Daily Times

The origins of Zionism can be traced to multiple factors: the appalling plight of Jews in eastern Europe where, from the end of the 19th century, pogroms against them intensified; the campaign launched by Theodore Herzl and other prominent Jews to convince the western powers that Israel would serve as an outpost of western civilisation and interests in the Middle East, and European anti-Semites, including Lord Balfour, the architect of the Balfour Plan of 1917, wanting to expel Jews from Europe. The defeat of Ottoman Turkey in World War I resulted in its Middle East provinces being placed under British and French mandates. Jewish immigration to Palestine picked up momentum. Zionist and Palestinian armed militias clashed many times.

From a Gandhian perspective, Zionism presupposed ethnic cleansing because Palestine was described as the exclusive homeland of the Jews. It stemmed ideationally from German nationalism based on the glorification of the German language and culture but excluded the German-speaking Jewish minority that had been living there for a long time. In its ugliest and deadliest form, it became Nazism. It is worth noting that originally the Nazis wanted to expel all Jews and purify Germany only for the people of German blood; it turned into genocide or a holocaust only when western nations refused to accept German Jewish refugees. Consequently, the inherent logic of German nationalism and Zionism was the same and it was famously expressed in the Zionist maxim: “A land without a people for a people without a land.”

Among international Jewry the idea of a homeland in Palestine was by no means universally popular. Orthodox Jews believed that the prayer about returning to Israel was spiritual and not political. Equally, the main Jewish trade union body, the International Jewish Labour Bund, was opposed to it. As the conflict sharpened and Jewish immigration magnified, extremist forces on both sides were strengthened. The news of the holocaust and the en masse arrival of holocaust survivors created a great humanitarian crisis. Public opinion in the west began to swing in favour of the idea of a Jewish homeland.

A UN partition plan creating a Jewish and an Arab state was passed on November 29, 1947 by the UN General Assembly: 33 for, 13 against and 10 abstentions. At that time, most of Asia and Africa were colonies. It awarded the Jewish state 52 percent and the Arab state 48 percent of Palestine. Jerusalem was to be the shared capital. The Zionists accepted this and the Arabs rejected it. From our region, both India and Pakistan voted against the partition plan. Mr Miko Peled, born in Jersusalem into a famous and influential Israeli Zionist family, explains why, in a speech available on YouTube. He informs us that at that time, there were only 500,000 Jews and 1.5 million Arabs in Palestine, so the distribution of territory was by no means fair. Moreover, 40,000 better-trained and better-armed Zionists militias terrorised innocent Palestinians into fleeing from their towns and villages.

On May 14, 1948, the Zionists announced the establishment of Israel as an independent state. Several Arab states declared war on Israel, which they lost. Israel permanently annexed more territory. Only 22 percent of Palestine, comprising Gaza, which went to Egypt, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem that went to Jordan that had emerged from nowhere as the British reward for Prince Abdullah, a son of Sharif Hussein of Makkah who, on the prompting of Lawrence of Arabia, had led the Arab revolt against Ottoman Turkey in 1916.

The great physicist Albert Einstein, an internationalist who abhorred ethnic nationalism, made a speech in April 1938 in which he said, among other things, “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.” In January 1946, he told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in response to their question as to whether refugee settlement in Palestine demanded a Jewish state: “The state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-minded and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it.” Then, in a letter to The New York Times dated December 4, 1948, he and other prominent US Jews, including Hannah Arendt, denounced Menachem Begin (later prime minister of Israel) as a fascist when he visited the US to raise money and support for his ideas. In 1952, when Einstein was offered the Israeli presidency, he politely declined.

President Roosevelt was ambivalent about the idea of an independent Jewish state. President Truman was sympathetic but hesitant; he agreed under immense pressure from US Jews to recognise Israel. At the time of the Suez crisis of 1956, the Eisenhower administration did not support the Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt. After President Eisenhower, US support shifted decisively in favour of Israel. Cold War polarisation and Arab radicals leaning towards the Soviet Union helped the pro-Israeli lobby build a formidable nework against pro-Arab voices ever being heard in US politics.

If we now move to the next stage in the conflict, the 1967 war, we learn from Mr Peled that his father, who was a general in the Israeli army, fought in that war. This resulted in a decisive defeat of the Arab armies and the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza came under Israeli occupation. His father then proposed that Israel should offer the Palestinians a separate state on the occupied territories in return for them accepting Israel. This was rejected by the hawkish Israeli establishment that, since then, has never sincerely wanted to let the Palestinians establish their independent state, asserts Mr Peled. That Palestinian armed resistance emerged in a spectacular manner in the 1960s is always present in the western media but that it was preceded by overwhelming terrorism by Zionist militias is either not mentioned or made respectable as the ‘war of independence’.

The much-trumpted peace accord that President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel wanted Mr Yasser Arafat to sign but he refused, gave him a Bantuland-type patchwork strictly under the heels of the Israeli garrison state. Therefore, when President Barack Obama recently parroted the hackneyed phrase that Israel has the right to defend itself, he was mouthing the blatant one-sided mantra of US administrations since John F Kennedy.

(To be continued)

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honourary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com