ABOUT THE NAQBA
(Article by Shlomo Avineri, Yediot Ahronot, 16.5.2003, Shabbat Supplement,
p. 22 - translation provided by the Israel Government Press Office)

Every year, Palestinians - including those who are Israeli citizens - mark
May 15 as a day of national mourning, in remembrance of the disaster, which
befell Arabs in the Land of Israel in the 1948 war. As human beings and as
Jews, we must be attentive to their pain and suffering: Hundreds of
thousands of men, women and children were uprooted from their homes - some
fled, some were expelled.

This is a human tragedy beyond its national dimensions. Whoever hopes for
peace and reconciliation between us and the Palestinians, cannot be
indifferent to their sorrow. However, whoever wishes to be attentive to the
Palestinians' pain must see things in their proper political and moral
contexts.

It is no coincidence that the Palestinians chose the phrase naqba, meaning
"disaster". This is a neutral term, as if one were discussing a natural
disaster. But what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 was the result of a
political decision on their part, and political decisions have consequences.

We should say it openly and forthrightly: The Palestinians who mourn on May
15 do not believe that the decision to prevent the carrying out of the
partition of the Land of Israel was either incorrect or immoral. What they
regret is that they lost that war, not that they began it.

It is possible to understand the heart of the Palestinians in particular and
that of the Arabs in general: From their point-of-view, the Zionist
settlement was an act of colonialism that came to rip away a section of the
Arab homeland. Arab consciousness finds it hard to accept this fact and
therefore, the Arab response to the Zionist attempt to gain a foothold in
the land was, from the outset, a total war - in which the murder of
civilians is considered a legitimate tool.

It was not following the occupation of 1967 that the Palestinians turned to
terror, in the simplest sense of the word - intentionally attacking
civilians. This was the Palestinians' modus operandi in 1920, in 1929, and
in 1936-9. When the Arabs of the Land of Israel - supported by the Arab
countries - decided to prevent the establishment of a Jewish in 1948, they
came out against not only the Zionist movement and the Jewish community in
the Land of Israel, but against international legitimacy as well.

It was the UN - the sole body that expressed, however imperfectly,
international legitimacy - which determined that the Jews merited a state in
part of their homeland. It was the UN that accepted the Zionist claim that
this was a conflict between two national movements, and which therefore saw
compromise, i.e. partition, as the only fair way out. The Zionist
movement - not without some reservations - accepted the principle of
partition. The Arabs of the Land of Israel and the Arab countries rejected
it.

When four Arab states, who are members of the UN - Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and
Iraq - were recruited to support the Israeli Arab armed struggle against the
establishment of the Jewish state, they went to war not only against the
Jewish community in the Land of Israel, but also against the UN decision.
It is irrelevant that Israel has not always done what the UN expected of it;
what is important is that on the central issue - the right of the Jewish
people to have its own state in its own land - the UN accepted the Jewish
claim and rejected the Arab claim. From the point of international
legitimacy, the Arab war against Israel was born in sin.

The fact is that even today Palestinians refuse to accept that we are
talking about rights against rights; from their point of view, in 1948, as
today, we are talking about rights against injustice. This is the basis of
the insistence on the right of return. The tragedy is that this viewpoint
fundamentally prevents compromise.

The Palestinian attempt to compare the naqba to the Holocaust is bound in
deep moral obtuseness: European Jews who were murdered by Nazis did not go
to war against Germany. The Arabs of the Land of Israel went to war - and
lost. That is the only difference.

However, there is an aspect of comparison with Germany that is politically
and morally relevant: When Germany was defeated, in 1945, over 10 million
Germans were deported - all of whom were civilians, woman and children, not
only members of the Nazi party - from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and
Yugoslavia. That is the terrible price that millions of innocent Germans
paid for Nazi crimes. Nobody - not even Germany -petitions today for the
right of return for these millions and their children, to the countries they
were expelled from and where they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds
of years.

A German government, that raises the issue of the right of return for these
millions as a condition for peace with eastern European countries, will be
perceived - justifiably - as neo-Nazi, and as trying to change the outcome
of the Second World War. This is cruel and harsh - but the whole world,
including the entire German political sphere, except for negligible margins,
recognizes this.

Therefore, we listen attentively and with empathy to the sufferings of the
Palestinians - as every person, including Jews, cannot be impervious to the
sufferings of millions of Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe.
Gunter Grass's last book, "Crabwalk", is a noble expression of this pain,
and is expressed specifically by someone to the left of the political
spectrum.

However, with all the understanding for the suffering of fellow men, the
truth must be told to our Palestinian neighbors: Just like Germany in 1939
went to war - and lost; just as in the German case, the fall was bound with
much suffering; but just as Germany internalized the messages of the World
War, in the same way - with all the pain and understanding - if the
Palestinians want peace, they must take moral responsibility for the
decisive outcome in 1948, to go to war, not just against Israel, but also
against international legitimacy, which accepted the Jews' right to
sovereignty.