Zionist Expansionism Is At The Root Of Israel-Hamas Conflict
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
27 October
2023
Israel Does
Not Accept Two-State Solution, No Matter What It Says From Time To Time.
Main
Points:
1. Israel
controls 80 per cent of Palestinian land.
2. Zionism was
founded in 1897 in Switzerland.
3. Balfour
Declaration supported a homeland for Jews in Palestine.
4. One UN
resolution says Zionism is a form.of racism.
5. Orthodox
Jews oppose Zionism.
----
Damage in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Palestinian
News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages/Wikimedia
Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
------
Ram Puniyani
delves deep into the history of Israel-Palestine conflict and the emergence of
Zionist movement since the end of the 19th century. The Jews have faced
persecution at different stages of history and were expelled from different
regions because of their mischiefs. During the 20th century they faced
persecution by Adolf Hitler who massacred millions of Jews. They escaped from
Germany and settled in other European countries.
During the
30s, they seriously started to focus on Palestine as their prospective homeland
and started to buy land in Palestine. Though the US and Britain had sympathy
with them, they did not want to give shelter in their lands because of their
history of mischief.
Therefore,
they decided to move the Jews to Palestine. Britain implemented Balfour
Declaration which supported a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, the
homeland of the Jews, Israel was established. 55 per cent of Palestine was
given to them and Palestinians were forced to accept only 45 per cent of the
land. 14 lakh Palestinians were forced to leave their homes which their
forefathers inhabited. But the greed of the Zionists did not see any limits.
They wanted
to occupy the entire Palestine and drive out its original inhabitants from
Palestine. The Zionist movement envisaged a Greater Israel from the
Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates and carried forward their goal ruthlessly. Thai
started to unleash terror among the Palestinians. Britain supported Israel's
expansionist plans. Gradually, Israel occupied more and more areas and pushed
the Palestinians out of their lands. The Arabs resisted its plans but Britain
crushed all the resistance.
In 1967,
Israel Arab war broke out and the Arab's were defeated. As a result, the West
Bank was occupied by Israel. Israel did not rest there. It continually pushed
people of Gaza towards the south and west eating out into more and more land of
Gaza reducing it to a strip 46 kilometre long and 6 to 12 kilometre wide. 2.2
million people live in such a small area in sub human conditions. They cannot
go out of Gaza and cannot meet their relatives in West Bank. 70 per cent of the
people in Gaza are jobless. Gaza does not have an airport. The people in Gaza
virtually live in an open prison. The United Nations Secretary General rightly
called it "56 years of suffocating occupation. “Due to the expansionist
policy of Israel, resistance movements began in Gaza in the 70s.
Laila
Khalid was one of the pioneers of resistance. Yasser Arafat was also a
respectable figure who had moderate views. His group was named Fateh and was
popular among the Palestinians. But Israel tried to counter his popularity by
forming another resistance group Hamas which was popular in Gaza Strip.
Since 2006,
Hamas has controlled Gaza and even won the elections there. However, Israel
does not accept two state solution which Hamas is ready to accept.
7 October
attacks by Hamas have changed the political scenario in Gaza a bit but Hamas
has not been able to turn the conflict into a major war between Iran and
Israel. Israel has been pounding Gaza strip and has turned the northern Gaza
into rubble, Iran and other countries have not been able to compel Israel to
stop its aerial strikes.
More than
7000 people including children and women have been killed. Residential
buildings, schools and hospitals have been destroyed killing thousands of
innocent people.
France, US,
UK, Italy, Germany and Greece visited Israel and expressed solidarity with
Israel but have not said much to denounce Israel's war crimes. When UN
Secretary General criticised Israel's international law violations and its
suffocating occupation of Gaza, Netanyahu demanded his resignation.
UK Prime
Minister Rishi Sunak approved of Netanyahu's war crimes in Gaza by describing
it as Israel's right to self defence. Israel has refused electricity, fuel,
food, water and medicine to the people of Gaza. Its genocide. Its barbarism at
its worst.
