5/5: Palestinians weren’t a government in 1947: two points. Firstly, under the relatively decentralized system of administration during Ottoman times, local peoples governed their local affairs and were generally left to be as long as they pledged allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople. Local elites were co-opted into the Ottoman nob…
5/5: Palestinians weren’t a government in 1947: two points. Firstly, under the relatively decentralized system of administration during Ottoman times, local peoples governed their local affairs and were generally left to be as long as they pledged allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople. Local elites were co-opted into the Ottoman nobility in what was essentially system of indirect rule. Secondly, by contrast, post WWI, early Zionists successfully lobbied the British to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and used their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The use of the word “establishment” itself in the Balfour Declaration is very telling – for it recognises that massive social engineering would be required to convert a land that was 94 percent Palestinian at the time into a Jewish state. Naturally therefore, mandatory rule was designed to deny and exclude Palestinians from the polity in their homeland. Unlike all of the other British and French mandates, the Palestinians were never allowed to formally establish a quasi-governmental body representing its interests and aspirations because the British denied it to them. Although organisations such as the AHC which emerged when Palestinian elites organised themselves in the 1920s, they nonetheless remained outside the system unlike their Zionist counterparts. Various articles in the mandate for Palestine clearly evidence this. Article 2 for example only allowed for the creation of self-governing institutions for the Jewish immigrants, not the Palestinians. Article 4 gave the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status thereby according wide-ranging powers to the Zionists to develop economic and social policy as well as acquiring international diplomatic status. Palestinians were not allowed to create their own institutions, nor were joint Jewish-Palestinian bodies ever permitted. Articles 6 and 7 gave the Jewish Agency full control over immigration and citizenship – such that European Jews immigrating could immediately acquire nationality while a Palestinian who may have been abroad prior to 1917 (for higher education let’s say) was stripped of their citizenship and couldn’t return home to their families. So yes, they didn’t have a government in 1947 because political participation was systematically denied to them. But again, deliberate political and social engineering to deny Palestinians a voice at the table doesn’t change the overarching fact that Mandatory Palestine was nonetheless their “homeland.” To tie it back to the comments I made at the start of this response, this also explains why the AHC didn’t have a seat at the table in negotiating the terms of resolution 181 with the Zionists and other UN members.
Arabs voluntarily fled, or encouraged by their leaders: this is “lying by omission.” Arabs fled out of fear, in particular after the Deir Yassin Massacre in April 1948. As the news of the brutality of the Zionist militias spread like wildfire, terrified Palestinians fled their homes. This could hardly be described as “voluntary.” As far as the Arab leaders were concerned, many of them preferred an orderly withdrawal to a chaotic and bloody one to save lives. The Zionist claim of “voluntary transfer” is completely illogical. Why would anyone flee from their homes unless they’re threatened with brutal violence? As I’ve already explained above, it was a culmination of forcible expulsions + massacres that eventually compelled the Arab armies to attack Israel and prevent the refugee crisis spilling over into their borders from becoming unmanageable. To reiterate, they were reluctant to attack because they were significantly weaker than the Zionist militias, who, under the tutelage of their British patrons during the Mandate, had become a formidable fighting force that were instrumental in putting down Palestinian rebellions in the mid 1930s and had gained fighting experience in North Africa during the Second World War.
Palestinians attacked Israelis in 1948, 2.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel so no ethnic cleansing: Sure, but again there is a simple explanation. Most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel originate from the North – particularly the Galilee. By the time the Zionist militias got to this region, news of the forcible expulsions and massacres reached them, and they organised themselves and resisted. Survival, keeping your home, are remarkably strong incentives to fight back! Resultantly, there were about 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinians that weren’t successfully expelled. Historians such as Benny Morris say the job to entirely clear the land out of its inhabitants was only partially completed by the time the armistice agreements were signed in 1949. The ~2 million remaining within the Green Line today are the descendants of those who successfully managed to resist their expulsion (this population has grown naturally, just like the Israeli Jewish population did from about 1.4 million in the early 1950s to 7.5 million today). It is absurd to argue that clearing out ~750,000 Palestinians, or ~75% of the Palestinian population from what became Green Line Israel in less than two years was not ethnic cleansing because less than ~25% of them managed to remain behind. It’s the overarching principle that’s truly informative of the intent – i.e. the only way that a Jewish majority state could have been formed in a land that just 50 years earlier was 95 percent Palestinian is ethnic cleansing. And if the intent was never forcible expulsion, then why did the UN resoundingly pass resolution 194? Why haven’t the Palestinians languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring countries been allowed to return to their homes? The reason is simple. It comes down to maintaining the demographic reality that was engineered in 1947-49. As a consequence of their resistance, Palestinian citizens of Israel were subjected to military rule until 1966 to pacify and subjugate them. This had the added benefit of fine tuning the system of military occupation that would be required to bring hundreds of thousands more Palestinians under direct Israeli control after capturing the West Bank and Gaza following the June 1967 war.
More on Gaza: to further debunk your attempt to invent the map and the history in the Mandatory period, Egypt, it was already under British control since the late 19th century (i.e. before the Mandate) and at no point before the 1948 war was Gaza ever under its jurisdiction. In fact, during Ottoman times, about a sixth of the Sinai in the north (immediately south of what is today the Gaza strip and the Negev desert) was part of the Levant province. Israel preferred for Gaza to be taken by the Egyptians in 1948 because over 200,000 Palestinian refugees fled there after being driven out of what became south and central Israel. This is completely understandable. A nascent Jewish state did not want to govern, or directly face possible resistance on two fronts because they already had the Palestinians of the North (in the Galilee in particular) to contend with. This wasn’t any different from the logic behind Ben-Gurion’s dealings with the Jordanians in 1948 re: the West Bank.
