Peace is Possible—But Only if Palestinians Get Their Own State

By Charley Reese

Because it is a fair-to-middling certainty that there will be trouble in the Middle East during 1999, I thought this might be a good time to do a little backgrounder.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is over land, not over religion or ethnic differences. It began in World War I.

For centuries, Palestinians, who are Muslim and Christian, had lived in Palestine as empires came and went. The British, battling the Austro-Hungarian empire, Germany and the Ottoman empire, made two contradictory promises. They promised Arabs independence if they would revolt against the Ottoman Turks, and they promised prominent Jewish Zionists in Europe they would favor establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Secular Zionism had been organized around the turn of the century by an Austrian journalist who asserted that Jews were a nationality and not just people who practiced the religion of Judaism.

As soon as Palestinians discovered that they were not going to be granted independence and that European Jews intended to displace them, the trouble started. Because Britain had created the Palestine Mandate, the conflict was largely a British problem until 1948.

It may amuse you to know that the big terrorists of the 1940s were the Jews, in British and also in American eyes. Menachem Begin, founder of Binyamin Netanyahu's party, ran an organization called the Irgun, which bombed, ambushed and assassinated both Palestinians and British soldiers and officials. Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister, led an even more radical group known as the Stern Gang and gave the order to assassinate Count Folke Bernadotte, a United Nations diplomat and Swedish humanitarian.

In 1947, the British gave up the struggle and turned it over to the United Nations. About that time, it became our problem. During the struggle, after a U.N. vote to partition Palestine, which the United States forced through, some 500,000 Palestinians became refugees. The Zionists proclaimed the state of Israel (how odd that they object to the Palestinians proclaiming their own statehood) and grabbed 22 percent more territory than the U.N. plan had given them. They also seized Western Jerusalem which, under the U.N. partition plan, was to be an international city.

In 1956, Israel invaded Egypt but was forced to withdraw by President Dwight Eisenhower.

In 1967, Israel attacked and defeated Syria, Jordan and Egypt, seizing in the process the Golan Heights in Syria, the Sinai in Egypt, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For 32 years now, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been denied the right of self-government and forced to live under Israeli military occupation.

The United Nations Security Council has passed, through the years, 69 resolutions condemning Israeli aggression or violations of the Geneva Accords, but, in every case, the United States, which kills Iraqis in the name of U.N. resolutions, has prevented the United Nations, by veto or threat of veto, from enforcing a single resolution against Israel.

And so here we are. There could be peace if Israel would allow the Palestinians to have their own state on the West Bank, Gaza and in East Jerusalem. Israel, unfortunately, has no intention of doing that. Nor will Israel either compensate or allow the return of Palestinian refugees, most of whom languish in bitter poverty. That, too, is strange in view of the clamor of Jewish refugees from Nazism for return of property and compensation. Apparently what is good for the Jewish goose is not to be had by the Palestinian gander.

The injustice inflicted on the Palestinians guarantees conflict for an indefinite time.

Charley Reese writes three weekly columns for the Orlando (FL) Sentinel, from which this column is reprinted. His column is syndicated and appears in more than 200 newspapers.