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June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
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Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
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David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
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Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
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John Borowski
Stossel
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Chris Floyd
Southern
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David Martin
Of Lies
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James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
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Jacob Levich
The War
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Mark Weisbrot
What
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Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
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Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
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Ben White
Is It Possible
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Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
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Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
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Ron Sullivan
Law
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The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
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Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
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David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
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Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
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June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
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Bush's Weird
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Democracy
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Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
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June 12, 2002
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Dirty Bombs, Blowback
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Dave Marsh
Shelley
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Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
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Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
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in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
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George Sunderland
"Send
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June 28/30, 2002
The Palestinian Saga
Seething With
Rage
by N.D. Jayaprakash
While there is constant harping about micro-violence
(suicide bombings) and castigation of the Palestinians for the
same, the world at large has practically turned a blind eye to
the gross macro-violence (State terror) being perpetrated on
them by Israel with the unstinting support of the United States
of America. That Israel has been a crypto-fascist state has not
been widely recognized as yet despite the fact that there is
no shortage of information on this count. Umpteen UN reports
have brought to light the nightmarish existence of the Palestinians
under Israeli occupation. Aren't such reports ample proof of
the fascistic nature of the occupying forces? All those who refrain
from acknowledging this startling truth only become accomplices
to the ongoing crime. The need of the hour is to take action
to end the fascistic terror being perpetrated by the Israelis.
The unrelenting struggle that the Palestinians are waging against
Israeli occupation and for national liberation deserves far more
moral and material support from the rest of the world than what
has been forthcoming.
Of course there have been many concerned
people across the globe who have spoken up forthrightly for the
cause of the Palestinians. None other than Mahatma Gandhi was
one of the foremost amongst them. Others who were not initially
opposed to the creation of Israel soon realized their folly and
began to alert the world to the growing fascist tendencies there.
The noted scientist and humanist, Albert Einstein, tried to do
precisely that. Isn't it time the world listened to the appeals
of Gandhi and Einstein?
Crux of the
Problem
It may not take too much time and effort
to understand that it is the call for a Jewish national home
in Palestine, the subsequent immigration of Jews into that territory
and the resulting coercive displacement of the Palestinian population
from their land that has resulted in the Palestinian-Israeli
imbroglio. In this context it would be appropriate to recall
what Mahatma Gandhi had to say regarding the matter. In an article
in his journal, the Harijan, on 26.11.1938 he wrote:
"The cry for the national home for
the Jews does not make much appeal to me.... Why should they
not, like other people of the earth, make that country their
home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs
in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France
to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on
the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified
by any moral code of conduct.... Surely it would be a crime against
humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored
to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. " [1]
Gandhi's observations, that (a) "It
is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs" and
(b) "What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified
by any moral code of conduct", are as relevant and valid
today as when they were first made 64 years ago. In other words,
it is the forcible occupation of Palestine by Jews emigrating
from other parts of the world and the resistance offered by the
dispossessed native Palestinians against the humiliating treatment
meted out to them in the process that is the crux of the problem.
In the latest phase of its history most
of Palestine has been under the occupation of the Zionists since
their unilateral proclamation of the "State of Israel"
on 14th May 1948, which coincided with the decision of Britain
to terminate its mandate over the territory. This precipitate
action needlessly aborted the move for a peaceful transition
of power as envisaged in the UN Partition Plan for Palestine,
which the UN General Assembly had adopted on 29 November 1947.
It is true, as will be explained below, that the Palestinians
were aghast by the idea of Partition. They were even more outraged
when they got to know the terms of the Partition Plan. The terms
were such that they favoured the Zionists in a manner that was
far disproportionate to their relative size in Palestine at that
time.
