Gareth Smith, Byron Bay
Dany Wakil lays all the blame for failed Israel/Palestine talks on the Palestinians (Letter, July 31). From its inception the Zionist objective was to create an exclusive Jewish state but the existence of an indigenous population was a problem.
In 1967 Golda Meir asked Levi Eshkol what he intended to do with the more than a million Palestinians living in the newly captured territory. Jokingly, Eshkol replied, ‘I get it. You want the dowry (the land), but you don’t like the bride (Palestinians)!’ Meir replied, ‘My soul yearns for the dowry, and to let someone else take the bride’. Moshe Dayan said, ‘Before (the Palestinians’) very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they and their ancestors have lived. We are the generation of colonisers and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a house.’
Israel implemented a harsh apartheid policy making the conditions of life almost impossible for Palestinians in order to force them to leave. This strategy is incompatible with a Palestinian/Israeli rapprochement.
So-called peace talks are designed to fail and the prospect of a two-state solution is moribund. Palestine will never have its own state because its land has been fractured by Israel’s strategically placed settlements populated with heavily armed settlers and road links that are exclusively Jewish.
Unlike Israelis, Palestinians are subject to military checkpoints, arbitrary arrest, night raids, electronic surveillance, torture, child arrest before military courts, extra-judicial killings, home demolitions, timeless incarceration through administrative detention, a draconian pass system and, in the case of Gaza, calorific restrictions designed to starve but not kill. No, Danny Wakil, we can see through your Zionist propaganda!
Gareth Smith resorts to specious arguments to support his vitriolic anti-Zionist agenda. The Arab population at the turn of the 20th century was burgeoned by the arrival of Jews infused by Zionism, many escaping pogroms in Russia. That is to say that there certainly were Arabs who had been living for generations in what became the British mandate of Palestine, but there never was a Palestinian indigenous population as such – the Palestinian identity only emerged as a backlash to the creation of the state of Israel in the 1960s with the birth of the PLO, fundamentally a terrorist organisation.
The Zionist objective has never been to create an exclusive Jewish state. In Israel’s Declaration of Independence it states “WE APPEAL – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”
The existence of the local Arab population which reacted xenophobically to the arrival of Jews in number was admittedly a problem because they were driven to oppose the Zionists by their leader Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in Mandatory Palestine who collaborated with the Nazis.
Until the Palestinian leadership is willing to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst, which is anathema to the dictates of their Islamic religious traditions, Israel has to maintain the status quo for its own safety. Letting go of the reins would be inviting terrorists once again to wreak havoc as they relentlessly pursue Israel’s destruction instead of its accommodation.