February 4, 2003

I FEEL it is fair to say that the success of a newspaper can be judged by how well informed its readers are. I, like others, have benefited by the Opinion column in the Mid-Ocean News and from the input of other contributors from time to time also.

I feel the problem with many opinion writers, though, is that even given the most well-informed and well-articulated articles, the average reader has a short attention span and can lose the message. If you were to ask one of your learned contributors the time of day, he would probably tell you how to make a Swiss watch!

I would therefore, sir, ask your indulgence and allow me to encapsulate the origin of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a follow-up to some other fine recent contributions to the Mid-Ocean News.

While most of the Jews left Palestine during the Roman occupation, some remained. Those who left were absorbed into the general populations of their adopted homelands and for centuries regarded themselves as products of these new cultural environments - as did their children and their children's children.

Theodor Herzl formed the Zionist movement in 1897. It was a nationalist movement, modelled on the others sweeping Europe at the time (movements that championed nationhood and national self-determination for peoples like the Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks and Slavs who at that time still lived under the rule of the polygot Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires). Zionism advocated a nationalist programme for the Jewish people. Its objective was to have Jews everywhere to return to Palestine. This gradually took place and was continued into the 20th century, as events like the anti-Semitic Dreyfus trial in France and Czarist pogroms in imperial Russia encouraged active Zionism.

Eventually Zionism spread into the US although it never won wide support among American Jews, who by and large were more interested in assimilating into US society than creating a Jewish state in Palestine, until the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became widely known after the Second World War.

Following the Holocaust the Jews needed a secure homeland and eventually the US became the facilitator, backed by US wealth and military assistance which continues to this day.

The borders of the state of Israel were agreed upon by the United Nations in May, 1948, when a partition plan was approved. The rump of what was until then called British Mandatory Palestine was earmarked for a Palestinian state. However, these territories were absorbed by Egypt and Jordan during the ensuing Israeli War of Independence.

The Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the River Jordan were administered from Cairo and Amman until the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and the Arab countries. Since then Gaza and the West Bank have been considered illegally occupied territories under international law.

Israel became the US' tame Frankenstein but much of the rest of the world must have recoiled from the monster that Washington had created. In a nutshell, the US accepted that their religion gave the Jews deed title to land, even if already occupied for centuries by others. This premise is not supportable in any court of law, in any civilised country.

It is abundantly clear, therefore, that the forced occupation of Palestine by the Jews, with the financial and military aid of the US, is both illegal and inhumane.

Had there been a gradual, legal immigration process in place that weighed the rights of the Jews against those of the indigenous Palestinian population, it would have been more acceptable. But solving one refugee situation by creating another was and is a recipe for disaster, creating an unholy stalemate.

Considering the historical animosity between Jews and Arabs, this policy of forced occupation and colonisation was and is very short-sighted.

Israel today survives only by dint of huge assistance from the US and can only maintain its security by keeping the conquered Palestinians in a virtual state of siege, de facto prisoners of the Israeli army. The harsh reprisals against Palestinian "terrorists" (who are seen as "freedom fighters" by much of the rest of the world) has not only created hatred for Israel among the Palestinians but also among up to one billion Muslims worldwide and others who sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The pioneers of terrorism in Palestine were, in fact, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organisation), a so-called resistance organisation whose commander, Menchem Wolfouitch Begin, dynamited the British administrative headquarters in Jerusalem, the King David Hotel, killing more than 100 people including many British nurses housed there.

Begin was also renowned for planning and presiding over the massacre at Deir Yassin, an Arab village on the outskirts of Jerusalem in April, 1948; hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered in the unprovoked Irgun attack, intended to incite fear among the Palestinian population and make them flee into neighbouring territory intended for the Palestinian state or neighbouring Jordan.

Begin eventually became Prime Minister and went on to share the Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat in 1978.

The moral integrity of the Israelis can best be summed up by their recent re-election of Ariel Sharon, the "Butcher of Beirut", whose dreadful record is available to all who are seriously interested in studying it.

It has been said of Sharon, that if there was an outbreak of malaria , he would kill as many mosquitoes as he could, rather than drain the swamps, which for me clearly sums up Israeli policy.

Just for the record, history shows us that the Philistines were the original inhabitants of the land historically known as Palestine. The Israelites came later - not the other way around.

BILL COOK

Paget

PS: Now we know the cause of the crisis let's focus on the care.