While Britain could have played the role
of a mediator to evolve a just and amicable solution to the controversial
Partition Plan, it did not do so. Instead it suddenly decided
to terminate its "mandate" and leave Palestine to its
fate, which was to the advantage of the well-armed Zionists who
were now free to impose their will with impunity. The seizure
of power by the Zionists and the forcible eviction of the Arab
population from their lands lead to outbreak of war with the
neighbouring Arab countries, which came to the defense of the
Palestinian people who were at the mercy of the marauding Zionist
gangs. A UN report later recounted the developments as follows:
"One of the two States envisaged
in the partition plan proclaimed its independence as Israel and
in the 1948 war expanded to occupy 77 per cent of the territory
of Palestine. Israel also occupied the larger part of Jerusalem.
Over half the indigenous Palestinian population fled or were
expelled. Jordan and Egypt occupied the other parts of the territory
assigned by the partition resolution to the Palestinian Arab
State which did not come into being. In the 1967 war, Israel
occupied the remaining territory of Palestine, until then under
Jordanian and Egyptian control (the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
This included the remaining part of Jerusalem, which was subsequently
annexed by Israel. The war brought about a second exodus of Palestinians,
estimated at half a million". [2]
Imperialist
Conspiracy
It may be recalled that Palestine was
placed under the British Mandate in 1922 by application of Article
22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The Mandate resolution
had entrusted Britain with the task of leading the indigenous
people of Palestine to full independence. Britain had occupied
Palestine on 9 December 1917, thereby ending Turkish rule over
the territory since 1517. The occupation came about as a result
of the Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France in 1916,
which was part of a policy to divide and rule the Arab world.
(The secret plan was drawn out between Sir Marks Sykes representing
Britain and George Picot his French counterpart in consultation
with Italy and Czarist Russia for partitioning the Turkish Empire
after World War I. The plan came to light when, following the
Russian Revolution of October 1917, the new Bolshevik regime
published the secret imperialist treaties.)
Even before gaining control of the territory,
Britain promised a national home for Jews in Palestine through
its infamous Balfour Declaration issued on 2 November 1917. It
thus planted the seeds of an endless conflict in that land. The
Declaration was in the form of a letter written by Arthur James
Balfour, the then Foreign Secretary of Britain, to Lord Lionel
Walter Rothschild, one of the leaders of British Jewry. As one
commentator put it: "By this strange instrument, one country,
acting without legal or moral right, decided the fate of another
without even consulting it and gave it away to some people scattered
across the world" [3]. The ulterior motive of the British
in issuing the Declaration was to win the support of the Zionist
Jews across Europe and America for the ongoing war (WW-I). Moreover,
it was a convenient way to stem the flow of Jews into Britain
from other parts of Europe while at the same time carving out
a safe haven for a potential ally in West Asia.
The ravages of World War I and the economic
disaster that followed threw up social and political crises in
Europe once again. Anti-Semitism was one of the tactics adopted
for diverting people's anger and for disrupting their unity in
the struggle against those forces that caused these crises. Many
such devious means were used to cover up the real motives for
unleashing yet another world war: the desperate struggle between
imperialist powers to corner markets and to grab new colonies.
During World War II (1939-45), Hitler and his Nazi regime in
Germany carried out a systematic campaign to destroy among others
the Jewish communities of Europe, in the course of which some
six million Jews alone, including some 1.5 million children were
exterminated. (It is one of those great ironies of history that
today the malevolent Zionists are perpetrating on the Palestinians
almost the same type of atrocities, which the Nazis had perpetrated
on Jews and others in Europe!) But was a separate homeland in
Palestine for Jews a solution for the anti-Semitic attitude?
During 1870-1896 several societies had
sprung up in various cities across Europe for propagating the
idea of Zionism, i.e., the political movement for a separate
homeland in Palestine for the Jews. The bizarre idea was staunchly
opposed by many well-known intellectuals of Jewish origin of
that time and since then. (Of course there was one streak of
Zionism, which was of the non-malignant kind. Known as Kibbutzim
- based on collective farming - it originated in 1909 with the
genuine desire to seek social justice for the Jewish people.
But today it is a movement that has been sidelined within Israel.
There is also a sect of native Jews in Palestine - known as Natvri
Karta - who are anti-Zionists.) Modern Zionism effectively began
with the holding of the First Zionist Congress on 29 August 1897
AD at the initiative of Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jew, in Basle,
Switzerland. The Zionist Organization emerged out of this Congress.
