54. Het ontstaan van Israel

Ilan Pappé schreef  een artikel waaruit ik onderstaande tekst haal.
Het geeft heel kort het ontstaan van Israel weer.
Niet het hele verhaal, dat begint bij Herzl en de Balfour declaratie, maar de situatie rondom de stichting in 1948.
NB: zie ook deze blog.

Ilan Pappé :
The UN was a very young and inexperienced organisation in those days, and the people it appointed to find a solution to the conflict were at a loss where to begin or how to proceed. The Jewish Agency gladly filled the vacuum, exploiting Palestinian disarray and passivity to the full.
In May 1947, the Agency handed a plan, complete with a map, to the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), proposing the creation of a Jewish state over 80 per cent of Palestine – more or less Israel today without the Occupied Territories. In November 1947 the Committee reduced the Jewish state to 55 per cent of Palestine, and turned the plan into UN General Assembly Resolution 181. Its rejection by Palestine surprised no one – the Palestinians had been opposed to partition since 1918. Zionist endorsement of it was a foregone conclusion, and in the eyes of the international policemen, that was a solid enough basis for peace in the Holy Land. Imposing the will of one side on the other was hardly the way to effect a reconciliation, and the resolution triggered violence on a scale unprecedented in the history of modern Palestine.
If the Palestinians weren’t happy with the Zionist idea of partition, it was time for unilateral action. The Jewish leadership turned to its May 1947 map, showing clearly which parts of Palestine were coveted as the future Jewish state. The problem was that within the desired 80 per cent, the Jews were a minority of 40 per cent (660,000 Jews and one million Palestinians). But the leaders of the Yishuv had foreseen this difficulty at the outset of the Zionist project in Palestine. The solution as they saw it was the enforced transfer of the indigenous population, so that a pure Jewish state could be established. On 10 March 1948, the Zionist leadership adopted the infamous Plan Dalet, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the areas regarded as the future Jewish state in Palestine.
Palestine was not divided, it was destroyed, and most of its people expelled. These were the events which triggered the conflict that has lasted ever since.

Uit Livia Rokach:

Other versions or approaches to the facts have more often than not been ignored. For example, recent disclosures by Nahum Goldmann (Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1979) have gone practically unnoticed. Goldmann, who for more than thirty years headed the pro-Zionist World .Jewish Congress, charges that the Arabs were not consulted about the partition of Palestine in 1947, and further that their willingness to negotiate a political compromise that might have prevented the 1948 war was vetoed and undermined by Ben Gurion before May 1948.

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In 1979 werd het persoonlijke dagboek van Moshe Sharett ( Israelisch minister president van 1954-1955) gepubliceerd, in het Hebreeuws.  

Livia Rokach  ( haar vader was minister in het kabinet van Sharett) heeft hier een boek over geschreven:  Israels geliefde terrorisme. 

Liovia Rokach trekt de volgende conclusies uit Sharett's dagboek: 

1 .The Israeli political /military establishment never seriously believed in an Arab threat to the existence of Israel. On the contrary, it sought and applied every means to exacerbate the dilemma of the Arab regimes after the 1948 war. The Arab governments were extremely reluctant to engage in any military confrontation with Israel, yet in order to survive they needed to project to their populations and to the exiled Palestinians in their countries some kind of reaction to lsrael's aggressive policies and continuous acts of harassment. In other words, the Arab threat was an Israeli-invented myth which for internal and inter-Arab reasons the Arab regimes could not completely deny, though they constantly feared Israeli preparations for a new war.

2. The Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning. The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East.

3. In order to achieve this strategic purpose the following tactics were used:

a) Large- and small-scale military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, then respectively under the control of Jordan and Egypt. These operations had a double purpose: to terrorize the populations, and to create a permanent destabilization stemming from tensions between the Arab governments and the populations, who felt they were not adequately protected against Israeli aggression.

b) Military operations against Arab military installations in border areas to undermine the morale of the armies and intensify the regimes' destabilization from inside their military structures.

c) Covert terrorist operations in depth inside the Arab world, used for both espionage and to create fear, tension and instability.

4. lsrael's achievement of its strategic purpose was to be realized through the following means:

a) New territorial conquests through war. Although the 1949-50 armistice agreements assigned to Israel a territory one-third larger than had the UN partition plan, the Israeli leadership was still not satisfied with the size of the state, the borders of which it had committed itself to respect on the international level. It sought to recover at least the borders of mandate Palestine. The territorial dimension was considered to be a vital factor in Israel's transformation into a regional power.

b) Political as well as military efforts to bring about the liquidation of all Arab and Palestinian claims to Palestine through the dispersion of the Palestinian refugees of the 1947-49 war to faraway parts of the Arab world as well as outside the Arab world.

c) Subversive operations designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.


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Er wordt altijd gezegd dat Israel bij haar ontstaan in 1948 van alle kanten werd aangevallen door arabische legers van diverse landen. 
Welnu, het machtigste leger was het Jordaanse leger ( 'Het arabisch Legioen' geheten) deed niet mee, omdat Jordanië een stuk land kreeg waar vrijwel geen joden woonden. 

De andere legers waren heel slecht geoefend en niet gemotiveerd.
De Israeli's wisten dit, zoals blijkt uit deze briefwisseling tussen Ben Gurion en de minister van Buitenlandse zaken Moshe Sharett.

 Sharett schrijft aan Ben Gurion : "We hebben alleen genoeg troepen om ons te verdedigen, niet om het land over te nemen. "

Ben Gurion antwoordt: 
" Als wij op tijd de wapens ontvangen die we al hebben gekocht, en misschien zelfs iets ontvangen van wat de VN ons heeft beloofd, zullen we in staat zijn niet alleen onszelf te verdedigen, maar ook dodelijke klappen uit te delen aan de Syrieërs in hun eigen land- en Palestina in zijn geheel in te nemen. Daar twijfel ik niet aan. We kunnen alle Arabische strijdkrachten aan. Dat is geen mystiek geloof maar een kille en rationele berekening gebaseerd op praktisch onderzoek."

(Mijn bron: Ilan Pappé : "De etnische zuivering van Palestina." pag 67.)