palestinians - in many ways, they became the excuse of the Arab Peoples against the Jews.

Of course, in many ways, it's easier to simply overlook all of this, and assume that the Mandate of Palestine was an isolated incident involving a nation known as Palestine - and this is the route that many take.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashemite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Jordan
http://www.mideastweb.org/mandate.htm