• Table of Contant
• Chapter 5

1. From Zionist Settlement to the Establishment of the State of Israel

The bilateral conflict between Israelis and Palestinians began with the Zionists' claim to power and the first instances of Zionist 'land grabbing' (Dan Diner) in Palestine more than one hundred years ago. Today, the conflict can only be appreciated fully within the context of the imperialism and colonialism that existed at the end of the 19th Century. The Zionist settlement project began with the construction of Rishon LeZion in 1882. Five years later, at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basle in 1897, the nationalistic-political program for a 'Judenstaat' was presented to the public. This led, amongst other things, to Theodore Herzl becoming known as the 'Father of Zionism'.

The historical-ideological basis for the expropriation of Palestinian land and the general discrimination against the Palestinians had existed long before the first instances of Zionist land grabbing. Jews lived in the land of the Philistines, which the Romans called 'Palaestina', some 2,000 years ago. Around the year 1,100 BC, the Hebrews and Israelites settled in the mountains of Palestine, but as far back as the 8th Century BC, the first Jews were deported by the Assyrians, and from 585 to 538 BC Jews were forced to live in exile in Babylon. Under the rule of the Persians, Greeks and Romans, the Jews resettled in Palestine until the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in the year 135 BC and either killed or deported its Jewish inhabitants. However, the more precarious their situation became, and the longer their exile continued, the stronger was their longing to return to Zion. This longing is expressed in the '18 Petitions Prayer' of pious Jews and in the fact that at the end of each Pessach feast, Jews taking leave of one another will say, "Next year in Jerusalem" - in Zionism, this religious wish was combined with a political program.

Western Christianity regarded the Arabs as 'strangers' in the 'Holy Land', and their 'symbolic expropriation' corresponded with the prevailing colonial attitude, namely, that one should take possession of all land that 'no one' claimed. For a man like the American President Woodrow Wilson, the return of the Jews to Palestine was like the fulfillment of the Biblical prophecies, and he zealously supported the Zionist project.

Moses Hess is considered one of the leading thinkers behind modern Zionism. Because of the latent anti-Semitism and the prevailing nationalism, he was one of the first to demand in 1862 the creation of a state for Jews in their ancestral homeland, Palestine. Hess, a contemporary of Karl Marx and a devout Jew combined socialist ideas with the ethics of Judaism, the result being liberal-minded nationalism. His idea to establish a Jewish community consisting of farmers and laborers has left its stamp on Israel's development for decades.

The call for the emancipation of the Jews was a Western European phenomenon, which, paradoxically, was to produce the evil of modern anti-Semitism. Although the roots of anti-Semitism go further back in history, one can say that modern anti-Semitism was born in approximately 1880. It expresses antipathy and hostility against Jews as Jews and fights against their political, social and legal equalization. Even a Christian convert to Judaism is still considered a Jew according to modern anti-Semitism, whose followers despise assimilated as well as non-assimilated human beings of Jewish origin and view 'the Jew' as the embodiment of all things negative.

In the East, the religious Jewish circles initially rejected emancipation. However, when it came to an emancipation movement as a result of the pogroms, it was dominated by the Jewish national element. One of the leaders of this movement, which called itself 'The Enlightenment', was Peres Smolenskin, who rejected an interweaving with Western culture due to his fear of assimilation. He founded in Vienna the newspaper Die Morgenr?te, which would soon become a leading organ of the new Zionist movement. In the publication Eternal Peace Smolenskin turned against Reform Judaism, which degraded Judaism to a confession, as well as against religious orthodoxy, which was frozen in rituals dictated by Jewish Law. For him, religion was the national link that connected the Jewish people, the people of the mind. Thus, the spiritual rebirth was for him the crucial factor.

The pogroms in Russia that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II led to emigration to 'Zion' and to Eastern European Jews flocking to Western Europe. This immigration, however, endangered the assimilation of the West European Jewry, and it soon became clear that the Jewish bourgeoisie wanted nothing to do with their 'brethren'. The Englishman Sir Edwin Montague, for example, remarked that the only thing that linked him to other Jews of other countries was the religion, saying: "I notice that there is no Jewish nation."

Leo Pinsker displayed more understanding that Moses Hess in his paper 'Auto-Emancipation', which appeared in 1882. In the paper, the physician from Odessa rejected assimilation and called for Jews to be allowed to enjoy equality of rights in their own national state, claiming that only through auto-emancipation could this goal be reached. The required land was to be purchased by a national congress as a national good. Pinsker, although insistent that a Jewish state should be established somewhere, did not originally advocate that it should be established in Israel and it was the 'lovers of Zion' who forced him to decide on Palestine, where, at the time of the first aliya, over 30,000 Jews lived among half a million Arabs.

