Steve Maltz considers the history

Steve Maltz

How many times have you been approached by someone and asked the question, "so what do you think about what's happening in Israel/Palestine?" Hopefully this may help.

Let's first go back to the 19th Century and look at the 'lie of the land'. Palestine, as it was called then was a poor country, ruled by absentee Turkish landlords, as part of the crumbling and corrupt Ottoman empire.

By all accounts the land was largely barren and uninhabited, its population was either nomadic or largely involved with agriculture, despite the poor environment. Sir John William Dawson, writing in 1888, said, "The motley impoverished tribes which have occupied it have held it as mere tenants at will, temporary landowners."

Thanks to the Turks, the land had been totally neglected. Hundreds of years of abuse had turned the country into a treeless waste, with malaria-ridden swamps and a sprinkling of towns. This was the position in 1880, and this is incontestable fact.

Palestine was not a country or a state, it was simply a collection of villages. Although many Arabs did own their own homes, the majority were the poor "fellahin", who worked as hired hands for the landowners. There was no nationalism in the land, no feeling of belonging to a "people", loyalty was to the local clan or village.

Jews had lived in the land from Biblical times, though, in the 19th century, they were very much the minority. The first major wave of Jewish immigration started in the 1880s and they slowly transformed the land. They worked on the swamps and the undrained rivers and soon Jewish villages were springing up all over.

Media sources today give the impression that Israel "occupies" land once owned by people living in a "Palestinian state". But evidence is to the contrary. When the First congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919, the agreement was that "we consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria". The only people who considered themselves "Palestinians" then were the Jewish inhabitants! Even the Jewish national newspaper was called "The Palestine Post".

Did Jewish immigrants seize the land or was the land acquired legally? Land first settled was bought from the absentee Turkish landlords, who were eager for the extra cash - it was uncultivated swamps and empty land. Later on they bought cultivated land, some of it at exorbitant prices.

In the 20th century, Arabs as well as Jews were immigrating into Palestine. The Hope Simpson Report acknowledged in 1930 that there was "uncontrolled influx of illegal immigrants from Egypt, TransJordan and Syria". The rate of immigration increased during the early 1930s. In 1939, Winston Churchill said "Far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied". This is an important point, because it dispels the myth that the Palestinian people have lived there for generations.

So now we reach that magic date, 1948, the formation of the State of Israel. And the major point of contention - the Palestinian refugees.

This is where objectivity flies out of the window and we get the sharpest divide in people's perceptions of actual historic events. In a nutshell, what happened was that the day after Israel became a country, it was invaded. Within 2 weeks, against all odds, Israel was victorious, resulting in an expansion of territory and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had been living in Palestine.

As a result of these events not one but two refugee situations were created.

Just under 750,000 Arabs lost their homes and became the 'Palestinian' refugees. Some were driven out by the Israeli army, others fled after being told to do so by Arab army commanders, expecting an eventual victory.

From 1947 hundreds of Jews in Arab lands were massacred, leaving thousands injured and millions of dollars in property destroyed. In 1948 Jews were forcibly ejected from Arab countries and of the 820,000 Jewish refugees created by this situation, 590,000 were absorbed by Israel.

Palestinian refugees still exist, in camps, on the West Bank, in Lebanon and elsewhere. Have you ever wondered why?

The 820,000 Jewish refugees who were forcibly ejected from Arab countries where they had often lived for thousands of years were all integrated into Israel or the Jewish world elsewhere. There are no Jewish refugee camps.

The 750,000 Arab refugees who were displaced in 1948, were placed into squalid refugee camps by fellow Arabs who had just gone to war (and lost) but were unwilling to pay for the consequences. Incredibly over a million of these poor people are still in these camps, despite billions of dollars of relief. Where has this money gone and why are they still in camps and not integrated into Arab society?

Palestinians were never allowed to be "ordinary" refugees. They have been kept in a form of forced captivity for a sinister purpose, that has transformed a peace-loving gentle people into terrorist pariahs. Let's be honest here and consider who is really responsible for this tragedy. It is not Israel or the Palestinians. Can't they see who their real enemy is?

And what of the "occupied" West Bank? It is true that Israel "occupy" the land, since gaining it as a result of the victory in the Six Day War in 1967, but who did they occupy it from? Well, it was actually illegally seized by Jordan after 1948. Before then it was part of the area administered by the British. Before that, the West Bank was just the eastern part of Palestine, occupied by whoever happened to live there.

The crisis in the Middle East is over a strip of land the size of Wales, a hoped-for safe haven for a people with historical links to the land going back over 4000 years, a people who have not been welcome anywhere else. The fact that this land is surrounded by over a dozen hostile nations is one of those tragedies of history that make you realize that there's more here than meets the eye.