Walid Khalidi: The reconquista of Mandatory Palestine under British aegis

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• published: 04 Feb 2014
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Please turn on the Captions [CC] for this video to discern the dialogue more clearly. see full video The Nakba. Walid Khalidi @ http://youtu.be/PxY1oUmpsqw [select a following time index to skip to that time in the video] 00:00 & 44:30 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine 08:24 Zionist Nationalist Movement 17:00 Balfour Declaration 24:50 Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936--39) 26:26 The Peel Commission 30:24 The White Paper of 1939 2009 Keynote: Walid Khalidi (Co-founder of the Institute of Palestine Studies) From 1947 to 1897: From Partition to Basle. The Nakba at the Brunei Gallery - SOAS - University of London. Palestine Society: http://www.thenakba.co.uk/ http://vimeo.com/26132299 ************************************ Security Issues Project http://desip.igc.org/MiddleEast/khalidiMEReconquista.htm --------------------------------------------- Walid Khalidi - "The Hebrew Reconquista of Palestine" Since the issue was divine right, questions of who fired the first shot, and who did or did not accept partition are mere diversions and irrelevancies. ---Walid Khalidi, 2009 I The foundational premise of official Israeli historiography is that the Yishuv was in an essentially defensive mode during the 1947-48 war. (The Yishuv is the term for the pre-1948 Jewish settlement in Palestine.) In actuality, on the eve of the 1947-1948 war, the Yishuv was in a full-blown territorially expansionist mode. This militant mode long preceded the November 1947 UNGA partition resolution, which within six months led to the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe. 2 The change envisaged for Palestine by the Balfour Declaration was unprecedentedly radical. Article 2 of the League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, entrusted to Britain in 1922, provided for "placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of a Jewish national home." The local Arab community could not partner with this colonial enterprise upon which rode an external actor, the Jewish diaspora as represented by the World Zionist Organization (WZO). The element of nonconsent of the local community was paramount. [...] Every Jewish immigrant who entered Palestine between 1918 and 1948, incrementally eroding the country's majoritarian demography, did so against the wishes of the Palestinians, for the most part with the help of British bayonets. Weizmann acknowledged to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 that it had been impossible to submit the Zionist project to the Palestinians because it would have been refused. The genius of the Zionist narrative is its ability to depict the Palestinians' resistance to this plan to dispossess them as Palestinian aggression, and the Zionist drive to impose this revolutionary status quo on the Palestinians by force of arms as Jewish self-defense. (25) 3 II The UN General Assembly (UNGA) partition resolution of 27 November 1947 was the proximate portal of the Nakba. Britain had dumped the "Palestine problem" on the UN and got out of its difficulties by ostensibly creating two states, a Jewish and an Arab state to succeed the Mandate in Palestine, thus liquidating its moral responsibility to its policy's principal victim: the Arab population. At the UN, British prime minister Clement Attlee pretended not to endorse it by abstaining, while seeing to it that Britain's Commonwealth partners voted in its favor. Meanwhile U.S. president Harry Truman jammed partition down the throats of other UN member states. The UNGA partition resolution is one of the foundational myths of Israel on the grounds that it was equitable, practicable and morally and legally viable and that the Jews had accepted it while the Palestinians and Arabs had rejected it. But the Palestinians and the Arabs rejected it precisely because it was not equitable, practicable, or morally and legally viable. Aggression and offensive action were built into the very concept of the UN partition resolution. The area of the proposed Jewish state was 15 million dunams (1 dunam = 1,000 sq meters) while Jewish land ownership in 1948 totaled 1.7 million dunams. The UN was effectively saying to the Yishuv: go seize those additional 13.3 million dunams that you don't own from those who do. (26) Since the Yishuv was fully mobilized, and there was no central authority to oversee the process and no agreed mechanism for implementation, the Jewish forces were able to use the alibi of the UNGA partition resolution to establish the Jewish state by force of arms under the guise of conforming to the international will. [...] The outcome of the regular war was already sealed in favor of Israel by the time it began. The "existential threat" supposedly posed by the Arab armies, like the ostensible equity and moral viability of the UN partition resolution, is a myth. (27)