Dear all,
Ted makes a good point. I did not really explain why I have a problem with Armstrong’s two sentences on the state of
Here are her sentences:
In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their homeland to the Zionists, who set up the Jewish state ofIsrael there, with the support of the United Nations and the international community. The loss of Palestine became a potent symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Obviously, to summarize anything as complicated as the creation of a new country, you’ve got to leave out a lot of detail, but Armstrong’s omissions go so far as to constitute error.
Let’s take the first sentence: “In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their homeland to the Zionists, with the support of the United Nations and the international community.”
There is a limited truth to the first clause of that sentence (“In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their homeland to the Zionists”). In 1948,
But Armstrong’s use of the word “homeland” is troubling, and as soon as she adds the second clause “with the support of the United Nations and the international community” it becomes clear that she is conflating two distinct events.
Why? The U.N. and the international community weren’t the key players in 1948, except in trying to stop the fighting, so Armstrong has to be thinking of something that occurred a year earlier, in 1947. That’s when the United Nations voted to partition the then-British Palestinian territories into three regions: a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a small zone that included Jerusalem, to be administered by an international body. Armstrong fails to mention that when the U.N. sanctioned a Zionist state, they sanctioned a Palestinian one too.
That’s why I’m bothered the word “homeland”: Before the partition, the Palestinians didn’t have a homeland any more than the Jews did. Palestine, ruled by the Ottomans then colonized by the British, hadn’t belonged to the Palestinians for hundreds of years, if ever. The U.N. partition gave them recognition as a group and self-determination for the first time in their history. The political form the self-determination took was unacceptable to them and their Arab neighbors, and they rejected it. You can see their reasons for doing so, but the fact remains that had the Palestinians and the Arab League not turned down the deal and attacked
Now let’s look at the second sentence: “The loss of Palestine became a potent symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.”
Let’s start with part of the second clause, “the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.” How did the Palestinians become homeless? Not as a result of the creation of the state of
Now let’s look at whether it was the “Western powers” who “seemed to feel no qualms” about the refugees. After the war, most of the territory in the U.N.-created Palestinian state fell into the hands of
And now let’s get to the humiliation. Why did the Arabs feel it so keenly? In part because they lost a war, in part because Israeli rule seemed a continuation of colonial rule, but also in part because—as Lewis makes clear in his book The Middle East—the wartime alliance between
Look.
Best,
Judith