There is a saying that goes: “Be careful what you wish for, for you may get it.” This has been Israel’s dilemma from the very beginning.
The Zionist movement, which held its first conference in Basel, Switzerland 120 years ago, wanted Palestine but not the Palestinians. They achieved this objective 50 years later, in what Israel termed as its ‘war of independence.’
Then, in 1947-48, the Palestinian homeland was captured, but millions of Palestinians were cruelly evicted following a harrowing war and many massacres.
That dynamic was not at work when the rest of historic Palestine was occupied during the war of 1967.
Ali Jarbawi, a professor of political science at Birzeit University, told the Economist that Palestinians were ‘lucky’ that they “were defeated so fast and so massively.”
The rapid events of the war made it too difficult for Israel to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as it did to hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, during what Palestinians call the Nakba of ’48 – the ‘Catastrophic’ loss of their homeland.
Well, perhaps ‘lucky’ is a bit of a stretch, since the last 50 years of military occupation has wrought untold pain and misery on occupied Palestinians. It has been a period in which international law has repeatedly been broken by Israel. It has been a period in which Palestinians escalated their resistance, non-violent for most of it, but violent at times. The price was, and remains,…