A friend of mine remarked recently that there was an injustice done to Arab peoples last century when the (new) State of Israel was established. His argument is: The original Israel was lost many centuries ago and there is no basis in law to re-establish it. While Jewish people were horrendously maligned in the early to mid years of last century, it did not justify confiscating the (long established) land of others so that Jewish people could come together in their own State. Is this view much shared by others? Is there a sound counter-position?
Your friend’s statement, while maybe over-simplified, is basically correct. Because the British saw themselves as masters of the world in the late 19th century, a number of British functionaries thought it would be good to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine. This, conveniently, would also get the Jews out of Europe so the movement (Zionism) had a great deal of support from many quarters. The basic idea was ill-conceived from the get go, but so were a lot of other British colonial ideas. At first, most of the land was legitimately purchased, although from absentee Turkish landlords. Arabs tenant families that had been farming the land for centuries were eventually displaced by policies favoring ownership and the hiring of Jews over non-Jews. And like any area that experiences massive immigration from a very different culture–most of the first Jewish immigrants were Europeans–there were lots of cultural tensions.
As other posters have pointed out, when the Israeli War for Independence broke out after the British fled the nightmare they themselves had created, many common people evacuated and were never allow to return. Israelis argue that some were fighting against the new state (true for many I’m sure), but to my mind, banning them from their property would be akin to saying that anyone who fought against the Union in the U.S. Civil War and didn’t stay on their property the whole should automatically have lost all their property rights and not be allowed to return. That’s just not going to work in the long run. So now there are Palestinian families who have been living in refugee camps since the 1940s.
The basic problem with the State of Israel is that it has been established as a “Jewish state.” Although originally this designation was meant to only have ethnic implications, over time the State has taken on a religious identity as well. If you’re not Jewish and you live in Israel, it is possible to be a citizen, but you will never be fully recognized as a citizen in the same way a Jew would be. For all practical purposes, non-Jews cannot own land within the State of Israel. Also, for a variety of reasons, non-Jews live under what we would think of as a sort of “Jim Crow” existence within the State of Israel. The idea of a nation built so strictly on the principle of ethnicity is abhorrent to our ideals as Americans. We (rightfully) bristle at the idea of Iran calling itself an “Islamic State” because we know non-Muslims will never ever have equal rights when a nation sees itself as a religious state. In the same way, the whole idea of a “Jewish State” in retrospect is just as ill-conceived because non-Jews will always experience discrimination and will never really have the same rights as Jews. Most Americans think that a nation needs to be a nation of its citizens that strives for equal treatment for all. Nations where one ethnicity is favored over another in terms of national identity is always going to discriminate against the non-“in group.”
The same principles were applied after the 1967 war, but only much more aggressively. As a practical matter, any occupied (outside the boundaries of the State) and that the State of Israel wishes to acquire for settlement, industry, parkland or whatever other use, the State acquires. The Palestinians view this as a violation of their property rights, and this is, to my mind a legitimate complaint.
In summary, it’s sort of a bizarre idea that the British implemented after WWI. We are still living with the consequences of bizarre British ideas in the Middle East that were implemented after WWI, most notably in Iraq.
