Partition Palestine now!
Palestine, Reporter's View, 4/3/1999

Unfortunately for the Palestinians of 1948 that the media revolution had not taken place by then. Otherwise, CNN and perhaps every other television news channel, could have aired live coverage of one of the worst ethnic cleansing that took place. But in those old dark days, Zionist gangs managed to force at least 800,000 Palestinians out of their Fatherland into what has become known as the Palestinian Question.

There were those who argued that some of the Palestinians who became refugees after 1948 had not been forced out and that they opted to leave. But this is not exactly the case. Those who did so "voluntarily" took their decision upon hearing of the abhorrent massacres that the Zionist gangs committed against the Palestinian population in Palestine. Names like Deir Yassin, Dawaymeh, Lod and others have become part of the bloody agenda of the Zionist gangs that took over Palestine and replaced the native Palestinians with new comers, Jews who left other countries and migrated into the land of milk and honey, into Palestine.

With today's modern technology, such a horrendous crime against humanity cannot be easily committed. World opinion has proved it has a say in events of this kind. Live coverage from war-shattered countries has made those countries a center of interest for all peoples of the earth. A question that has yet to find an answer is under what circumstances will the west take a tough stand against Israel? Would a new Palestinian exodus force the west to act against Israel? And if the Palestinians declare a state of their own in May, when the period of the interim agreements with Israel expires, will Israel try to storm the Palestinian cities as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly warned, or even threatened? And if the Israelis do storm the PNA areas, will the Palestinians be forced again into a new exile? And if they are forced into a new exile, will US cruise missiles hit Israeli military targets to force a defiant Israel to honor the rules of negotiations and their outcome?

These are all hypothetical questions. None of the Palestinian officials has raised such a scenario, which, for many, seems to be a bit unimaginable. There is hope among Palestinians in the street, however, that the world has really changed and that it is not the same it was fifty years ago. Officially, the PNA has been very carefully following up developments in Kosovo. Some even believe that a plain support by the PNA for the NATO action might disrupt the friendly atmosphere that President Arafat hopes to get at the Kremlin when he visits Moscow Monday.

But Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon was much more outspoken in this context. According to reports in the Israeli press by the weekend, Sharon had reportedly told his aides that Israel should not support the NATO military action against Serbia "because it might find herself one day a victim of a similar action." Sharon was voicing his worries that the international community might one day decide to intervene in the Arab-Israeli conflict and impose a settlement on both sides of the conflict. Sharon's fears are the main reason why Israel's response to the NATO attack on Yugoslavia was restrained and did not go any further beyond a general statement expressing sorrow for the enforced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars. "Israel should look ahead to the future and therefore should not offer any precedent to the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. Imagine one day the Arabs living in Israel might demand a self-rule linked to the PNA," he told his aides. Sharon is as such worried that a day might come in which the western world, led by the US, might take action against Israel as opposed to verbal condemnation and diplomatic pressure that characterize the Western stands nowadays.

The change is seemingly on the way and the west is getting closer to Palestinian rights than ever before. Europe has already provided the springboard for a more effective role in the Arab-Israeli conflict when the EU released the Berlin declaration which openly spoke of the Palestinian legitimate right to independent statehood and denied Israel any right to veto the creation of such a state. Moreover, the letter the EU sent to the Israeli Foreign Ministry regarding the status of Jerusalem, considering the city a "corpus separatum" has given fresh blood to what is hoped to be a new trend in Western diplomacy towards the Palestinian question. The reference to Jerusalem as a corpus separatum brings back to the front a five-decade long debate on the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish.

Israel, a country created by a UN resolution, has ironically beaten all world records of defiance of UN resolutions pertinent to the Palestinian question. Even the UN resolution that gave Israel its birth certificate was not honored by the Jewish state in its entirety. Israel took from the resolution the chapter that spoke of the Jewish state and disqualified the remaining clauses. It is for this reason that Palestinians still hope that it is about time for the world to step forward and finally back up a genuine effort to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of international legitimacy, represented by UN Resolution 181.

Not only that UN Resolution 181 has not been overruled by any other UN resolution, but the UN body itself has adopted since 1948 countless resolutions pertinent to the Palestinian question that had all backed the Palestinian "legitimate and inalienable" rights. The UN even adopted a decision back in the mid 70s that equaled Zionism with racism. Palestinian UN envoy Nasser Al Kidwa was right when he underlined the importance of Resolution 181 in a letter he addressed lately to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. "We believe that Israel must still explain to the international community the measures it took illegally to extend its laws and regulations to the territory it occupied in the war of 1948, beyond the territory allocated to the Jewish state in resolution 181. Such a situation has not been accepted by the international community," Al Kidwa wrote in his letter.

Al Kidwa explained that once the Palestinian people and their leadership took the decision to forge peace with Israel on the basis of coexistence, Resolution 181 has become acceptable as providing the international legal basis for the existence of both the Arab and the Jewish states in Palestine. In other words, while Palestinian officials demand a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories Israel conquered in the June 1967 war, they have not dropped the legal basis for a historical compromise with Israel based on Resolution 181. Any other basis for peace in the Middle East cannot lead but to a temporary truce, not to a comprehensive and lasting peace.

The PNA has not made up its mind yet as to whether to go on with the planned statehood announcement next May 4 or defer it to some other time as most of the world countries had advised PNA President Arafat to do. And as long as the question on when the Palestinian state will be declared is in limbo, no Palestinian official would be ready to discuss in the open the borders of such a state. They at least are relieved by the fact that their debate with the West is on the timing of the declaration and not on the declaration itself which seems to have already obtained wall-to-wall international support. A Palestinian official who spoke on condition of anonymity Saturday evening said that it is sure President Arafat will refer in a way or another to Resolution 181 in his statehood declaration but "I cannot speak for the president now. So far he has not taken a final stand on this issue since he is still examining a number of options that all seem to be open for him."

The official expressed hopes that the world that was shocked upon seeing hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Kosovo displaced and decided to attack Serbian war criminals in Yugoslavia, would take no less effective measures against Israel if it continues to dishonor the signed agreements with the Palestinians. "I cannot imagine US cruise missiles hitting targets in Israel but I do imagine a real practical pressure by the US administration on Israel." What kind of pressure he could not specify but repeated: "A real pressure is good enough to finally prove that might is not right and that only right can be right!"

Previous Stories:
  U. N. General Assembly Resolution 181 - The full text   (4/3/1999)
  Abdul Meguid: Canceling decision to divide Palestine calls into question the existence of Israel   (4/3/1999)
  Shaath meets Moussa, says European statement supports standing with Palestinian people   (4/3/1999)
  Mahmoud Darwish's speech at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of al-Nakba (the Catastrophe)   (5/14/1998)

Please add a link on your webiste pointing to ArabicNews.com and bookmark ArabicNews.com & subscribe to our daily email news bulletin.

Search