Central to Zionist thought is the concept of the Land of Israel
(Palestine) as the birthplace of the Jewish people (a mythical
claim invoking the Old Testament) and the belief that Jewish
life elsewhere is a life of exile. It is true that the Jews as
a community were formally expelled from Palestine in 135 AD -
a process that began from as early as 70 AD. But by no stretch
of imagination can the Palestinians be blamed for the forced
exodus; the decision to expel the Jews was that of the Romans.
It was a form of reprisal for revolts by the Jews against the
Romans, who had conquered Palestine in 63 BC and made it a province
of the Roman Empire. The devotion of Jews to their religion and
special forms of worship was used as a pretext for political
discrimination against them, and the pent-up anger had led to
the revolts.
It may be pointed out that the Hebrew
patriarch Abraham, the founder of Judaism - the religion of the
Jews, was not an original inhabitant of Palestine. According
to legend, he is said to have emigrated from Ur in Babylonia
(what is now Iraq) some 3700 years ago. On his way to Cannan
- or what later came to be called Palestine - he along with his
people had to trudge on to Egypt to escape a famine. While he
returned to Cannan, his people sojourned in Egypt for 400 years
and slaved under the Pharaohs. It was Prophet Moses, the next
important figure after Abraham, who led the Hebrew people out
of Egyptian bondage around 1300 BC. Moses tried to lead them
into Cannan but they were repeatedly turned back by the Cannanites,
i.e., Palestinians, until around 1260 BC when finally, under
the leadership of Joshua, the Jews succeeded in conquering Cannan.
Joshua was followed by a succession of leaders prominent among
whom are David and Solomon, whose combined rule lasted for 78
years until 922 BC. It was nearly eight centuries later that
the Maccabees, a Jewish family, established themselves as the
rulers of Palestine. Their rule lasted from 142 BC to 63 BC,
until the Romans took over power.
The right of return to Palestine after
a long gap may have had some semblance of justness if all the
Jews of today were the direct descendants of those who were forced
to emigrate from there over 1900 years ago. But that is surely
not the case. Of the total Jewish population the world over,
direct descendants of the expelled Jews would constitute but
a tiny fraction. A slightly larger fraction would be of mixed
decent, while the overwhelming majority would consist of those
who are Jews by religion but having anthropologically no connection
whatsoever with the Jews expelled from Palestine. This is because
there have been conversions to Judaism of large numbers whose
earliest forefathers were nowhere near Palestine. After their
dispersal from Palestine the thing common to all Jews was only
their religion. If religion should be the yardstick for deciding
nationality, all Christians across the globe should also have
the right to make Palestine their home as Christianity too originated
there! Mahatma Gandhi saw through the fallacy of this tenuous
claim of the Zionists and was of the opinion that:
"The nobler course would be to insist
on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred.
The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense
that Christians born in France are French. If Jews have no home
but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave
the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do
they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry
for the national home affords a colourable justification for
the German expulsion of the Jews." [4]
Occupation
by Force
By no stretch of imagination could a
separate homeland in Palestine for Jews have been a solution
for anti-Semitism. But that was the solution the Zionists prescribed
and they went about seeking that goal in a very organised manner.
The first large-scale immigration of Jews into Palestine (mainly
from Russia and Rumania, all of whom were converts and not descendents
of the expelled Jews) took place during 1882 -1903. Still in
the early 1880s, there were only about 24,000 Jews in Palestine,
consisting less than 4% of the total population there and a mere
0.3 % of the world's total population of Jews at that time. [5]
After the First Zionist Congress, the
Zionist movement organised itself as a worldwide organisation
with permanent institutions. The primary tasks of the Zionist
Organisation were to purchase land in Palestine, reclaim unproductive
land and to settle immigrating Jews in newly created rural settlements
and townships. For these purposes, it established two central
agencies. The first was the Jewish National Fund (JNF) founded
in 1901, whose charter specified land purchase in Palestine as
the organisation's sole pursuit. The second agency that was founded
was the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC) established
in 1908. Subsequently an overseas fundraising mechanism known
as Keren Hayesod was founded in London in 1920 (its headquarters
were moved to Jerusalem in 1926). The net result was that, according
to the Zionists' own admission: "By May 1948, when the [British]
Mandate expired and Israel was about to proclaim its statehood,
land redemption had placed nearly one-tenth of the country under
Jewish ownership, the rest being owned by the government or by
Arabs" [6]. While the Jews admit owning only 10 % of land
in Palestine, after usurping power in 1948 they forcibly seized
over 77 % of the land [7] although even under the UN Partition
Plan they were to get only 56% of it as its share!