The conservative Jews adamantly rejected the integration concept because they saw it as a 'surrendering' of their Jewishness and as being based on the premise that assimilation and equal rights were impossible to achieve. It was the publication of Theodore Herzl's Der Judenstaat - considered the Magna Carta of Zionism - which led to a turning point in political Zionism. With the publishing of the book, the Jewish elite also reacted to the dissolution of Jewish values and began 'unburying' the character of Judaism. According to Herzl, who was commissioned by the First Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897 to negotiate with the European governments on the provision of a territory for the Jewish state, only a Jewish political formation "in Palestine or anywhere else on this planet" would solve the Jewish question. The Jewish question was for Herzl a national question, which could only be satisfactorily solved by the creation of an independent state. Indeed, at the Basle assembly, the 'creation of a public-legal homestead' for the Jewish people in Palestine was decided upon, and prophetic Herzl was to subsequently write in his diary: "In Basle I founded the Jewish state." With this, the alternative of the 'assimilation' of Jews into their respective societies, which Walther Rathenau recommended in his brochure 'Listen Israel, was no longer relevant.

Herzl's strategy was now followed methodically and systematically, and Zionism no longer presented the messianic redeemer ideas using religious terminology, but used political terms instead. It was Herzl's intention to not only facilitate the continuation of the traditional Jewish culture, but also to radically renew it, which resulted in the Ultra Orthodox resisting the Zionists and accusing them of wanting to advance with their program the messianic future. Herzl paid them no attention, and anti-Semitism became an important constitutional element in his vision and that of other Zionists. Alfred Lilienthal voiced the opinion that it was the task of the Rabbinate, Jewish nationalists and local representatives to keep this prejudice alive. From the beginning, the Jewish identity was negatively determined.

The concept of Zionism was a vital component of the birth of the State of Israel, but it has to be seen within the context of Western imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, Zionism can only be appreciated fully if its victims, the Palestinians, are considered, since their tragedy began with the implementation of the Zionist plan. The national Zionist movement advanced right at the moment when Western colonialism began to divide the world into spheres of influence, and both were clearly interconnected. British imperialism in particular supported the Zionists in their desire to establish a 'homestead' in Palestine in order to consolidate its rule in the Arab area vis-à-vis the other colonial powers.

Another common concern of this alliance was the splitting of the Arab World. Although the Zionist movement and European colonialism were similar in many regards, they had one fundamental difference: it was the 'mission' of the colonialists to bring seemingly culturally underdeveloped people the blessings of Western culture, whereas the Zionists were motivated by a desire to establish a state at the expense of another people, and it was their efforts to do so that characterized the Zionist colonial project. How though was the project realized? Land was purchased through the Jewish National Fund and leased only to Jews: the concepts of 'Jewish labor' and the necessity of buying 'Jewish goods' were widely disseminated, which led to a boycott of Arab products.

Zionism resulted not only in discrimination against the Arab population, but also in a schism within the Jewish civilization, i.e., between secular nationalists and religious Jews, by introducing an ethnocentric value system to a culture that was based on monotheistic belief. This split within the Jewry led to the emergence of a Zionist movement that eventually created an ethnocentric state for the Jews. The consequence of this development, which completely renounces Jewish culture, was formulated by Asher Ginzburg under his pseudonym Ahad Ha'am. Ha'am, whose ideas are known in Israel but are not widely disseminated elsewhere, pointed to the fact that a Zionist state that is not based on the Jewish culture would become a state just like Germany or France, only it would be inhabited by Jews. Such a state existed at the time of King Herod, when the Jewish culture was rejected and those seeking to encourage it persecuted in the 'State of the Jews'. Likewise, Herzl's Judenstaat could not produce a Jewish culture because the Jews wanted to be 'like all other people'. Thus, their ideas lacked the cultural characteristics of historical Jewry. The objection of Ha'am is today reflected in the ethnocentric type of Zionism, which stresses that the Jewish people are not like other peoples. As far back as in 1913, Ha'am criticized in a letter to a settler the behavior of the Zionists vis-à-vis the Arabs: "If this is supposed to be the 'Messiah', then I hope that he will never come."

Until today, the question remains of whether Herzl and the other Zionist representatives knew about the existence of Arabs or whether they simply considered them irrelevant. Did Herzl and his supporters act in a political vacuum? Today, nobody can claim that Herzl and the others were not aware of the problem, and it now appears that cultural arrogance, ignorance and Zeitgeist were the major components of the unhappy alliance. When Max Nordau learned that Arabs live in Palestine, he reportedly said to Herzl, "There are Arabs in Palestine! I didn't know that! We are going to commit an injustice."

