Re: Entre aspas

Sobre uma polémica entre o Homem a Dias e Barnabé, e a identidade dos "palestinianos", remeto para

"An Open Letter to David Horowitz on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" Scott McConnell, fica aqui uma parte do texto onde destaco: "Of course if the Palestinians had been as nationally self-conscious as the Jews from the outset, Zionism would never have fulfilled its ambitions, at least not in Palestine"


"...the argument that the Palestinians, unlike the Jews, have no solid national claim to land their fathers and forefathers lived on before the Zionist enterprise began.

To this end, you argue that that the Palestinians never had an independent national existence for the arriving Zionist Jews to suppress, and therefore are not entitled to one now. They were, you write "largely nomads who had no distinctive language or culture to separate them from other Arabs . . . the idea of a Palestinian nation did not even exist . . . [in 1950] they did not attempt to create a state of their own . . ." and so on. You probably overstate the case – there clearly was agriculture and commercial life in Arab Palestine before the Zionists arrived.

But you are right to say there was no Palestinian nationalism at the time of the Balfour Declaration. Furthermore, that Palestinian "nationalism" which had come into existence a generation later, by the time of the UN partition plan, was not nearly so politically developed as Zionism. Another way to say this is that Jewish nationalism was derived from (and a response to) the European nationalism of the 19th century; Arab nationalism (including Palestinian nationalism) arrived one or two or even three generations later, as part of the wave of Afro-Asian nationalism born after World War I.

At every stage in the confrontation between the original Zionist settlers and the Palestinian Arabs, the consequences of this Zionist head start were manifest. The Zionists had leaders (of every ideological stripe) with a clear sense of the Jewish national mission; the Palestinians were represented by local "notables" who reigned over a semi-feudal system. A typical Palestinian Arab in the years before 1948 might have had a sense of his own village and those in the next valley, he did not think of "the Palestinian people."

The Zionist settlers, by contrast, were among the most sophisticated and nationally conscious people the world had ever seen. The Jews were all literate, many Palestinians, not; the Jews could understand the necessity of training and arming all their available men (and many women); the Palestinians' armed resistance was by comparison haphazard and formless. The Zionists could tax their entire community (in Israel and, in a way, in the Diaspora) to subsidize the building an army and of a new state; the Palestinians were unable to do so. The Jews had leaders who could move effectively in corridors of world power; the Palestinians were geographically remote from key decision-makers and feeble in their ability to estimate accurately the political situation they faced.

It is not too much to say that it took establishment of Israel and the experience of Israeli rule on the land occupied in 1967 to give birth to a genuine Palestinian nationalism and spur the Palestinians to embark on the long course of trying to catch up. Of course if the Palestinians had been as nationally self-conscious as the Jews from the outset, Zionism would never have fulfilled its ambitions, at least not in Palestine.
(...)
You make an important point about the UN partition plan which created the legal basis for Israel's establishment: had the Arabs accepted it, there would be no Middle East conflict. I certainly concur that the Arabs would have been better off if they had agreed to partition, instead of initiating wars they were not prepared to fight. But I'm not sure that their acceptance would have put an end to the conflict.

As you know, from the time of the state's very founding, there have been important Israelis (and not only in the Likud Party) who aspired to expand Israel to what they called its "natural borders," who wished to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians whose lands they coveted. ("Transfer" was the preferred euphemism.) Diplomatic necessity prevented the Israelis who thought this (including Ben Gurion, for instance) to restrain themselves but I am not sure that Arab acquiescence to the original partition agreement would have satisfied the Zionists who had long dreamed of the lands of Biblical Judea and Samaria.

You yourself seem relieved that that the Palestinians did not accept their half a loaf in a timely manner, devoting several paragraphs in support of the notion that Jordan is the logical place for a Palestinian state anyway. Sharon is known to share this notion of "resolving" the Palestinian problem, which would be acceptable neither to the Palestinians nor Jordanians.

You state that the Palestinians who didn't flee in 1948 and remained in what is now Israel have more political rights than any Arabs in the Arab world. This too is not an insignificant point – just as it was not insignificant when Senators from the segregationist South argued that American blacks had far more rights, and were far more prosperous, than blacks in Africa. But the yearning for political self-determination (or equal civil rights) has become a nearly universal political drive – whose claims any political realist has to acknowledge. I can think of no instance in which it has been trumped by the allure of exercising circumscribed minority rights in an alien and hostile polity.

When your essay reaches the Oslo period, I sense some uncertainty creep into your argument, as if you yourself are not sure whether you are disappointed, relieved, or ecstatic at the apparent breakdown of the peace process. If, like Ariel Sharon, you believe the "Palestinian homeland" is "Jordan" – then of course you would be delighted at the failure of Oslo, and can look forward to further Israeli measures to demolish homes and drive the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.(...)"