BEIRUT — Those in Israel, the United States and elsewhere who are puzzled about how to respond to Hamas’ victory in the recent Palestinian elections should not get hopelessly bogged down in the tensions and mutual killing of recent years. Instead they should keep in mind the larger picture of Palestinian identity and the decades-old struggle for national rights.
As usual, there is a good new book that helps people work through such dilemmas. The book is Salman H. Abu-Sitta’s monumental Atlas of Palestine 1948, recently published by the London-based Palestine Land Society (www.plands.org), and available worldwide through the offices of Saqi Books or the Institute of Palestine Studies.
The Hamas victory and this atlas, though very different events, are two examples of a much wider phenomenon: Palestinians everywhere who agitate for their national rights according to accepted global standards of law and common human decency. Other dimensions of this include the two recent intifadas, repeated democratic elections under conditions of severe occupation, and numerous attempts by civil society groups to agree on reasonable terms for a negotiated peace agreement with Israel.
The Atlas of Palestine 1948 is a remarkable document that uses detailed maps and copious tables and charts to provide the most accurate rendition of the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and exile at the hands of the Zionist forces in 1947-48. Israelis and some others challenge this narrative. The facts clearly show, though, that the land of Palestine, during the 30 years of British rule between 1918 and 1948, was transformed from an overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab society into a majority Jewish-Zionist-Israeli country. Palestinians see this as the result of a deliberate Zionist strategy often assisted by the British.
Abu-Sitta has been documenting modern Palestinian history for decades, diligently gathering every available credible source of evidence in order to provide answers to the simple question of how half the Palestinian population in 1947-48 — over 900,000 people according to his work — found themselves as refugees in exile. He also shows in great detail how and why 675 Arab population centers and villages were depopulated.
The power of this large and rich volume of 428 pages derives from the combination of its comprehensiveness and its detail, drawing on Ottoman, British, Israeli, Arab and other available historical records. Documented here in maps, aerial photographs and copious charts covering all of Palestine is every depopulated center, every massacre or ethnic cleansing perpetrated by pre-independence Zionist forces, land ownership records, land use patterns, partition plans, and evolving war and armistice conditions in 1947-49.
So here is what Israelis should ponder: When Palestinians look through this book, they instinctively look up their ancestral village or town, go to the page with the corresponding map or aerial photograph, and locate their neighborhood, even their house or farm.
This is not a record of what Palestinians have lost; it is an affirmation of that which still defines them and succeeding generations to come. The collective link to the land is the source of their national legitimacy. It is documented here with a startling power, and — like the Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael — it can never be taken away from them, despite death, denial, dispersal and occupation.
When I tracked him down in Kuwait and asked him about his main aim in producing this work, Abu-Sitta replied: “My aim is both to look back and forward. I want to document what happened in those fateful 18 months around 1948, but also to show the facts on the ground that might provide the basis for future scenarios of how Israelis and Palestinians might live together, whether in one state, two states or some other arrangement. If Israelis or others are interested to know why the conflict persists today, they can review the information here, and wake up from their collective amnesia about what really happened in 1948.”
The common, consistent driving force for Palestinians throughout the world since 1948 remains the determination to right the wrongs of that period, to reclaim our right to a normal life in our own land. The Palestinians and all other Arabs have now accepted that a Palestinian state can only hope to come into being alongside the existing Israeli state in its 1967 borders. A negotiated peace seems possible, in theory.
But peace for Israelis and Palestinians will not happen if the starting point is that seven million Palestinians have validity only if they first recognize Israel’s right to exist. The missing element in Israeli-Palestinian peace-making has always been the ability to treat both peoples as having the same national rights : to legitimacy, statehood, security — and to exercise those rights simultaneously, not sequentially.
Hamas’ victory is only another way for ordinary Palestinians to affirm their determination to struggle for their rights, and to regain the dignity and integrity of their national community, preferably through peaceful diplomacy. This will require that Israel reciprocates and recognizes that the Palestinian claim to national sovereignty in the land of Palestine-Israel is as strong as the Jewish-Zionist claim.
The force or validity of such a claim is not, in the end, anchored mainly in law or diplomatic niceties. It is anchored only in the human heart. It is given living expression in that common process, both tragic and heroic, that defines Israelis and Palestinians alike: young children and grandparents in exile who thumb through a book, open to a map, point their finger at a spot, and say “this is my village, this is where I come from, this is the land of my ancestors.”
People who feel this way — as Jewish Zionists did in Europe and Russia a century ago, as Palestinians do today — will not stop struggling until they regain their sense of humanity, the integrity of their national community, and a normal life for their children. Until now, after some ten thousand years of settled human history, no force in the world has ever been devised that can stop such human determination from succeeding. Why is that so hard to grasp?
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 11 March 2006
Word Count: 996
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