5/5: Palestinians weren’t a government in 1947: two points. Firstly, under the relatively decentralized system of administration during Ottoman times, local peoples governed their local affairs and were generally left to be as long as they pledged allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople. Local elites were co-opted into the Ottoman nobility in what was essentially system of indirect rule. Secondly, by contrast, post WWI, early Zionists successfully lobbied the British to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and used their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The use of the word “establishment” itself in the Balfour Declaration is very telling – for it recognises that massive social engineering would be required to convert a land that was 94 percent Palestinian at the time into a Jewish state. Naturally therefore, mandatory rule was designed to deny and exclude Palestinians from the polity in their homeland. Unlike all of the other British and French mandates, the Palestinians were never allowed to formally establish a quasi-governmental body representing its interests and aspirations because the British denied it to them. Although organisations such as the AHC which emerged when Palestinian elites organised themselves in the 1920s, they nonetheless remained outside the system unlike their Zionist counterparts. Various articles in the mandate for Palestine clearly evidence this. Article 2 for example only allowed for the creation of self-governing institutions for the Jewish immigrants, not the Palestinians. Article 4 gave the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status thereby according wide-ranging powers to the Zionists to develop economic and social policy as well as acquiring international diplomatic status. Palestinians were not allowed to create their own institutions, nor were joint Jewish-Palestinian bodies ever permitted. Articles 6 and 7 gave the Jewish Agency full control over immigration and citizenship – such that European Jews immigrating could immediately acquire nationality while a Palestinian who may have been abroad prior to 1917 (for higher education let’s say) was stripped of their citizenship and couldn’t return home to their families. So yes, they didn’t have a government in 1947 because political participation was systematically denied to them. But again, deliberate political and social engineering to deny Palestinians a voice at the table doesn’t change the overarching fact that Mandatory Palestine was nonetheless their “homeland.” To tie it back to the comments I made at the start of this response, this also explains why the AHC didn’t have a seat at the table in negotiating the terms of resolution 181 with the Zionists and other UN members.
Arabs voluntarily fled, or encouraged by their leaders: this is “lying by omission.” Arabs fled out of fear, in particular after the Deir Yassin Massacre in April 1948. As the news of the brutality of the Zionist militias spread like wildfire, terrified Palestinians fled their homes. This could hardly be described as “voluntary.” As far as the Arab leaders were concerned, many of them preferred an orderly withdrawal to a chaotic and bloody one to save lives. The Zionist claim of “voluntary transfer” is completely illogical. Why would anyone flee from their homes unless they’re threatened with brutal violence? As I’ve already explained above, it was a culmination of forcible expulsions + massacres that eventually compelled the Arab armies to attack Israel and prevent the refugee crisis spilling over into their borders from becoming unmanageable. To reiterate, they were reluctant to attack because they were significantly weaker than the Zionist militias, who, under the tutelage of their British patrons during the Mandate, had become a formidable fighting force that were instrumental in putting down Palestinian rebellions in the mid 1930s and had gained fighting experience in North Africa during the Second World War.
Palestinians attacked Israelis in 1948, 2.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel so no ethnic cleansing: Sure, but again there is a simple explanation. Most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel originate from the North – particularly the Galilee. By the time the Zionist militias got to this region, news of the forcible expulsions and massacres reached them, and they organised themselves and resisted. Survival, keeping your home, are remarkably strong incentives to fight back! Resultantly, there were about 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinians that weren’t successfully expelled. Historians such as Benny Morris say the job to entirely clear the land out of its inhabitants was only partially completed by the time the armistice agreements were signed in 1949. The ~2 million remaining within the Green Line today are the descendants of those who successfully managed to resist their expulsion (this population has grown naturally, just like the Israeli Jewish population did from about 1.4 million in the early 1950s to 7.5 million today). It is absurd to argue that clearing out ~750,000 Palestinians, or ~75% of the Palestinian population from what became Green Line Israel in less than two years was not ethnic cleansing because less than ~25% of them managed to remain behind. It’s the overarching principle that’s truly informative of the intent – i.e. the only way that a Jewish majority state could have been formed in a land that just 50 years earlier was 95 percent Palestinian is ethnic cleansing. And if the intent was never forcible expulsion, then why did the UN resoundingly pass resolution 194? Why haven’t the Palestinians languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring countries been allowed to return to their homes? The reason is simple. It comes down to maintaining the demographic reality that was engineered in 1947-49. As a consequence of their resistance, Palestinian citizens of Israel were subjected to military rule until 1966 to pacify and subjugate them. This had the added benefit of fine tuning the system of military occupation that would be required to bring hundreds of thousands more Palestinians under direct Israeli control after capturing the West Bank and Gaza following the June 1967 war.
More on Gaza: to further debunk your attempt to invent the map and the history in the Mandatory period, Egypt, it was already under British control since the late 19th century (i.e. before the Mandate) and at no point before the 1948 war was Gaza ever under its jurisdiction. In fact, during Ottoman times, about a sixth of the Sinai in the north (immediately south of what is today the Gaza strip and the Negev desert) was part of the Levant province. Israel preferred for Gaza to be taken by the Egyptians in 1948 because over 200,000 Palestinian refugees fled there after being driven out of what became south and central Israel. This is completely understandable. A nascent Jewish state did not want to govern, or directly face possible resistance on two fronts because they already had the Palestinians of the North (in the Galilee in particular) to contend with. This wasn’t any different from the logic behind Ben-Gurion’s dealings with the Jordanians in 1948 re: the West Bank.