100 years on, tears for Palestine
This declaration was made 100 years ago in a letter written by Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary to President of the British Zionist Federation Chaim Weizmann on November 2nd1917. The declaration will set in motion chain of events which will forever alter the fate of the people of Palestine. The infamous declaration encapsulated Britain’s […]
This declaration was made 100 years ago in a letter written by Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary to President of the British Zionist Federation Chaim Weizmann on November 2nd1917. The declaration will set in motion chain of events which will forever alter the fate of the people of Palestine. The infamous declaration encapsulated Britain’s intention to create conditions favorable for the establishment of a Jewish ‘national home’ in the land of Palestine. In 1917, the world was witnessing one of the most destructive military conflicts in modern history namely First World War-which lasted from 1914 to 1918. By 1917, Palestine had been a part of the Muslim Ottoman Empire for four centuries- its Jewish population being a meager three percent.
Ottoman Empire entered the Great War alongside the Central powers of Germany, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary and fought against the Allied forces comprised of Britain, France, Serbia, Montenegro and the Russian Empire. Few days after the declaration, British forces conquered Palestine, marking the beginning of British occupation and the British Mandate in Palestine.
The British Mandate
In the Hussein-McMahon Correspondences between Sherriff Hussein, the ruler of Mecca (then part of the Ottoman Empire) and Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner to Egypt in 1915, the British, exploiting ethnic fault lines and personal greed of some Arab rulers, had succeeded in instigating revolt against the Muslim Ottoman Caliph by his Arab subjects, with the promise of independence for the Arabs at the end of the War. This led to the so-called Arab revolt in Arabia led by Captain Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). But Britain had also secretly signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with the French in which the two had finalized plans on how Arabia would be carved up between them after the war.
The moment British rule started in Palestine, a policyof demographic engineering to alter the population in favor of the Jews began in earnest. So from 1919 onwards, Zionist immigration to Palestine increased dramatically. Historical sources documented that “between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands”. This policy ignited the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. The British authorities responded with brute force; between 1936 and 1937, the British killed over 1,000 Palestinians. The British also trained and armed the Zionist militias in Palestine. According to JournalistZena al-Tahhan “When the British decided to terminate their mandate in 1947 and transfer the question of Palestine to the United Nations, the Jews already had an army…. formed out of the armed paramilitary groups trained and created to fight side by side with the British in World War II”.
UN Partition Plan
After 30 years of British (mis)rule, “the British government announced it would be handing over the disaster it had created in Palestine to the United Nations” wrote a historian. On 29 November 1947, UN Resolution 181 divided Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as an internationalized city.
At the time, the Jews in Palestine constituted one third of the population and owned less than six percent of the total land area. But the UN partition plan allocated to them 55 percent of the land, leaving only 45% to the Arabs. Celebrated by the Zionists, it was greeted with outrage in the Arab world.
Al-Nakba – The 1948 Catastrophe
Britain announced the endof its mandate in Palestine on the eve of May 15, 1948. Eight hours earlier, David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s Prime Minister, pronounced‘a declaration of independence’ in Tel Aviv. Seven Arab armies entered Palestine the next day and the first Arab-Israeli war began.
In the course of the conflict, the Zionists military forces carried out a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing in which close to a million Palestinians were forced to flee and 75 percent of Palestinian land was captured. At the end of nine months of fighting, armistice agreements were signed and the control of the West Bank was given to Jordan, while the Gaza Strip was left under Egyptian control.
Al-Naksa: The Set-back (The 1967 Six-Day War)
By 1948, the Zionists had fulfilled the dream of creating “a Jewish homeland” in Palestine. The area they had seized comprised about 80% of historical Palestine; exceedingly beyond the 55% the UN partition plan had granted to them.
However in June 1967, Israel launched another attack effectively starting the second Arab-Israeli war. The Israeli army marched into and occupied the remaining Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza strip. In addition they invaded and took Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and the Golan heights in Syria. Thus by 1967, Israel had finished what it set out to achieve in 1948, namely the invasion and occupation of all of historical Palestine.
The war led to the displacement of yet another 430,000 Palestinians. To this day, the West Bank and the Gaza strip have remained under Israeli military occupation, creating “the longest known occupation by any military force in modern history”. In this same year, Israel began what it termed ‘settlement programmes’ in the occupied Palestinian territories; a euphemism for forceful eviction, expulsion, land seizure and dispossession.
A major fall out of the defeat was that it diminished the trust Arabs had in the monarchies;consequently3 distinct movements emerged. Pan-Arabism, which advocated for a unified Arab state championed by Gamal Abd Nasser, Arab nationalism championed by the Ba’ath party and the Islamists group, which promoted a return to the fundamentals of Islam as the means of returning the region to its days of glory. This movement was led by Hassan Albanna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Israel: the making of an apartheid state
Commonly, the term ‘apartheid’ has been associated with white minority rule in South Africa which was brought to an end in 1990. In March 2017, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) released a report in which it accused Israel of having established “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”. The report found Israel “guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid”, a “crime against humanity under customary International law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.
The report states further that since 1967, Palestinians have lived in four fragmented domains. Domain 1 embraces about 1.7 million Palestinians who live in Israel as citizens but with special restrictions since in Israel, there is clear distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”;all Israeli citizens enjoy the former, but only Jews enjoy the latter. The second domain includes 300,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem. For them, “openly identifying with Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory politically carries the risk of expulsion to the West Bank and loss of the right even to visit Jerusalem”. The third domain comprises the“4.6 million Palestinians living in occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip who are governed by military law while Jewish settlers in the same territory are governed by Israeli civil law”. The last is domain 4, comprised of the millions of Palestinian refugees and involuntary exiles, who are “prohibited from returning to their homes in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory”; Israel refers to them as the “demographic threat”.
The report concluded by recommending that “States have a collective duty: (a) not to recognize an apartheid regime as lawful; (b) not to aid or assist a State in maintaining an apartheid regime; and (c) to cooperate with the United Nations and other States in bringing apartheid regimes to an end.
Earlier in 2012, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa had in a report titled: ‘Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” reached similar conclusions.
We conclude with a quote from Julius Malema-which he made at a protest march marking the 100th anniversary of the Balfour declaration,-in Pretoria, South Africa: “We are not here today because we hate the Jewish people, our march is not against the Jews, our march is against Apartheid Israel’’.
Dr. Adamu is a lecturer with the Department of Public Health, College of Medicine, Kaduna State University, Kaduna (KASU)