The political slogan of Israel Zangwill, "A land without people for people without a land," matched perfectly the expansionistic Zeitgeist of that epoch and would become one of the Zionists' historical myths that still survive today. The slogan forms the anti-thesis to the colonial approach through settlement. Ha'am wrote in 1891, after his return from Palestine, in the article 'Truth from Palestine', that the country was not empty and that one hardly saw any uncultivated land. "We were used to believing that all Arabs are wild people from the desert, ignorant like animals, who can neither see nor understand what is happening around them," said Ha'am. "To believe this is a big mistake. The Arabs - like all Semites - have a sharp brain and are very cunning." Ha'am then described how the Arabs traded and tried to take advantage of others, just like the Europeans. "Should the time ever come," continued Ha'am, "when the life of our people has developed to such a degree that we are driving out the indigenous population to a larger or bigger extent, I do not believe that they will just leave." Ha'am also realized that there was no way to avoid the conflict between Zionist colonization and the indigenous Palestinians, during which two secular kinds of nationalism were to collide in Palestine: the Jewish and Arab. This nationalism is today increasingly displaced and instrumentalized by Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism.

According to leading representatives of the Zionist movement, there were no doubts about what should happen to the indigenous population. Israel Zangwill envisaged that it would be necessary "either to chase away the indigenous tribes with the sword, as our ancestors have done, or to live with the problem posed by a large, strange population." The idea of transfer was also suggested by Herzl, who wrote in his dairy, "We will send the poor population unnoticed over the border and provide them with work in the transfer countries while we deny them any work in our own country. The wealthy population will join us. The expropriations as well as the transfer of the poor have to be pursued with delicacy and care. The owners of real estate shall believe that they cheat us and sell over value while we will not sell them back anything."

That the Zionist movement did not have pure motives in settling in Palestine was apparent in the exclamation of David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, back in the year 1937: "The land is in our eyes not the land of its current inhabitants…if one says that Eretz Israel is the land of two nations, he doubly falsifies the Zionist truth…Palestine should and must not solve the questions of both people, but only the question of one people, the Jewish people of the world." Herzl, it should be noted, never elaborated upon the historical claims of the Palestinians.

From the beginning, Zionism did not aim at the sharing of the country with the indigenous population, but questioned the Arab presence in general, which resulted in an exclusive ideology, according to which the non-Jewish population is considered superfluous. Such an ideology is very prone to integrating the idea of population transfer or deportation. In this school of thought, which is very influential until this day, the Arab-Israeli conflict has no place because the Arabs are only perceived as a minority.

There were different ideas concerning the size of the land claimed by the Zionist movement. Depending on the political opinion and the political circumstances, different borders were and still are mentioned. Max Nordau for example wanted to expand "the borders of Europe until the Euphrates." At the Versailles Peace Conference, the Zionist organization suggested obtaining the south of Lebanon, parts of Syria along the Hijja railway line to Jordan and parts of the Sinai until Al-Arish as a 'homestead'. There were even voices that called for a Palestine that resembled the one that existed during the time of David or Solomon. Herzl reportedly said to Reich Chancellor Chlodwig Duke of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst that "We demand what we need according to our population." This seems to have remained the leading motive of the Israeli settlement drive, and until now, Israel has managed to avoid clearly defining its borders or indicating its future shape.
What is Zionism? Zionism is based on three fundamental assumptions:

1. The Jews are a people and not just a religious community. Therefore, the Jewish question is a national question.
2. Anti-Semitism and the resulting persecution of Jews represent a latent danger for the Jewish people.
3. Palestine (Eretz Israel) was and remains the home of the Jewish people.

From the beginning of the Jewish colonization, the goal was to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine. For Vladimir Jabotinsky, head of the revisionist stream of Zionism, the achievement of a Jewish majority was the main goal of Zionism because the term 'Jewish state' implied a Jewish majority; Palestine would become a Jewish land at the exact moment when a Jewish majority was achieved. Jabotinsky remarked, ironically, that the Palestinians might not have had the right idea about the Zionist enterprise, yet the reactions of Palestinians on the spot revealed that they fully understood the true intentions of Zionism.

From the beginning, there was protest and resistance against the land grabbing, which continues until today. In this resistance, the reasoning of Palestinian nationalism, the origins of which Rashid Khalidi dated back to the year 1908, was evident. The peasants resisted the Zionist settlement project, which led to a mobilization of the urban middle classes. The first Palestinian newspapers, such as Al-Quds, warned of Zionism as posing a threat to the "Palestinian nation" and the "Palestinian land." The Zionist settlement would inevitably force the indigenous population out of their land.

To explain the land grabbing and the return of the Jews, the Zionist movement stuck to a uniform interpretation of history. According to this interpretation, today's Jews are the descendants of the Hebrews, although this has yet to be proved by Jewish anthropologists; the same applies to the fact that the Jews and not the Arabs are the original inhabitants of Palestine. That the Jews were illegally driven out is only partly correct, because many Jews left Palestine for economic reasons prior to the expulsion of the others by the Romans. Religious auxiliary arguments have repeatedly been used to back Zionism and give it legitimacy: arguments that for many were not ideology but reality.