The Zionists were able to impose their
will over the Palestinians only because of their military superiority.
Such superiority was achieved through long-tem planning. To advance
their interests, the Zionists methodically went about arming
and training their members in large numbers soon after they started
immigrating to Palestine in an organized manner. They began by
setting up so-called "security organizations", the
first of which was founded in 1909 and was called Hashomer. Subsequently,
in 1920 an underground organization called Haganah was formed
as a "grassroots" armed force (which gradually became
the full-fledged military wing of the Zionists) to unleash terror
on the Palestinians and to remove all obstacles in their path
including those placed by the British.
In 1931 a group of Haganah members seceded
from the organization and founded the Irgun Tzevai Leumi (National
Military Organization) also know by its acronym, Etzel. Etzel
advocated a much harsher line of action against the Palestinians
and protested the policy of relative restraint adopted by the
Haganah. Etzel split in 1940 when a section within it demanded
that the military struggle against the British should be continued
irrespective of the war against Nazi Germany. The new group which
called itself Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for Freedom of
Israel) or Lehi for short, was also opposed to enlisting in the
British army. Haganah, Etzel and Lehi eventually joined together
in November 1945 to form the Hebrew Resistance Movement.
Interestingly, during the Palestinian
uprising of 1936-39, strategic interests persuaded Britain to
allow a certain degree of military co-operation between the British
army and police and the Haganah. This co-operation gave the Haganah
a measure of legality and manifested in the "Supernumerary
Police" venture (enlistment of over 20,000 members of the
Haganah into the British police force in Palestine) that lasted
until 1948. Of course the most important factor that contributed
to the development of Zionist armed forces in Palestine were
the more than 30,000 Zionists who enlisted in the British army
in the course of World War II, which led to the establishment
of the Jewish Brigade Group. This helped them learn a broad range
of military subjects - combat, administration, technology and
logistics - and after the war they were able to transfer this
knowledge along with the trained men to the Zionist armed forces
in Palestine. [8]
It is suspected that the Zionists managed
to procure vast quantities of arms from the residue of the US
and British military campaigns in the Middle East after World
War II. The military co-operation with the British stood them
in good stead when British forces departing from Palestine in
1948 reportedly sold arms and ammunition, even tanks and other
heavy weapons to the Zionists. The steady flow of military hardware
from Czechoslovakia after World War II was what finally helped
them a great deal in consolidating their military might. Thus,
at the time of forcibly establishing the State of Israel in 1948,
the Zionist had a well-trained and well-armed force, which were
at least 65,000 strong. There was little doubt that the number
of armed Zionists in the field in 1948 was far greater than the
combined strength of the ill-trained, in-disciplined and poorly
armed Arab armies from the neighbouring countries that eventually
confronted them.
Palestinian
Resistance
The Palestinian peoples' resistance against
the disastrous immigration policy, including major revolts in
1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39, was put down only through intimidation
and brute force. While the Zionists immigrated to Palestine in
a very organized manner, the Palestinian resistance against it
was most disorganized. There were several reasons for it. The
prospect of a strong, united and committed leadership emerging
from amongst the Palestinians was constrained by the social setup
of their society. Big land-holding families (many of them non-Palestinian
Arabs) had largely controlled Palestine. In the 1930s, while
about 30 % of the Palestinian rural families were land-less,
250 families owned the same amount of land as cultivated by 60,000
peasants [9]. Family-based political factions, their self-interests
and their rivalries frustrated any hope of building a sustained
struggle against foreign incursion. The two most important families
- the Husseinis and the Nashashibis - fought for primacy and
could never get over their rivalry even for the sake of presenting
a solid front against British imperialism and Zionism.
