Peace and Palestine

November 17, 2004

Much of the misunderstanding and misinformation of the Middle East issues stem from the warped view of events that comprise biblical history and which to millions around the world is synonymous with truth.

That assumption, that the Bible is unadulterated fact, is the underlying, remote cause of much of the pain, humiliation and bloody massacres which the world today is forced to countenance in the Middle East.

All the Christians, whether old-school or born-again, all these students of the Bible, who study only the Bible as the fountain of knowledge, who learn lines of the Bible by heart, all these pontificating preachers who are masters of developing one-liners from the Bible into three and four-hour discourses, punctuated with sporadic shouts of "Amen," will have you believe and accept that the Jews, the followers of Judaism, are the chosen people and that Jerusalem and Palestine belong to them.

Some even say, and they quote the Bible, that the Jews were scattered throughout the world because they did not adhere to certain dictates of the Lord, one such dictate being that they, the Jews, should have "killed out" all of their enemies and destroyed all of their property and possessions including their animals.

And at the end of the day, despite this scattering, it is predicted in the Bible that the Jews, after much travail and torment, will be reunited within their Holy Land.

In their view this is the evidence, garnered from the Bible itself, which justifies the horrible fate that has befallen the people who actually inhabited Palestine for the past hundreds and hundreds of years.

It is historical distortion to suggest that the resettling of Palestine by the Jews at the expense of authentic Palestinians is the self-determination and re-edification of a people because there was no country called Israel before 1948; there was though a country called Palestine.

It was not Arab people who persecuted European followers of Judaism. It was their European kith and kin, the German Nazis, who inflicted the holocaust on the Jews during the Second World War by making them scapegoats and targeting them for the defeat of Germany in the First World War.

Why then give the Jews in 1948 a piece of Palestine rather than a piece of Germany, or for that matter a piece of anywhere in Europe to which they belonged for many centuries?

As a matter of fact, when the matter was first raised after 1939, the British initially considered giving the Jews a piece of Kenya and even a piece of Argentina. But Palestine provided the easier justification given the prophecies of the Bible.

It mattered not that at the time of the writing of the Bible the Jews relatively could only have been just a handful of a particular desert-inhabiting sect as compared to the millions emerging out of Europe in modern times.

And they were never satisfied with the piece of Palestine that was entrusted to them by colonial Britain. A fact that gave rise to rabid Zionism.

The British approach was that the settling of Jews in Palestine should be gradual and be spread over time. The British limited how many Jews could be brought in at any one time.

The Zionists, Jews who desired immediate and total takeover of Palestine and the expulsion of the Arabs, fought against any limiting or piecemeal measure.

was even an incident in which they blew up a ship full of intended European Jewish settlers in the Port of Haifa, sacrificing their own in order to get the British to remove the limitations.

The Zionists fought the Palestinians street by street, house by house, claiming more and more land as they pushed the Palestinians out completely into refugee camps in Lebanon and all over the bordering Arab States.

The Jews in that process became masters of urban guerilla warfare and terrorist actions. All their past and present celebrated leaders are overt or closet Zionists, many of whom have tarnished histories and were noted in the early days for terrorist actions such as hiding in garbage cans and shooting Palestinian Arabs in the back.

They do not wish any peace. They wish only for Israel to exist and for that to happen there can be no Palestine.

One Palestinian whom I met in Montreal in 1967 informed me that his family on some ten occasions was awaken at night, thrown out onto the street and their home bulldozed. After that they could exist nowhere but in the refugee camps.

The leaders of Israel pay lip service to the idea of an independent State of Palestine only so that they can appease world opinion or hoodwink the rest of world to buy time until they can succeed in grinding Palestinian resistance into nothing.

The Palestinians on the other hand have learnt much from Israelis. They are powerless and virtually defenceless by comparison to the Israelis, who are armed with modern equipment provided largely by the US.

So the Palestinians employ terrorism to fight terrorism. It is difficult to make moral judgments in this context when both sides do the same thing with the only difference being that one has the power to define and the other has no such clout.

So Abu Ammar, Yasser Arafat, who embodied the aspirations of Palestinian resistance for over 40 years, is now dead. The request that he be buried in Jerusalem was met with the retort: "Bury the dog in Gaza, Jerusalem is for kings!" Now is that an indication that Israel desires peace?

And of course from the other side comes the expected, even programmed reply: "We will sacrifice our blood and souls to redeem you, Abu Ammar. You will stay in our hearts, leader of the revolution and symbol of the resistance."

There is only one way out. When the United Nations came into existence after the war, the intelligent policy that was declared was that all borders and boundaries as existed would be recognised. That is the correct position or there will never be peace.

The world cannot tolerate these old claims, most times based on sheer hysteria and emotion. So we have to start from where we are at the moment. Let Israel revert to its borders before the mad annexation after the Seven-Days War of 1967. Let a free Palestine come into being. And Jerusalem can be shared.

In fact at one time Jerusalem had four quarters: the Christian Quarter, the Muslim Quarter, The Jewish Quarter, and the American Quarter. Imagine that !