Exactly how far this legend building has gone is clear in the book of Joan Peters, with the author denying the Arabs any right to exist in Palestine. The land was empty, and the Arabs falsified their genealogy - or so Peters indefensibly claims. Norman G. Finkelstein writes about this book, which has been celebrated as 'pioneering' in the United States in a similar manner to the book of Daniel J. Goldhagen, that "it represents one of the most spectacular deceptions that have ever been published on the Arab-Israeli conflict." Together with Ruth Bettina Birn, Finkelstein has only recently de-mystified Goldhagen's book, calling it a "non-book" and Goldhagen's mono-causal interpretation and analysis a complete bankruptcy.

Zionists described the Palestinians as Arabs who had only recently immigrated to Palestine due to the opportunities created by the settlers. Arabs were considered 'backward' and 'law-breakers', whose actual home was in the 22 Arab states. What the settlers actually introduced, however, were simply more profitable methods of production, compared to which the feudal Arab system was inferior. Zionist settlement brought the indigenous population the loss of its home, the destruction of its society, its culture and tradition, as well as the mass flight to refugee camps. This colonization has had disastrous consequences for the Palestinians, which last until today, bringing for the Palestinians living in Palestine chaos and destruction. Most of the Arab inhabitants lost their houses, their land, their businesses, and their capital, which resulted in the ruination of the Palestinian society. Did Zionism not lose its ethical legitimacy with the expulsion of the Palestinians in the year 1948?

Despite enormous diplomatic progress, most Jews were indifferent vis-à-vis Zionism. This attitude only changed when the national socialists used anti-Semitism as an instrument of power and killed the Jews systematically. Zionists then used this anti-Semitism for their own goals, reducing it to racism and persecution, on the basis of which they argued that the situation of the Jews was hopeless. The Jew-phobia thus became an integral component of Zionism; it alone made Jews Jews and, according to Herzl, it was the "life elixir" for the Zionist movement. Without the Jew-phobia, it is unlikely that Zionism would have remained an esoteric-national movement. According to Leo Pinsker, the Jew-phobia was a "characteristic inherent in the human nature."

Besides this viewpoint, there is also an economic interpretation. According to this, the causes of the Jew-phobia are to be found not so much in the 'race', culture or the position of Jews as a minority but in economic conditions. The rise of capitalism deepened the differences between the different classes, which led to new resentment vis-à-vis the Jews and frustrations being vented through attacks on the Jewish minority rather than those who caused the misery. The power elites now used anti-Semitism as an instrument of power in order to strengthen the petty bourgeoisie in its latent racism. Those who suffered from this were the Jews of Europe. Thus, anti-Semitism was not only essential for Zionism, which also made use of it by claiming that there could not be any emancipation outside a Jewish state; this "eternal victim image" then also became a key feature in Israel with regard to the identity of the state. Hence, Zionism has not solved any of the problems it originally wanted to eliminate.

Without the help of a great power, the Zionist movement would never have succeeded. A crucial document was the declaration of Lord Arthur James Balfour that was sent to Lord Walter Lionel Rothschild in the year 1917. A unilateral declaration of sympathy by the British Government, the declaration, which was the carte blanche for the creation of a Jewish state, had no meaning from the point of view of International Law. The declaration reads as follows:

"Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations, which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet. 'His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non?Jewish communities in Palestine, or in any other country'. I should be grateful if you would bring the declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation."

According to the opinion of the Oxford historian Elisabeth Monroe, the Balfour Declaration was "one of the biggest mistakes in our imperial history." The declaration suggested that there was a predominantly Jewish population in Palestine and some insignificant minorities; it failed to mention that the 'unimportant' Palestinian 'minority' (90 percent) had existed continuously for 1,300 years in Palestine and owned 97 percent of the land! The British Government had no right whatsoever to assume responsibility for deciding the fate of the indigenous population. Moreover, the right to self-determination that was deemed valid for other 'liberated areas' was deliberately disregarded in the case of Palestine: "In Palestine we do not even propose to take the wishes of the current inhabitants into consideration… The four great powers are obliged to Zionism. Right or wrong, good or bad, Zionism is rooted in a long tradition, in the present necessities, in future hopes, which are of greater importance than the wishes and the disadvantages of 700,000 Arabs, who currently live in this historic land" - these were the words of Lord Balfour in a memorandum to his cabinet colleagues dated 11 August 1919. This open and partly racist declaration was the peak of the overall deception. For the American President Woodrow Wilson, the support of this project was a "holy obligation."

