As American politicians proclaim their support for Israel's right to self defense I've been looking back over the pages I've read so far in Benny Morris's Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Here is British Foreign Secretary Balfour, after the publication in 1917 of the Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, on the relative merits of the claims of Jew and Arab, along with Morris's comment:
"Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." This was to be the Palestinian Arabs' tragedy: They were seen as insignificant "natives" and usurpers, whereas the incoming Jews were viewed both as Europeans and as the rightful owners of Palestine.
That was in 1919. Four years earlier, Moshe Sharett, chief aide to David Ben-Gurion and later Israel's first foreign minister, had written:
We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture. . . . . Recently, there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about "the mutual misunderstanding" between us and the Arabs, about "common interests" [and] about "the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples." . . . But we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes. . . for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate--all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.
No matter what you think of the Arabs it should not be so hard to be somewhat more evenhanded. Israel's tactics and objectives, about which its spokesmen and supporters have sometimes been quite blunt, are not in the least attractive.
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