How Decisions Made In 1948 Left The Middle East In Eternal Conflict

The New York Times Magazine (Feb. 4, 2024) asked a group of Middle East specialists to assess “the long shadow of 1948 and how decisions that led to the founding of Israel left the region in a state of eternal conflict.”

Editor Emily Bazelon notes that, “For centuries, Palestine was an Ottoman province with no clear boundaries. Muslims were the majority, living alongside small Christian and Jewish communities. The Jews were almost entirely Sephardic and native to the region, with few nationalist aspirations. The relationships… began to shift in the beginning of the 20th century as a group of young socialist revolutionaries—-including founders of the future state of Israel…immigrated in waves from Russia and Eastern Europe. They believed that the only answer to… antisemitism was Zionism—-the vision of a Jewish home in the land of the Hebrew Bible.”

The League of Nations carved up the former Ottoman lands. The mandate for Palestine, written in 1920, stood out for its international commitment to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Derek Ponslar, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, points out that, “Many Zionists wanted to believe that they represented progress—-they would come with their technology and electricity…and improve everyone’s lives. Ze’ev Jabotinsky,whose vision of Zionism was the precursor to Likud, the party of Benjamin Netanyahu, had a more realistic vision. He said: ‘Don’t condescend to the Arabs. They have every reason to oppose Zionism, and they will do so until they are met with overwhelming force.’”

In Feb. 1947 the British Government announced that it wanted to end the mandate. The U.N. set up the Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to recommend a solution. At this point there were about 600,000 Jews and 1.2 million Palestinians.

Deena Dallasheh, a historian of Palestine and Israel who has taught at Columbia University, NYU and Rice University, states: “The Holocaust was a horrible massacre committed by Europeans. But I don’t think the Palestinians figure that they will have to pay for it. Yet the world sees this as an acceptable equation. Orientalist and colonial ideology were very much at the heart of thinking, that while we Europeans and the U.S. were part of this massive human tragedy, we are going to fix it at the expense of someone else. And the someone else is not important because they are Arabs. They’re Palestinians and thus constructed as not important.”

Salim Tamari, a sociologist at Birzeit University in the West Bank, points out that, “Sending the Jewish refugees to Palestine was a byproduct of European guilt, but a hypocritical kind of guilt because they did not want to bear the social and economic cost of absorbing the refugees themselves. The vast majority of Jewish refugees who came were not Zionists. They did not have a choice about where to go.”

In the view of Abigail Jacobson, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “It’s often argued against the Palestinians, how come you didn’t accept partition? But it’s important not to read history retrospectively. When you look at the demographic realities of 1947 and the division of the land, it was 55% for the Jewish state and 45% for the Palestinian state even though there were double the number of Palestinians as Jews at that point. If you were a Palestinian in 1947, would you accept this offer? One needs to remember that the Palestinian national movement was ready to accept the Jews as a minority within an Arab state.”

Emily Bazelon points out that, “At the end of 1947, as fighting escalated, Palestinians streamed across the partition borders, leaving the Jewish state. For decades, the Zionist narrative was that Palestinians left their homes at the urging of Arab governments, which promised they could return after a successful invasion. Arab scholars said this was false. Since 1988, Israeli academics have also written a lot about the flight and forced expulsion of the Nakba, as it’s called. How did it happen?”

Nadim Bawalsa, a historian of modern Palestine and Associate Editor of The Journal of Palestine Studies, provides this assessment: “In the early months of 1948, Zionist forces terrorized Palestinians. They massacred more than 100 people in the village of Deir Yassin. They destroyed Qatamon, an affluent Palestinian neighborhood near Talbiya…A couple of months ago my mother heard on the news that some of the radical Israeli settlers on the West Bank are dropping fliers in Palestinian villages and towns telling people to leave, to go to Jordan or face another Nakba. She was shaken because it reminded her of stories her parents told her of Zionists using the radio or loudspeakers to threaten Palestinians to leave Jerusalem or their fate would be similar to Deir Yassin.”

Deena Dallasheh points to the fact that, “The Israeli authorities passed a law appropriating the property of people who left, destroyed their homes so they couldn’t return and used the stones to build new settlements. This was done with complete disregard for U.N. resolution 194, which provided for the right of return in 1948 to Palestinians who wished to go back, and in order to circumvent this possibility.” *