There were three distinct strands within
the nationalist movement in Palestine. The notables, who were
disturbed by popular agitation and sought accommodation with
the Zionists, 'performed the role of diplomats, the educated
middle-class that of articulation of public opinion and the peasants
that of the actual fighters in the battle against the Zionist
presence' [10]. While the traditional leadership 'refused to
commit themselves to any platform which would imply the acceptance
of the Balfour Declaration, they also refused to promote or condone
any revolutionary course against the Anglo-Zionist convergence'
[11]. The latter stand could be attributed to the belief that
revolution would inevitably be detrimental to their own interests.
Their failure to adhere to a revolutionary platform prevented
the emergence of a revolutionary leadership from among the middle-class
militant nationalists. Thus, the 'lower strata' of the Palestinian
society, which was potentially willing to revolt, was left leaderless.
The First Palestinian National Congress
(PNC), which was organized in March 1919 in Jerusalem, sent two
memoranda to the Paris Peace Conference (following World War
I): one rejecting the Balfour Declaration and the other demanding
independence. At the Third PNC, convened in Haifa in December
1920, an Executive Committee was elected that continued to stir
the Palestinian movement till about mid-1930s. At the Arab National
Conference held on 13 December 1931 in Jerusalem a 'national
charter' was chalked out and a new level of activity became evident
leading to the founding of the Arab Independence (Istiqlal) Party
in 1932. This was the first serious attempt by the rationally
thinking Palestinians to pool their anti-British and anti-Zionist
zeal on a national plane without constraints of tie-up with the
Husseinis or the Nashashibis. 'In their first manifesto the Istiqlalists
attributed the lamentable disarray in the ranks of the national
movement to the egocentric and self-interested political notables
who were subservient to the imperialist rulers. The party founders
vowed to struggle against imperialism face to face and fight
against Jewish immigration and land sales and to endeavour to
achieve a parliamentary Arab government and work for the attainment
of complete Arab unity' [12]. The decision of the British to
hold an electoral sideshow on the local municipal level, instead
of establishing a national self-governing institution, led to
the formation of four more political parties.
One of the most influential leaders of
the Palestinians was Haj Amin al Husseini who became the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem (traditional leader of the Palestinian Muslims)
in 1921. 'The Istiqlal Party had ceased to be an effective organised
force in the latter part of 1933, partly owing to Haj Amin's
efforts to sabotage their reputation and position within the
national movement' [13]. 'It was a remarkable feat on Haj Amin's
part to achieve ascendancy within the national movement in Palestine
while maintaining friendly relations with the High Commissioner
and a conciliatory attitude towards the British at a time when
the contradiction between the two forces was becoming increasingly
sharp'. [14]
Palestine was an excellent ground in
the 1920s and 1930s for a peasant led revolution. Large numbers
of absentee landlords (mainly from Lebanon and Syria) were ready
to surrender to the temptations of selling their estates at generous
prices offered by the Jews. The Jewish campaign of dispossessing
the natives in favour of immigrants inevitably created an acute
sense of economic outrage and helped politicise the Arab peasantry.
The British occupation of Palestine also kindled the passion
for national liberation. As a result, the entire objective conditions
for a successful peasant revolution existed except one: radical
leadership [15]. Istiqlal was an organization that was capable
of throwing up such a leadership but the traditional overlords
had quickly stepped in to stifle its growth. Nevertheless, Sheikh
Izzeddin al Qassam, one of those who joined the Istiqlal in 1932,
rose to become a national hero in Palestine.
