文档介绍：The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict
THIRD EDITION (including Intifada 2000)
PUBLISHED BY JEWS FOR JUSTICE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
As the periodic bloodshed continues in the Middle East, the search for an equitable solution must
come to grips with the root cause of the conflict. The conventional wisdom is that, even if both
sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational "terrorists" who have no point of view worth
listening to. Our position, however, is that the Palestinians have a real grievance: their homeland
for over a thousand years was taken, without their consent and mostly by force, during creation
of the state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes - on both sides - inevitably follow from this
original injustice.
This paper outlines the history of Palestine to show how this process occurred and what a moral
solution to the region's problems should consist of. If you care about the people of the Middle
East, Jewish and Arab, you owe it to yourself to read this account of the other side of the
historical record.
Introduction
The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine in the late 19th century to
reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish
community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian
Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs' inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists were then
forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to
today.
The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true, as the documentary evidence in
this booklet will show. What really happened was that the Zionist movement, from the
beginning, looked forward to a plete dispossession of the indigenous Arab
population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as was possible. Land bought
by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold
or even leas