According to the Balfour Declaration, the establishment of a Jewish homestead should not result in any disadvantages for the non-Jewish, i.e., the Arab-Palestinian community. There was no legal reasoning to deny the Palestinians, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a state next to the Jews in the British Mandate area that had existed since 1922. As the inhabitants of Palestine, who shared a common history, language and culture that was characterized by close family ties, they were the legitimate inheritors of the Ottoman Empire. Their claims were and remain the same as those of Croatians, Slovenians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians and other national minorities. In their particular case, however, the Zionist movement countered their legitimate claims.

In order to make the claims of the Palestinians appear illegitimate, the Palestinians were described by the Zionist movement as Arabs who had only recently immigrated to Palestine due to the opportunities created by the settlers. This myth has also been repeated by the present Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, who said, "Many Arabs immigrated to Palestine in response to the increase in work opportunities that were created by the Jews." Netanyahu even repeated the Zangwillian myth concerning the country without people during his state visit to Austria in September 1997. Today, the "hard, uninhabited no-man's-land" in the Middle East is a "modern, dynamic state." The truth is that Palestinians were regarded as 'law breakers' whose actual home was in one of the 22 Arab states. Consequently, they were not recognized as negotiation partners.

The behavior of the first settlers vis-à-vis the Palestinians was described by Ahad Ha'am after his return from Palestine in 1891 as follows: "They think the only language the Arabs understand is that of violence. Their behavior towards them is - to put it mildly - aggressive. They attack them without reason in their villages and are proud to humiliate them by kicking and beating them. This is the way in which they express their anger about the fact that another people lives in 'their' land and refuses to leave." Ha'am warned the Zionist movement about despising the Arabs, treating them like barbarians and ignoring their interests.

The Palestinian identity is not based on religious claims but on the rights of a clearly identifiable Palestinian entity that has obvious claims to the area in question. The negation of this national identity was to result in the rejection of the Palestinians' right to self-determination.

Martin Buber and Ernst Simon predicted that Zionism would rise and fall with its treatment of the Arabs. Such voices were vehemently rejected by the Zionists and had no influence on the development process. At the Zionist Congress held in Karlsbad in 1921, Buber - who was among the first warning voices of Zionism and Israel - called for a just bond with the Arabs, saying, "We frivolously throw away genuine and valuable sympathy if we now recognize a method, which we have thus far stigmatized as inhuman, by practicing it ourselves... Not from outside, but from within yourselves is the real, unsolvable problem spreading."

The majority of those present at the Zionist Congress expressed the desire of the Jewish people to coexist in an environment of friendship and mutual respect with the Arab population and, along with the Arabs, to turn the common homeland into a prosperous country. The Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin demanded that Jews and Arabs should live on an equal footing side by side, negating any claim to authority. How insincere he was became clear when he repeatedly voiced his support for a closed Jewish economy, voting against the employment of Arab laborers in Jewish enterprises and pleading for a boycott of Arab products and for the systematic purchase of Arab land, which deprived the Arabs of their livelihood.

Initially, the Zionist movement was eager to embellish its colonial goals with rhetoric. Chaim Weizman declared in 1918 in Jaffa that Jews wanted to work shoulder to shoulder with the Arabs for the sake of prosperity in Palestine, and he assured Palestinian and Syrian leaders in Cairo that Zionism was not seeking power in the country. Moreover, before the Peel Commission began its work in Palestine in November 1936, as ordered by His Majesty the King of England, Weizman demonstrated a readiness to cooperate and referred to the Balfour Declaration, saying that he and his associates were aware that the non-Jewish population in Palestine should not be suppressed and that the declaration was a kind of guarantee for them. However, he demanded at the same time a state that should be as Jewish as England was English: a goal that was persistently pursued. Weizman put it this way before the Peel Commission: "We are a stubborn people and a people with a long memory. We never forget… We have never forgotten Palestine. And the steadfastness that has maintained the Jews throughput the centuries and through a long chain of inhuman sufferings is mainly thanks to this psychological attachment to Palestine."

Neither the Jewish settlers nor the British occupying power made a serious attempt to reach an agreeable solution with the Arabs or to acknowledge their rights vis-à-vis a state of their own. That their interests should have been considered is noted in the following letter, sent by the author Hans Kohn to Martin Buber in 1929: "We have been in Palestine for 12 years now and have not once seriously tried to secure the acceptance of the people or to negotiate with the people that live in the country. We have relied exclusively on the military power of Great Britain. We have set goals that inevitably and in themselves had to lead to conflicts with the Arabs and about which we should say that they are reason - and justified reason - for a national uprising against us."

