Democratic Palestine : 30 (ص 17)
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- عنوان
- Democratic Palestine : 30 (ص 17)
- المحتوى
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‘Israel’ — 40 Years
The following is the first half of an article by PFLP General Secretary George Habash, which first ap-
peared in Al Hadaf Magazine in May this year - on the fortieth anniversary of the Zionist state. It ad-
dresses the need for a more realistic assessment of this state as a prerequisite for deriving the Palestinian
and Arab strategy of confrontation.
Forty years have passed since the establishment of the
Zionist entity on the land of Palestine. Forty years is the age of
the Arab and Palestinian tragedy, of the Palesti-
nian exodus, of the uprootedness, homelessness, negation,
annihilation and massacres suffered by our people at the hands
of the Zionist usurpers and their allies.
These were also forty years full of resistance and struggle on
the part of both the Palestinian and Arab people for the
preservation of their national identity and the restoration of
their rights and occupied land.
In 1948, the Zionists’ dreams materialized when the ideas
Hertzl expressed in his book, The Jewish State, became a real
state in Palestine. With extensive support from imperialism
in general and Britain in particular, the armed Zionist usurpers
established their state under the umbrella of international law
represented by the Partition Plan (UN Resolution No. 181).
They went further in their interpretation of this resolution,
undermining the defined borders of the Palestinian state.
Within a few years, the chapters of the conspiracy were com-
pleted through the convention of the Jericho conference (1950)
which declared that the Hashemite regime was entitled to an-
nex the West Bank to the Kingdom of Jordan. The very word
Palestine has for years been absent from political lexicons and
atlases in a cruel attempt to erase it from memory.
Although the 15th of May 1948 is the official date of the
establishment of the aggressive Israeli state, its emergence
dates back much farther, being the result of a build-up phase
extending over thirty years, from the Balfour Declaration to
the Partition Plan. In this phase, the Jewish Agency (of the
World Zionist Organization) was acting as a state within the
state (in this case, the British Mandate), and exercising its
power to the utmost in the political, economic, military and
social spheres. This phase, characterized by the official adop-
tion of the Zionist scheme by British imperialism, was itself the
extension of twenty years of preparatory efforts by the Zionist
novement which had taken an organized, comprehensive form
at the Basel Congress in Switzerland in 1897. This congress was
the culmination of the extensive discussion which had accom-
panied the emergence of the Zionist movement in the middle of
the 19th century. é
Here lies the very reason for the «Israeli surprise» in the
Arab-Israeli war of 1948. There were those who considered this
war just a short round; they thought they were facing a few
bandits; they had no idea of the development of Zionist power
in the economic and military fields, and in terms of human
resources. This power was markedly superior to that of the
Arab forces which took part in the war, qualitatively and
quantitatively, in terms of arms and human resources.
This was accompanied by the intensification of both im-
potence and treason on the part of Arab reaction, together with
pervasive backwardness, discord, etc. The 1948 war was one
between two widely divergent sides: the Israelis who were living
their present and building up their future, and the Arabs who
had just come out of the moribund Ottoman heritage, and
whose development had been arrested since 1918, due to im-
perialist domination and the partition of the region among the
principal imperialist powers of that time.
Because of all these factors, the 1948 defeat represented a
typical interaction of Zionist ambitions, imperialist collusion
and Arab reactionary failure and treason; hence, the in-
terdependence of the struggles for the restoration of Palestine,
ending the corrupt Arab reactionary regimes, and liberation
from colonialism and imperialist domination.
The lopsided international balance of power prevailing at
that time contributed to the success of the imperialist-Zionist
effort to establish ‘Israel’. The Soviet Union had just emerged
from the war where it had suffered heavy damage and
casualties, together with the newly born socialist community. It |
was not in a position to foil the imperialist-Zionist scheme.
This is aside from all the wrong calculations and evaluations
on which attitudes towards the Zionist entity were based. These
included assumptions that the Jews had a right to self-
determination, and that there was a chance for «democratic
development in the young Hebrew state».
Much of world public opinion assumed that ‘Israel’ was a
state of victimized Jews who had - relatively speaking - paid
most dearly for the rise of the Nazi monster in Europe; thus it
would be peaceful and an «oasis of democracy» in the region.
Both western and Zionist mass media contributed to the pro-
motion of this image, achieving outstanding successes. This
image is not easy to erase, even after forty years of the Zionist
entity’s existence and aggression. Only gradually has the image
of the cruel occupier shooting at children, women and old
people, carrying out massacres, etc., begun to replace the im-
age of the small, peaceful country threatened by Arab «bar-
barism» and Palestinian «terror».
17 - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 30
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- المنشئ
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