The most
unfortunate part of all this tragedy is that Islamic countries have been
conspicuous by their absence from the entire discourse on Palestine. Yasser
Arafat did not get the support of the Arab and Islamic countries and Mahmoud
Abbas has been playing stooge to Israel. After Arafat, there is no real leader
of the Palestinians. Hamas is a guerrilla organisation. West Bank had been
relatively safe from Israeli bombarding until he said during the Cairo peace
summit that the Palestinians will not go anywhere and that the two state
formula should be implemented. After his statement Israel attacked West Bank
too warning
Mahmoud
Abbas not to raise his voice. Egypt also was hit with a missile for the same.
It convened the Cairo Peace Summit where two state formula was reiterated. The
message is loud and clear. No Muslim country should stand up for Palestine and
no one should talk about the state solution.
Israel has
not also shown willingness to hold talks for the release of Israeli hostages
ignoring demand of the Israeli people to expedite the release of the hostages
immediately as their relatives fear for the worst. Netanyahu does not want the
release of the hostages because as long as hostages are with Hamas, Netanyahu
will justify his bombings on Gaza in order to secure the release of the
hostages. He says he is attacking hospitals because Hamas takes shelter in
hospitals. He has been destroying buildings daily to finish Hamas and save
hostages.
The only
goal of Netanyahu, therefore, is to completely latten Gaza strip so that the
Gazans will not be able to stand on their feet for decades to come. Till then,
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Egypt and Turkey will look on the death and
destruction in Gaza. History will forgive these impotent rulers of the Islamic
countries.
-----
By Fully Supporting Israel, the West Has Chosen to Forget the Suffering of Palestinians
By
Ram Puniyani
27 October
2023
With
Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, Israel and Palestine have plunged into
yet another war. The cruelty of both attacks is beyond words, and as always in
such wars, common people on both sides are suffering the most.
Palestinians fleeing their homes after the establishment of Israel in
1948. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/David Eldan/CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED
----
In the
aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel, the major Western powers – the US,
Britain, France, among others – extended their full solidarity to Israel, and
even Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a statement in support of Israel
within hours after it came under attack. Modi who took months to open his mouth
on the violence in Manipur, and that too in a very insincere manner, was prompt
in conveying his sympathies to Israel. Many columnists fiercely condemned Hamas
for starting the war. A number of protests have been taking place across world
capitals condemning the Israeli regime’s treatment of Palestinians, and many
such protests are either led or seeing the participation of Jews.
Orthodox Jews outside the BBC building in Central London showing
solidarity with Palestine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Alisdare Hickson/CC BY-SA
2.0 DEED.
-----
Modi’s
outright support of Israel is in contravention of India’s longstanding view of
the Israel-Palestine conflict. India’s position has always been, in a way, to
put in Mahatma Gandhi’s words of 1938, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs as
England belongs to the English and France to the French.” Gandhi famously
observed that Jews suffered at the hands of Christians, but it cannot be
compensated by taking away the land of Palestinians to undo the wrongs of
history. Jews were the victims of anti-Semitism, which prevailed in Europe.
Among many roots of anti-Semitism was the feeling that it was Jews who were
responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Later other trade rivalries
were added to this resulting in Adolf Hitler pursuing the worst forms of anti-Semitism,
by massacring lakhs of Jews.
The
displaced Jews had to suffer a lot of discrimination, which resulted in the
Zionist movement taking root. Theodore Herzl’s pamphlet, The Jewish State, and
a conference of some Jews in 1897 in Switzerland’s Basle further laid the
foundations for the Zionist movement. Quoting from the Old Testament in the
Bible, Zionists declared that Palestine belonged to Jews and came up with the
slogan, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. The slogan
completely ignored the fact that Palestinians had inhabited the land for over a
millennia. And, in fact, Palestinians were not only Muslims (86%), but they
were also Christian (10%) and Jewish (4%). In the aftermath of that conference,
a ‘Jewish National Fund’ was instituted, and Jews from around the world began
to relocate to Palestine and bought lands even before Israel was established in
1948.