Sheikh Izzeddin, a man of immense religious
learning, was a Syrian born Arab who came to Palestine in 1921
after the failure of the Syrian revolt against French occupation
of which he was a prominent leader. As an ardent patriot and
a fiery orator, he stood up against Zionism and British rule
and preached about the necessity of armed revolt against subservience.
He succeeded in setting up secret cells among the growing number
of land-less peasants, but in a pre-mature encounter with the
British forces he and his closest associates attained martyrdom
on 19 November 1935. Less than a month after the killing of Sheikh
Izzeddin, hostility towards the British government spread to
the villages of Palestine where the Sheikh and his followers
were held in high esteem. In the major towns radical youth groups
began to emerge to replace the discredited older political leadership.
The Great Arab Revolt (1936-39) was in effect triggered off by
the killing of Sheikh Izzeddin. The overall losses suffered by
the Palestinians during 1936-39 - both in terms of lives and
property - was quite substantial [16]. Thus, the Zionist were
able to ride roughshod over the Palestinians in the 1940s because
most of the revolutionary Palestinian cadres were wiped out by
then and there was no effective force within Palestine to counter
the organized Zionist offensive.
The sustained protests by the Palestinians
against the wave of Jewish immigration did force the British
to set up several commissions of inquiry between 1929 and 1939.
As a result of the ambivalent policy of the British Government,
report of one commission tended to contradict the report of the
one that followed. The net result was that none of them could
propose a satisfactory solution to the problem. Meanwhile, the
rapidity with which immigration was taking place was quite staggering.
According to scholars, between 1882 and 1948 about 600,000 Jews
had immigrated to Palestine. Thus, during the period of British
occupation, there was an eleven-fold rise in the Jewish population,
by 1948 Jews constituted around 33% of a total population of
about 2,000,000 in Palestine [17]. This was due to the British
administrative and land laws, which facilitated huge wave of
Jewish immigration. Almost all the new immigrants were from Europe.
The outbreak of World War II and the subsequent decline of Britain
as the premier imperial power opened the way for the United States
of America to take over Britain's role.
Click
here for Part Two of The Palestinian Saga.
N.D.Jayaprakash
is a member of the Delhi Science Forum/Coalition for Nuclear
Disarmament and Peace in New Delhi, India. He can be reached
at:jpdsf@hotmail.com
References/Notes
1. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi,
The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,
Government of India, New Delhi, 1977, Vol.68, p.137
2. Overview, UN Information System on
the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL) at http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/ngo/history.html
3. Punyapriya Dasgupta (member of the
1985 UN sponsored international team of journalists on a mission
of fact-finding about the Palestinians), Cheated by the World
-The Palestinian Experience, Orient Longman Limited, New Delhi,
1988, p. 45
4. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi,
op cit., p. 138
5. Prakash C Jain (School of International
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University), 'Population and Society
in Israel', Encounter (New Delhi), Vol. 2, No. 3, May/June 1999,
pp. 57-58
6. http://www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00uq0
(Official web site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government
of Israel)
7. See endnote 2 above
8. Information on Haganah, Etzel and
Lehi are primarily from the official web-site of the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, Government of Israel at: http://www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00uo0
and http://www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH27z0
9. Don Perez, 'The Historical Background
of Arab Nationalism in Palestine', in Richard Ward, Don Peretz
and Even M. Wilson (eds.), The Palestinian State: A Rational
Approach, New York, 1977, quoted in Dasgupta, op. cit., p.131
10. A.W. Kayyali, Palestine - A Modern
History, Croom Helm, London, 1978, p. 41
11. Ibid., pp.123-124
12. ibid., p. 167
13. Ibid., p.176
14. Ibid., p. 175
15. Dasgupta, op. cit., pp.133-134
16. Palestinian casualties were 5,032
killed and 14,760 wounded (Kayyali, op cit., p.231) About 460
Jews and 101 Britons were killed during the same period (Dasgupta,
op cit., p.138) Unaccounted Palestinian casualties may have much
more.
17. Amnon Kapeliouk, The Changing Pattern
of Israeli Immigration, Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1997,
http://mondediplo.com/1997/11/israel,
p.1
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