by ALAIN GRESH
No man’s land: Palestinian women and children trucked from a village near Haifa walk to Arab lines in Tulkarem under Red Cross safe conduct PHOTO/Bettmann Getty
Fifty years after the June 1967 war, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands continues. Whatever new plan is devised will concern the entire region and the wider Muslim world.
This April a number of Republican congressmen set up an Israel Victory Caucus in Washington (1). Its co-chair Bill Johnson said: ‘We believe Israel has been victorious in the war and that this reality must be recognised for any peace to be achieved between Israel and its neighbours.’ Historian Daniel Pipes added that ‘victory means imposing your will on your enemy.’ As if in response, hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners acted on a call from their best-known member, Marwan Barghouti, to go on hunger strike, their way of saying loud and clear that the Palestinians’ resistance continues and all ideas of their destruction are illusions.
This was not the first time Israel and its allies had fantasised about the Palestinians’ capitulation or even disappearance. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-9, Moshe Sharett, the influential Zionist Labour leader and future prime minister, had prophesied a grim future for the 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes: ‘The refugees will find their place in the diaspora. Through natural selection, some will survive, others won’t. The majority will become the dregs of the human race and melt into the poorest strata of the Arab world’ (2).
The Palestinians had just suffered a heavy defeat. The territory designated for their state under the UN partition plan of 29 November 1947 had been divided in three: Israel had conquered one part (including Upper Galilee); Jordan had annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem; and the small Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, though with limited autonomy. Their institutions were in turmoil and political leadership was lacking.
This catastrophe — the Nakba in Arabic — followed another defeat, the crushing of the Arab Revolt of 1936-9, the civil and military uprising demanding British withdrawal and a halt to Jewish immigration. It was put down by British troops allied to Zionist militia, who acquired experience and UK-supplied arms that made possible their subsequent victory over the Arab armies in 1948-9.
With their people scattered in camps in neighbouring countries or under Israel’s control, the Palestinians seemed destined to disappear as Sharett had predicted, like the indigenous peoples exterminated in the conquests of North America, Australia or New Zealand. Perhaps they would be absorbed into the wider Arab world? After all, they shared the language, culture and often religion of the countries that had taken them in.
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