Even as
this trend began to take shape, a large number of Jews opposed Zionism, which
appealed to Jews to move to Palestine and urged specifically not to rent or
resell their lands to Arabs. The intentions of Zionists were very clear right
from the start that they wanted to increase their numbers in the region. As
their numbers increased, Palestine came under the British mandate and the local
Arabs began to see what was happening to their land. At this point, the British
implemented its Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported “the establishment
of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”. The seeds for the
present Israel-Palestine conflict were, thus, sowed by the British
colonialists.
Jewish
writer Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration in the most succinct
way, “It was the most improbable document of all the times.” American-Israeli
historian Martin Kramer, on the other hand, called the Declaration as something
which “constituted the first step towards the objective of political
Zionism…narrow, conditional, hedged…”
The Arab
resistance to Jewish migration and Britain’s plan to establish a Jewish
national home in Palestine began in 1936. It was, however, crushed by the
British.
The
persecution of Jews by Hitler intensified the immigration of Jews into the area
after the Second World War. Interestingly, European countries and America did
not encourage Jews to come to their lands. In due course, the historic
Palestine was divided into Israel and Palestine, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem
brought under international control. The division of land was very much against
the interests of Arabs, as 30% of Jews who occupied 7% of the land were given
55% of the land. Palestinians declared this as Al Naqba (Catastrophe) and were
forced to occupy 45% of the land.
Israel,
however, continues to enjoy the support of the Western powers. Through various
wars over the last seven decades, it has extended its territory to the extent
that today it occupies over 80% of the original Palestine land mass. The
Palestinians have since been dispossessed of their land and are turned into
refugees. Today 1.5 million of them have to live in camps with poor facilities.
Soon after the establishment of Israel in 1948, around 14 lakh Palestinians
were displaced from which emerged a resistance group called the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine. Leila Khalid was one of its major icons. The
other major figure of this resistance was Yasser Arafat, who took the middle
path and brought the issue to the global forefront. The Oslo Accord was one
such aborted attempt. The solution put forth by the global community – a two-state
solution, with Israel and Palestine as independent nations – is not acceptable
to Israel, for it does not recognise Palestine. Golda Meir, a former prime
minister of Israel, once stated that “there is no such thing as Palestinians”.
This, in fact, is the underlying policy of Israel.
The
expansion of Israel into Palestinian territories has been an ongoing thing
since 1948 and many resolutions of the United Nations have not been followed by
Israel, as America stands in support of the Zionist policies of Israel. Israel,
for its part, also acts as a collaborator in the American designs to control
oil resources in the region. The UN, in its Resolution 3379 in 1975, stated
that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. However, later
another resolution rolled back the view.
Palestinians
are probably the worst ever sufferers of discrimination and are being exiled
from their own land. This is, perhaps, the most cruel outcome of British
colonialism and the United States’ imperial designs. With the UN’s influence
waning over the last few decades, the question that arises is who will do
justice to the Palestinians.
Now, with
Hamas’s latest attack, the gross injustice against Palestinians by Israel has
intensified, as the West continues to support Israel. However, peace will
remain elusive in the region without addressing the root of the problem, which
is the Zionist expansionism and suppression of the Palestinians. For lasting
solution and peace in West Asia, underlying issues of conflict need to be
addressed. One silver lining following the latest conflict is that a number of
Jews around the world have been protesting against the high-handedness of
Israel.
-----
Ram Puniyani is president of the Centre of Study of Society and
Secularism and has written several books including Communal Politics: Facts
Versus Myths (Sage, 2003), Deconstructing Terrorist Violence (Sage 2015),
Indian Nationalism versus Hindu Nationalism (Pharos 2014) and Caste and
Communalism (Olive 2013).
Source: By
Fully Supporting Israel, the West Has Chosen to Forget the Suffering of
Palestinians
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/israel-hamas-zionist-expansionism/d/130987
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism