Here in the place where I live, the population is old. That’s the nature of life in a retirement village. But none of us were always old. We have been places and done things. We have stories to tell.
Lately I have been asked by several different groups to talk about what is happening in the Middle East. Their reason has been that they don’t understand; they feel ignorant. So when I talk I emphasize the things I suspect they don’t know.
Some of you may not know that I lived and worked in the Middle East for 30 years, in Jordan and in Lebanon. In both places I knew a lot of Palestinians, most living in refugee camps, all having been driven from their homes by the state of Israel (or born in the refugee camp.)
You may not know that I am 94 years old with a long memory. I remember that, before Israel existed, the European Jews (who had been severely persecuted and obviously needed a place to go) were very good at propaganda. They called Palestine “A land without a people for a people without a land.” This was a lie.
The average American is surprised to know, and I am sad to say, that the first terrorists in the modern M.E. were Jews. One of these groups, the Irgun, blew up Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in July, 1946, destroying the headquarters of the British Mandate and killing more than 90 people. A year later gangs such as the Irgun and the Hagana destroyed the village of Deir Yassin, killed the inhabitants and ordered other villagers to leave or else. In this way hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees
Here is another thing that most Americans don’t seem to know: Within the West Bank, which has been designated for the Palestinians under international agreements, there are 132 Jewish “settlements” officially recognized by Israel, plus 121 unofficial communities called “outposts.” (The “settlements” are, in fact, planned, well-built cities.) 450,000 people live in these communities. In addition, there are 25 communes, called kibbutzim, with populations of 125,000.
Altogether, that’s 575,000 Israeli Jews living in the space allotted to Arabs, a space smaller than the state of Delaware. And they do it with the encouragement and support of their government. Obviously, all of this is a way of taking back Palestinian land and making impossible the creation of a Palestinian state.
The Israelis have built a fine highway system to connect all of these Jewish communities to one another. These highways have no “on” or “off” ramps in the Palestinian communities or in the open farmland. Anyway, Palestinian-owned vehicles, which have green license plates, are not permitted on these roads. Jewish vehicles have yellow plates.
The other piece of land assigned to Palestine is this little strip called Gaza, which is approximately 38 miles away, across Israeli territory. All movement in and out of Gaza is controlled by Israel as well as a lot of their food and fuel. Residents of Gaza are allowed to travel to the West Bank only in case of exceptional need, such as urgent medical care. And it is possible to travel from the West Bank to Gaza only if the traveler pledges to permanently relocate to Gaza.
Can you even imagine turning these scattered pieces of land into a cohesive state?
But I have one more shocker for you: Under Israeli law any Palestinian can be arrested without cause and imprisoned for an indefinite length of time without trial. Called “administrative detention,” this law is used to keep thousands of men and teen-aged boys in prison on the claim that they might do something.
A frustrating daily life tends to promote violence. And abused people groups are fertile ground for militias with their own agendas.
So now there is Hamas, which is supported by Iran and used for Iran’s own purposes. This is another dangerous obstacle to any solution for the Palestinians. On the other hand, giving the Palestinians a home would give Israel peace and remove Iran’s opportunity.
Maybe all we can do, especially if we are very old, is just tell what we know.
Frances, I am so happy you are well, writing, and remembering. This piece is interesting, and there are things in it I did not know. I spent time in Israel in the 1980s, and I saw similar things. But I also saw the other side. Which I think you have neglected. The Jewish story in Israel cannot be complete without the history of how the Jewish people got there to begin with. England and the West were trying to find a place for the displaced survivors of the systematic murder of 4 million Jews in Europe. Where were these people to go? The US and Europe turned them away. Russia offered “land,” but I suspect there were strings of fire attached. When the Jewish refugees arrived in Palestine, it was not a simple solution. There is more about the King David Hotel incident than you tell. More about the English treatment of the people they had invited in. None of this excuses the treatment of Palestinian people in Israel. The Settlements are horrific. The imprisonment is horrific. And the solution is at the moment impossible. But neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have turned to a collective of other nations to seek a solution. This is a miasma with many fingers of pain and crime. We are not going to get anything good there until the world is involved, and knows and acknowledges the full story, all sides.
A concise defense of Palestinians:
Leaving aside the moral arguments for ending a festering, 70-year injustice, leaving aside the comparisons to South Africa’s systemic apartheid racism, and even leaving aside the ultimate irony of obvious parallels to Nazi Germany’s millennial dreams (Godwin’s Law be damned)…
First of all, archaeological evidence suggests ancient Israelites were just another Canaanite tribe, one of many, in what is today’s Palestine. Their particular deity was Yahweh, although artifacts from this time show that these people were hardly monotheistic – neighboring gods (especially fertility goddesses) were routinely incorporated into their religious practices. As these tribes jockeyed for power, the Israelites eventually emerged as the region’s dominant tribe, more through gradual assimilation and population growth (maybe those fertility goddesses really worked) than from bloody smiting and conquest (despite the tall tales of the Old Testament’s PR priests and poets).
Israelites’ self-rule typically only lasted as long as they were overlooked or ignored by nearby superpowers. When the big boys from back East/West showed up, Jewish kingdoms quickly collapsed and their aristocrats were killed or taken away as captive (albeit well-treated) hostages. It was hardly total ethnic cleansing – peasants, mostly agrarian, were left behind.
Once the rich folk returned from exile, they discovered these peasants had gotten uppity and “moved on up” – they had become the new establishment. Just in the nick of time to re-establish the old order, these returning refugees magically, deliciously “discovered” their creation/origination myths (for which there is not a shred of evidence – see below), the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch), in the ruins of Jerusalem’s destroyed temple. What a coinky-dinky! God was mandating a return to the old pecking order and peasants were forced to shuffle back to their fields of labor. The old sheriff, the aristocracy and particularly the hereditary priesthood, was back in town, large and in charge…
Now let’s look at the science of the “we were here first” argument. Sephardic Jews (especially the Mizrahi) and Palestinian Arabs have practically identical DNA and a common culture while Ashkenazi DNA indicates divergent medieval origins in eastern Europe… Post-1948 Israel shut down DNA research several years ago because the findings were so awkward (and antithetical to their notions of ancient racial/ethnic purity).
On top of that, once modern historians began re-examining the long-held idea that the Roman Empire completely emptied Palestine in 70 AD, they soon concluded that the logistical requirements of completely emptying Palestine as nothing but fanciful myth. And not for the first time. The non-existence of ANY archaeological evidence suggests the story of a much earlier Jewish exodus from Egypt to Canaan was also a myth. If it happened at all, it could just as easily have happened along the western coasts of Yemen and Arabia.
The truth of the matter is that a Jewish diaspora had already largely
happened by the time an itinerant rabbi named Jesus got himself killed for upending the cozy relationship the Jewish muckety-mucks had worked out with their military occupiers. The majority of Jews were already living far beyond Palestine and, except for diehard zealots and anti-Roman terrorists, and a few shepherds, Jerusalem was fading in importance for religion of Judaism.
In other words, today’s Palestinians are direct descendants of those same Jews and pagans and pilgrims and assorted mystics who lived in Palestine while Jesus was among them. They didn’t go anywhere – a few clung to their Judaism, but most became Christians and later, Muslims. Notions of racial purity here are a fool’s fantasy. The blood-soaked “holy land” is the world’s genetics kitchen blender. Waves of conquerors have marauded through the Levant since the dawn of human history. Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Arabs, and even French, British, and now Ashkenazi Jews have all added their cultural and genetic flavors, often with rape and violence, to the recipe of Palestine’s people.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea.
https://mondoweiss.net/2008/09/israeli-historian-palestinians-are-biological-descendants-of-bibles-jews/
Today, too many foolish fundamentalist (a tautology?) Christians (and many Jews) are beguiled by their hypocritical leaders and Israel’s massive hasbara propaganda apparatus. As an antidote, I heartily recommend Gary Burge’s book, easily available on Amazon – Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to “Holy Land” Theology.
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Land-Testament-Challenge-Theology/dp/0801038987
Finally, a more contemporary public service announcement (a PSA) re Hamas: its creation was helped along by the same Israel now keen to vilify it. What?! Yep, it’s true…
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict
Video version: https://youtu.be/o7grSsuFSS0
I commend you Frances, and the others who’ve commented here, so far. But, no one has mentioned US policy yet, and how we, the American tax payers, directly contribute to this bloodshed. We need to look at this.
If the IDF had no bullets, the Israelis might sit down at ‘peace talks.’ The problem is actually how ‘profitable’ war is to the US military industrial complex. We are the world’s biggest arms dealers, sadly. We don’t want peace. This is an awful truth. Blaming the victims can’t fix this.
We give $10 million in aid each DAY to Israel…
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts And the surrounding countries, like Saudi Arabia, see the arms Israel has & order $60 billion worth for themselves, and so it goes.
Next month I’ll be 70. And I also have a long memory. My family spent 21 years living & working in the Middle East, half of it in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the other half in Beirut, Lebanon where my sister was shot & my father kidnapped …by Palestinians from those refugee camps. I wrote a memoir about all this The Importance of Paris, available on Amazon in audio as well as print & kindle. I lived there while trying to get Georgina Rizk to tell her story…because it was too dangerous for either of us to be in Beirut.
The former Miss Universe, who converted from Christianity to Islam, to marry her Palestinian refugee ‘freedom fighter’ husband, Arafat’s heir apparent, only to have him blown up in a Beirut car bomb when she was 6 months pregnant…
‘Hurt people hurt people.’ As the saying goes. I want to see the Palestinians have peace too. The traumatized -of all sides – are never going to put their guns down unless they find healing. Politicians manipulate their pain.
I married an Arab Jew, a Moroccan born Israeli. He left for America, after serving & being captured by the Egyptians in the 1973 war. One reason why he left Israel was because Ashkenazi Jews called him a ‘nigger’ – intra-Israeli racism is also rampant.
Don’t forget the very real prospect of civil war between secular & observant Jews in Israel.
Sorry to have gone on a bit long here but as you can see these subjects are still important to me. And I’m glad you care too.
Frances, thank you for sharing your knowledge on the very complex relationship between Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.
In my mind, the common thread is religious extremism as a tool for political greed. Don’t you think moderate Palestinians and moderate Jews want to live in peace, sharing the land’s resources? Don’t you think moderate Christians in the United States want safety, prosperity, and respect for the humanity of both groups? Unfortunately, extremists of all three religions are holding the futures of the Middle Eastern peoples.