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Who are they, the Palestinians, and who has the right to speak for them? Oppressed nationalities find it difficult to get a hearing because those who pretend to represent them are often political adventurers who merely exploit them—whether for other powers’ imperialistic purposes or to vent on imaginary enemies their own hatred of the world. This is true of the Somalis, the Irish, the Bengalis, the Ibos; it is twice as true of the Palestinians because their country happens to lie at the crossroads of a world power struggle. Nowhere else do local enmities serve so many outside masters; nowhere else do foreign interests spread so much confusion about the very identity of the people they are pretending to save. So first of all, let us agree: like most Irish, most Palestinians are not terrorists ; but like many Ulstermen or Basques, many Palestinians condone or even applaud acts of terrorism as long as they lack other means to express what they consider their just grievances, and as long as those grievances continue to be seen as just by others. Let us also agree that their plight is not of their own making ; they have been objects of other people’s policies for 3,000 years. Palestine, the land of the Philistines, a Semitic people who were once subjugated by Joshua and by David, has retained that name through the centuries as it was conquered by Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs,1 Christians from the West, Osmanli Turks, and the British. Until recently, in modern times it was sparsely settled, mostly by Arab Bedouins, and was considered part of Syria. A movement to liberate and unite the Arabs, then under Turkish domination, existed long before the First World War. Then the British used Arab tribesmen to wrest Palestine, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Syria from the Turks, promising them “sovereignty” and self-determination. After prolonged uprisings, those parts of Syria that lay east of the Jordan River were given to Hashemite sheiks, who thereafter were called kings; the part west of the Jordan River was styled the British Mandate of Palestine and was supposed to evolve toward self-government; northern Syria became a French mandate. The terms of the mandates were illegal even by the standards of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was their covering law. Previously, a unilateral declaration by Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour had designated Who Are the Palestinians? Henry Pachter 217 “Palestine” a “Jewish homeland”; at the same time, however, Chaim Weizmann and Lord Harlech assured the Arabs that this should not interfere with Arab aspirations to sovereignty. What these terms meant or how to reconcile them was never spelled out, except in Balfour’s memoirs, where he wondered how anybody could have been misled into thinking that they meant anything.2 But based on the evidence of contemporary customs and conditions, the Balfour Declaration was consistent with a Jewish immigration rate of 50,000 a year and a ratio of two to one between Muslims and Jews. In 1930, after serious Arab riots, immigration was severely restricted—just when Jews were desperate not for a homeland but for a place of asylum. At the outbreak of World War II, the population consisted of 456,000 Jews and 1.1 million Muslims; at its end, the census counted 1.143 million Muslims, 583,000 Jews, and 145,000 Christians. The Holocaust and the war left the Allies with a “disposal problem” in western Europe: nearly 100,000 eastern European Jews who had been made homeless by persecution and political changes were languishing in displacedpersons camps, fed by charitable contributions and government aid mostly from the United States, which, however, did not lift its own restrictions on immigrants from eastern Europe. Responding to strong pressures from Zionist organizations—and minding the electoral situation at home—President Truman resolved the problem by agreeing to the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Soviet diplomacy gladly gave its assent, viewing any diminution of the British Empire as a gain for itself, and hoping to ingratiate itself with both Jews and Arabs. At first, the British wanted to build a base in Haifa because, ironically, they were about to fulfill another Arab demand: to evacuate the base in Alexandria. But a 1939 white paper also promised independence to Palestine. Weary of Arab terrorism and immediately prompted by Jewish terrorism, the Labour Party government decided to abandon the thankless task of policing the peace between Jews and Arabs...

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