Indeed, a national uprising soon took place. During the first pogrom of 1929 in Hebron, almost all of the Jews living there were killed. Several years later, in the summer of 1936, widespread fear on the part of the Arabs concerning the impressive and equally frightening development of the Jewish Yishuv (pre-state settlement of Palestine) and the realization that the colonization of the country would take place solely at their expense resulted in the Arab revolt against both the Mandate power and the Zionist settlers, prior to which numerous, small incidents resulting in causalities occurred. Thus, Arab anti-Zionism manifested itself violently for the first time in 1936. A significant contributor to this later was the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husseini, who had been appointed by an English Zionist: the first High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel.

The attitude of the Arab population of Palestine was not anti-Zionist from the very beginning. In 1908, all religious communities in Palestine had welcomed the decree of the Moslem Government, which allowed for greater political and religious development possibilities, and on 9 August of that year, all religious communities opened their holy sites to members of other faiths.

Eventually, the violent confrontations between Jewish combat units and the indigenous Palestinian population and the struggle against the British Mandate authority both got out of control, resulting in the willingness of the British to terminate their mandate, assigned by the League of Nations. The Jewish units fighting in Palestine - Haganah, Etzel (Irgun Zvai Leumi) and Lehi (Stern Gang) - were uniquely famous for the acts of terror they committed against the Palestinians and the British. Two Prime Ministers of Israel were once wanted by the mandate power, which had issued arrest warrants for the two Jewish 'terrorists'. Examples of their handiwork included the blowing up of a part of the King David Hotel, seat of the Palestine Government, and the massacre committed in the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1998, in which 250 Arab men, women and children were murdered; the Arabs took their revenge only a few days later when they killed 77 doctors, nurses and scientists on their way to Hadassah Hospital. Menachem Begin, head of operations during the Deir Yassin massacre and Prime Minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983, voiced the opinion that the massacre was not only "justified" but that without the "victory" of Deir Yassin "a state of Israel would never have come into existence."

In February 1947, when Palestine was on the edge of a civil war, the British turned to the United Nations. With this move, the stage was set for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which provided for the division of Palestine between Arabs, who possessed 90 percent of the land, and Jews. At the time, 1,365,000 Arabs and 710,000 Jews lived in Palestine, and the numbers suggest that even without the Holocaust, which undoubtedly resulted in a lot of sympathy for the Zionist struggle, a Jewish state would have emerged, although the extent of the Nazi crimes and the refugee movement from Europe undoubtedly accelerated the rate at which it was born. However, as Michael Wolffsohn stresses, the establishment of Israel was mainly due to the "political, economic, social and military achievements of its founders." The massive British and American support should of course not be ignored.

The fight of the Jewish underground organizations was both an anti-colonial war against the British and a renewed colonial attempt to establish a state on the territory of another people against its will. The entire Arab World rejected the Partition Plan for understandable reasons, such as the fact that it questioned the right of the Palestinians to the land in its entirety and promised to result in inestimable losses with regard to rights, property and political and social institutions. The Arabs regarded the Jewish claims to Palestine as illegal usurpation, a form of colonialism which denied the native population its right to a national state. As reported by Nahum Goldmann, even David Ben Gurion seemed to understand this: "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign such an agreement with Israel. That is absolutely normal: we have taken their land. Sure, God has promised it to us but why should they be bothered by this? Our God is not theirs… They only see one thing: we came and stole their land. Why should they accept this?" The Palestinians, it should be noted, also feared that the Partition Plan would transform the 'Jewish problem' and bring Western European anti-Semitism to the Near East.

In view of the military operations, the UN General Assembly withdrew the Partition Plan less than six months after passing it and suggested an alternative proposal, which included the call for a temporary trusteeship for the undivided Palestine. The Arabs accepted the proposal while the Zionists rejected it vigorously and - while the assembly called for a special session in order to reconsider the Partition Plan - decided to take care of the matter themselves. As the British ended their mandate, the Zionists occupied Palestine, city by city, occupying, whilst pursuing their goal, many more parts than had been earmarked for the Jewish state. The terrified Arab population either fled in panic or was expelled by force, and by mid-May 1948, some 300,000 Arabs had left the country without even one single Arab soldier from the neighboring countries having entered Palestine.

The result of the Zionist occupation was the creation of three separate areas: Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Historical Jerusalem came under Arab rule while the western part of the city became part of the Jewish state and thus, Palestine was not divided according to the UN plan. When David Ben Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, only six percent of Palestine was actually Jewish property; yet, following the war-like confrontations, Israel possessed 77 percent of the total area of Palestine; 21 percent more than the UN Partition Plan, which the Zionists had accepted, had allocated to the Jewish state. Then and afterwards, the Zionists argued that the Palestinian Arabs had forfeited their right to any part of Palestine because they had refused to be content with half of the country. Meanwhile, diplomatic recognition and massive economic support contributed to the legitimization of the new state.

