No Israel, No Hamas?

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/middle_east/2001/israel_and_the_palestinians/340237.stm
May 1948 – Jewish settlers proclaim the state of Israel. British troops leave. Fighting breaks out with Arab neighbours, ending in October 1949.
Some 700,000 Palestinians flee or are driven from what had been British-mandate Palestine. Israel annexes large tracts of land. Jordan and Egypt hold onto the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively. Control of Jerusalem is split between Israel in the west and Jordan in the east.

The words highlighted above shows that even the BBC agrees that the Jewish settlers illegally occupied Palestinian lands and drove the Palestinians out of their homeland.

From: http://www.helium.com/items/942983-how-the-events-of-1948-transformed-the-middle-east
On May 14, 1948, a battered, war-weary Britain prepared to evacuate from Palestine, having relinquished their responsibility for governing the area to the United Nations. In a small room in Tel Aviv, the leaders of a provisional Jewish government signed a Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the new state of Israel. Those actions immediately displaced all Palestinians and declared them nation-less.

Like most people (with exeception of perhaps a certain soon to retire President), I am deeply saddened and angered by the carnage and mayhem in the Middle East. I thus feel that maybe a quick look at how all this started could shed some light on why it is happening and how we can stop it. Please note that this is not a doctoral dissertation on the Middle Eastern conflict, it is merely an observation from afar.

In the 19th century, the land of Palestine had a multi-racial population of 86% Muslim, 10% Christians and 4% Jewish living in peace. However, in the late 1800s, a group called the Zionists, after rejecting alternative locations in South America and Africa, decided to colonise this land for the Jewish people.

The ancestors of many Gazans used to live in the country now called Israel. Prior to 1948, this country called Israel does not exist. On 2nd November 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration from the foreign secretary Arthur J. Balfour in the form of a letter to a British Zionist leader (Lord Rothschild) promising the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. What right did the British government have to grant the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine?

The refusal of the British government to grant Palestine independence as well as the large scale Jewish immigration beginning in 1922 culminated in a rebellion and strikes in 1937. This continued until after WWII.

In 1947, the British government gave up and passed the problem to the UN. The UN proposed to split the land called Palestine into two independent states i.e. Israel and Arab Palestine. But the Palestinian Arab state never came into being but instead, resulting from the 1948 war, the Israeli state occupied 77 per cent of the territory of Palestine, destroying more than 500 towns and villages and expelling most of the indigenous Palestinian population. It is estimated that more than 700,000 Palestinians were made refugees in 1948. Israel also occupied the larger part of Jerusalem while Jordan and Egypt occupied the other parts of the territory initially assigned by the partition resolution (Ref: http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/ngo/history.html).

It was noted by some researchers that in the 1948 war, Zionist forces outnumbered the Arab and Palestinian forces three to two. It is also interesting to note that the Arab armies entered the conflict only after Zionist forces had committed 16 massacres, including the grisly massacre of over 100 men, women, and children at Deir Yassin lead by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (Ref: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/).

The Arab states refused to recognise the Jewish state and wars broke out in 1956, 1967, 1973 & 1982. The number of Palestinian refugees at the moment is estimated to be around 4 million. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian.”

Many see the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip in December 2008 as a justifiable retaliation to Hamas’ rocket attacks. Some even commented that if Hamas did not launch any rockets into Israel, the IDF would not need to retaliate. My answer is – the existence of Hamas, Hezbollah and PLO are due to Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land; expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral homes and denying them basic necessities like food and medical supplies by laying siege over the refugee settlements. If there was no Israel, there would be no need for Hamas to exist.