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COTANGENT
By Daphne Cardillo
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The contention that the
United States
supported the establishment of the State of Israel due to its interest
in oil is quite incorrect.
The US didn’t need
Israel
for Middle East oil since an all-American company has acquired a
concession in Saudi Arabia as
early as 1933.
And Saudi Arabia
has the biggest source of oil in the area.
In fact, the United States’ support for Israel was jeopardizing its interest in Middle East oil for the Saudi King was apprehensive of
Zionism.
Thus, two diverse American foreign policies
were pursued; “support for the State of Israel, which was critical for
honor and votes, and support for Saudi Arabia, which was critical for
oil.”
But even before the State of Israel was
declared by the United Nations in 1948, Jews have started going back to
Palestine (now Israel) when it was still under the Ottoman Empire.
These were the Zionist pioneers, and they
formed the Lovers of Zion movement in
Palestine.
By the early 1900s, Jews from Russia came to
settle and ventured in Zionist collective farming which gave birth to
the kibbutz movement that was to revolutionize agriculture in the
desert.
Palestine was in poverty and squalor under
Turkish rule, so it took the Jews, through communal living and hard
manual labor, to make the land productive and improve the living
condition of the area.
Most Arabs living here were still roaming
and grazing, and didn’t have permanent settlements.
The kibbutz movement thereby began to own
land purchased by the Jewish National Fund, the organization created by
the Zionist in 1901.
Now politics has marked its heavy toll on
the Palestinian Arabs, for when the Turks were defeated in World War I
and Palestine
became under British Mandate, Jewish immigration increased with the
Balfour Declaration of 1917, and became massive starting in 1948 when
the State of Israel was established.
What was at first was only an issue of
population density and peaceful coexistence turned into a
Middle East conflict.
For on May 15, 1948, on the day of the
Declaration of Independence (British Mandate has ended), Israel was
attacked.
Armies from Egypt, Lebanon,
Syria,
Transjordan,
Iraq and Saudi Arabia crossed the frontiers and invaded Israel.
The event led to the War of Independence
(1948-49), the first in a series of Arab-Israeli wars.
As a consequence, Palestinian Arabs fled
during the battles and ended up as refugees in the Gaza Strip which was
under the administration of
Egypt.
Now politics, in which the minds of a few
men rule a whole population further jeopardized the Palestinian Arabs,
for their leaders followed the path of destruction.
Unlike the other Arabs who remained within
the borders of Israel
during the war, the Palestinian Arabs fled, for months earlier, they
launched daily attacks on Jewish rural settlements, towns, and
inter-urban transport after news of the United Nations Partition
Resolution on November 29, 1947 was announced.
Then, starting in the 1950s and after the
War of Independence, the Palestinians embarked on guerrilla warfare
against Israel,
and at the great expense of its population.
Their militants persistently attacked
Israel
civilians and villages along
Israel’s borders so that the label
“terrorists” (armed men attacking civilians) became popularly applied to
them.
But Israel’s
reprisals were sharp, costing many Palestinian lives.
And the Gaza Strip, where many Palestinians
subsequently lived, became the base for terrorist operations, from the
Feyadeen up to the Hamas.
The Palestinian struggle became a war of
symbols, for their terrorist activities expanded by hijacking western
airline and taking hostages in exchange for their imprisoned militants.
The enemy was not only
Israel
but the West.
The terrorist organizations based in
Jordan
were even operating like a state within a state that King Hussein
restricted them and they moved to
Lebanon.
While the Palestinians aim of statehood,
from Yasser Arafat’s move, had been denied simply due to their warlike
stance.
The path the Palestinians took only bred
hatred, bitterness, and destruction among its people.
(This is compounded by the Muslims
tradition of blood debt.)
For even if they have become more cunning
in guerrilla warfare, the Israelis have become more sophisticated in
their defense system.
The endless pattern of violence only made Israel become a military power.
And unless the Palestinians renounce their
path of destruction, the Israelis are sure to wreck more havoc on them,
irrespective of where the other people of the world stand.
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