In the summer of 1949, a peace conference took place in Lausanne, initiated by the Palestine Conciliation Commission. The Arab states and the Palestinian representatives wished to discuss the UN resolution as a basis for peace negotiations, but the idea was rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion. Israel's then Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett saw in this conference an opportunity for peace, but Ben Gurion completely rejected this notion. In contrast to Ben Gurion, Sharett was willing to return the territories occupied by Israel during the War of 1948 that belonged to the Palestinians in accordance with the UN Partition Plan, and he was prepared to consider the issues of the return of the refugees and the internationalization of the Holy Places. However, peace was not Ben Gurion's prime goal. In 1954, when Sharett became Prime Minister for a short time, he held secret talks on solving the Question of Palestine with the Egyptian Government, although the Arab side was not ready to conduct the talks publicly and in Israel the de facto power was still in the hands of Ben Gurion, "who did not seek peace with the Arabs."

In recent times, the establishment of the State of Israel has been the subject of a great deal of controversy. Since the opening of the official archives in the 1980s, younger historians have increasingly questioned the official historical doctrine concerning the nascent state that was instituted between 1948-1952. Besides Benny Morris, Simcha Flapan in particular has questioned the official Israeli interpretation of history, maintaining that 'Plan D' was not a political plan for the expulsion of the Arabs and expressing the view that they were expelled for security reasons only. Morris eventually had to admit that since April 1948 there had been "clear signs pointing to a policy of expulsion on national and local levels." With the help of documents from the archives, Simcha Flapan, Ilan Pappe and Norman G. Finkelstein were able to prove that a deliberately planned expulsion of the Palestinians had indeed taken place.

Although it appears that Ben Gurion never issued an explicit expulsion order, many of his documented statements leave no doubt about his real intentions. For example, asked by Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin about what should happen to the inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle (50,000-70,000), Ben Gurion reportedly answered: "Expel them!" Lieutenant-Colonel Rabin immediately signed an order that read as follows: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly irrespective of their age. The order is to be executed instantly"…which is exactly what happened. This excerpt concerning the expulsion order was removed from the memoirs of Ben Gurion, as reported by the New York Times on 23 October 1979. Prior to the final attack on the Galilee, Ben Gurion declared: "When the fighting in the north resumes, the Galilee will be cleansed and empty of Arabs." That Ben Gurion had actually given this particular 'expulsion order' was confirmed by Israel Eldad, one of the most articulate Israeli rightwing ideologists, in the daily Yediot Aharonot on 10 February 1995: the reference to 'cleansing' appeared several times with regard to both the Galilee, Lydda and Ramle. Moreover, Ben Gurion did not concede a single square meter that was in the hands of the Israelis, regardless of whether it had been allocated by the United Nations or the United States. Ben Gurion is further said to have told Musa Alami in 1937: "Of course we want peace, but we came here not because of peace but because of Zionism."

In exactly the same spirit, the following arguments have been presented repeatedly by the official Israeli side:

· The Zionist movement's acceptance of the UN Partition Plan of November 1947 was a fundamental compromise, according to which the Zionist Jews relinquished their dream of a Jewish state in all of Palestine and recognized the Palestinians' claim to an independent state. Israel was ready to make such a sacrifice because it was the precondition for the peaceful implementation, involving Palestinian cooperation, of the UN resolution.

Flapan maintains, however, that the Zionists' agreement to the Partition Plan was only a tactical concession within the framework of an unchanged overall strategy. On the one hand, it aimed at the creation of an independent state for the Palestinians; therefore, Ben Gurion concluded a secret agreement with King Abdallah of Transjordan, who thought the annexation of the area earmarked for the Palestinians would be a first step towards realizing his reign over the Greater Syria region. On the other hand, the strategy aimed at extending the territory earmarked by the UN for the Jewish state.

· The Arab Palestinians adamantly rejected the partition of Palestine and followed the call of the Mufti of Jerusalem to declare total war on the Jewish state; this forced the Jews to look for a military solution.

Flapan insists that it is only partly true that the Arab Palestinians rejected the partition of Palestine. The Mufti did indeed fight the Partition Plan but initially, the Palestinians did not follow his call for a 'holy jihad' against Israel. On the contrary, many Palestinian notables and groups were keen to reach a modus vivendi with the new state. It was only the absolute resistance of Ben Gurion to the creation of a Palestinian state that drove the Palestinians to the side of the Mufti. The number of fighters was not very high and they were clearly inferior to the Haganah troops in terms of numbers, equipment and training. At the beginning of 1948, the Mufti had asked all Arab states for weapons and money but in vain.

· Before and after the foundation of the State of Israel the Palestinians followed the call of the Arab leadership to leave the country temporarily and to return at a later stage with the victorious armies. The Jewish leadership tried its best to make them stay but was unsuccessful.

