More than 80 years ago, Albert Einstein famously declared, "Zionism springs from an even deeper motive than Jewish suffering. It is rooted in a Jewish spiritual tradition whose maintenance and development are, for Jews, the basis of their continued existence as a community." With Einstein's sentiments in mind, the Tufts community prepares once again to congregate in the Mayer Campus Center tomorrow to celebrate our annual I−Fest tradition as Israel turns 63 years old. Nonetheless, several questions have been raised regarding the legitimacy of celebrating the State of Israel's independence and its basic right to exist.
Should Israel's policies, in the context of the Arab−Israeli conflict, be addressed and extensively debated? Absolutely. However, when that scope overshadows and questions the commemoration of Israel's very existence, it becomes increasingly concerning.
Nakba Day, translating to the day of "the catastrophe" in Arabic, mourns the displacement of the Palestinian people after the creation of the State of Israel. The fundamental issue I take with Nakba Day is not the fact that it highlights Palestinian suffering, which must be both recognized as well as remedied, but rather its denial of legitimate Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.
The vision for Jewish self−determination was conceived by early Zionist thinkers and political philosophers who believed that after centuries of persecution and pogroms, the Jewish people were entitled to independence under the universal ideal of self−determination. That principle, as defined by Article 1 in the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, states that "All peoples have the right to self−determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development."
To address local Jewish and Arab demands for autonomy and liberation from the British Mandate of Palestine, the United Nations passed the Partition Plan in 1947. U.N. Resolution 181 Part I, Number 3 specifically calls for the establishment of both a Jewish state and an Arab state, with a Special International Regime overseeing the contentious city of Jerusalem. The implementation of Resolution 181 depended on the acceptance by both parties, but it was subsequently rejected by the League of Arab States, who could not come to terms with the idea of Jewish sovereignty in the British Mandate.
The Arab leaders boldly declared they would wage war on the State of Israel "with the same determination and force as during the Crusades," as King of Saudi Arabia Ibn Saud warned. The Arab League was vocal in its genocidal intentions, as Secretary General of the League Azzam Pasha declared on the eve of Israel's birth that "this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres."
As promised, hours after the nascent Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, five of the seven Arab League members launched a military attack on the Jewish state. Lebanon and Syria invaded in the north; Iraq and Transjordan (now Jordan) attacked from the east; and Egypt, assisted by Sudanese reinforcements, assailed the south. The defenders of the young State of Israel were ill−trained, ill−equipped and lacked a professional military, as judged by international standards.
The Independence War left a deep psychological as well as physical toll on the newly founded State of Israel. On a human scale, Israel lost 1 percent of its population, the proportional equivalent of 3 million Americans today for the United States. The reality that many of the fallen soldiers in the 1948 clashes were Holocaust survivors, some having just returned from concentration camps in Europe, left a deep wound in the psyche of the Jewish people. With the memories of Auschwitz−Birkenau's gas chambers still fresh in their minds, world Jewry were presented with a stark message that the international community would continue to turn a blind eye to the slaughtering of their kin.
Even as the young State of Israel was struggling for its survival, it proudly stated in its Declaration of Independence that, "The State of Israel … will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of creed, race or gender; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture." It was during this tumultuous birth of Israel that what we now know as the Palestinian refugee problem came to be. This issue is based heavily on the claim that the Zionist forces ethnically cleansed the land through systematic expulsion. This, however, could not be farther from the truth.
The hundreds of thousands of Arabs who abandoned their homes in the wake of the war in 1948 had a few reasons, including credible instances of expulsion, but it has been historically noted by historians, including "New Historian" Benny Morris, that the majority of these soon−to−be refugees left not because of Israel, but rather because of other Arabs. According to Morris' estimate, up to 80 to 85 percent of Palestinian Arabs who left were not forcibly expelled.
Furthermore, a research report by the Arab−sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, Lebanon, asserts that the majority of the Arab refugees in 1948 were not expelled, and 68 percent of them left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier. Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 war, wrote in the Beirut Telegraph that same year that, "the fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously."
Even among the Palestinian leadership, this fact is well−acknowledged. In 1976, in the official journal of the Palestine Liberation Organization, current Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas admitted, "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland. … The Arab States succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity."
To this day, the plight of Palestinian refugees in member states of the Arab League such as Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia has not been duly addressed. The autocratic regimes of the region have deliberately chosen to use refugees as political pawns, rather than helping them integrate into society, a clear violation of U.N. Resolution 194, which calls on all governments involved in the Palestinian refugee question to share responsibility. The international community repeatedly ignores the countless government−sanctioned abuses and breaches of Resolution 194, such as the Hashemite−orchestrated "Black September" campaign, in which thousands of Palestinians in Jordan were massacred.
I call on pro−Palestinian activists to celebrate Palestinian culture on this campus, while acknowledging the Israeli narrative and the right of a Jewish and democratic state to co−exist peacefully with its Arab neighbors. I implore my colleagues to explore the other Nakba — the inability of failed Palestinian leadership over the decades to coalesce around a constructive goal of building a prosperous and peaceful Palestine. At a time when Israel's neighbors in the Middle East cry out for freedom from oppression in the so−called "Arab Spring" and their autocratic leaders respond with equally tenacious and violent crackdowns, it becomes evident that the singular oasis of stability in the region is Israel. The Jewish state, while by no means a perfect democracy, can attribute this stability to its vibrant, maturing and functioning democratic system of government. Despite its flaws, astonishing images such as Arab women voting en masse with blue ballots in their hands for Knesset (parliamentary) elections, an Arab−Israeli judge sitting on the High Court of Justice, and Muslims and Jews alike treating patients at Israeli hospitals in unison all serve as microcosmic testaments to Israel's thriving democracy. Curious to learn more? Come see for yourselves, as we celebrate I−Fest 2011 in the Campus Center tomorrow from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
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Daniel Bleiberg is a sophomore majoring in international relations. He is the president of Tufts Friends of Israel.