Flapan argues that the Israeli politicians expelled the Palestinians from their villages and towns. While Morris mentions security reasons, Flapan and Finkelstein explain that the transfer was the result of Zionist ideology, saying the aim of the Zionist movement was to create a 'Jewish state', which necessitated the expulsion of the original inhabitants. As far back as in 1938, Ben Gurion had said at a meeting of his party, "I am for the forced evacuation. I cannot see anything immoral in this."

· All Arab states united on 15 May 1948 in order to enter Palestine, to destroy the newly established State of Israel and expel its Jewish inhabitants.

First and foremost, the Arab states wanted to prevent the reaching of the accord between the provisional Jewish government and King Abdallah, and they only entered Palestine to help their Arab friends after the proclamation of the State of Israel and the termination of the British Mandate. It was never their intention to destroy Israel. For example, the Jordanian Government ordered the general who led the Jordanian troops not to enter Jewish territory.

· The entry of the Arabs - in violation of the UN Partition Resolution - made the War of 1948 inevitable.

According to Flapan, the war between Israel and the Arabs was inevitable per se. The Arabs had agreed to a last minute American proposal calling for a three-month cease-fire on condition that Israel would meanwhile postpone its declaration of independence. The provisional Israeli government voted with six to four against the American proposal.

· The tiny Israel faced the attack of the Arab forces like David had once faced the giant Goliath: a people that was far inferior in numbers and badly armed was at the risk of being crushed by an overwhelming military machine.

According to Flapan, the comparison with David and Goliath is invalid. Ben Gurion admitted that the actual war of 'self-defense' lasted only four weeks, until the cease-fire of 11 June. Afterwards, large deliveries of weapons arrived in Israel, and the already better trained and experienced Israeli troops thus enjoyed technological superiority by land, air and sea.

· Israel has always stretched out its hands for peace, but no Arab leader has ever recognized its right to exist; thus, there was nobody with whom peace talks could have been conducted.

This is also not correct. In the years between the end of World War II and 1952, Israel rejected numerous proposals submitted by Arab states and neutral mediators that could have led to a peaceful solution.

This official interpretation of history forms the essence of the Israelis' understanding of their state. Until today, the notion of an Israel that faces an awesome enemy is still spread, in particular by the Netanyahu government, which never fails to use this foregone conclusion to full advantage. All activities of Israel are portrayed as measures of self-defense of a people struggling for its very survival. With this, Israel automatically has right on its side, regardless of the extent to which its actions violate International Law.

By the time of the 1949 cease-fire, 750,000 Palestinians had fled. The UN passed various resolutions pertaining to the return of the refugees, but Israel refused to allow them to return, and until today, they are living in refugee camps throughout Jordan, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and elsewhere in the Diaspora. Of the 550 abandoned Palestinian villages, including their cemeteries, only 121 were not totally destroyed, the goal of the Israelis being at the time to wipe out any evidence of a Palestinian history. Jewish immigrants were settled in the remaining villages, where 200,000 of their number found apartments waiting for them. In the collective memory of the Palestinians, these events are manifested as the 'Catastrophe' (An-Naqba).

The tension in the country remained after Israel's victory in the War of 'Independence', due, in part, to the proclamation of martial law on 21 October 1948, which permitted the military administration to control and restrict the freedom of movement of the Palestinians in central Israel. No Palestinian was able to leave his place of residence or district without the prior permission of the military governor, and Galilee alone was divided into more than 50 military districts. The military regime proved to be a very efficient control instrument because it split the Palestinian community. Moreover, Israel enforced the emergency regulations of the British Mandate period, which revoked the rights of the Palestinians. The Israeli Palestinians soon realized that they were second-class citizens.

The 'Absentee Property Law' of 1950 had even more devastating effects than the military regime, as it declared the Palestinians 'absentees' whose property would be administered by the Custodian of Absentee Property before being made private Jewish property or State property. This law permitted the State of Israel to confiscate land from Palestinians who had left Israel, as well as from those who had stayed. "He was present, because he was there, and absent, because he was not there." It has been estimated that according to this law, which reads like something out of a science-fiction paperback, half of the Palestinian population in Israel fell under the category of 'absentee'.

By 1953, some 370 Jewish settlements had been built, 350 on land declared as abandoned, and by 1965, the Absentee Property Law and various other laws had facilitated the confiscation by the Israeli Government of almost three million acres of Palestinian land, 60 percent of which belonged to 'absentees'. Some Palestinians were offered compensation according to the 1953 law regulating land purchases, but the payments were so low that most refused them.

The passing of the Law of Return of 1950 and the Law of Nationality of 1952 likewise contributed to the discriminatory manner in which the Palestinians were treated. The disintegration of the Palestinian entity further advanced with the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1949; meanwhile, the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian administration.

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