Golda Meir sent a letter to the New York Time which was published on January 14, 1976, 42 years ago.
It makes for fascinating reading today
“Golda Meir, on
the Palestinians”
By Golda Meir
The New York Times
January 14, 1976
To be misquoted is an
occupational hazard of political leadership; for this reason I should like to
clarify my position in regard to the Palestinian issue. I have been charged
with being rigidly insensitive to the question of the Palestinian Arabs. In evidence
of this I am supposed to have said, “There are no Palestinians.” My actual
words were: “There is no Palestinian people. There are Palestinian refugees.”
The distinction is not semantic. My statement was based on a lifetime of
debates with Arab nationalists who vehemently excluded a separatist Palestinian
Arab nationalism from their formulations.
When in 1921 I came to
Palestine – until the end of World War I a barren, sparsely inhabited Turkish
province – we, the Jewish pioneers, were the avowed Palestinians. So we were
named in the world. Arab nationalists, on the other hand, stridently rejected
the designation. Arab spokesmen continued to insist that the land we had
cherished for centuries was, like Lebanon, merely a fragment of Syria. On the
grounds that it dismembered an ideal unitary Arab state, they fought before the
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and at the United Nations.
When the Arab
historian Philip K. Hitti informed the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that
“there is no such thing as Palestine in history,” it was left to David
Ben-Gurion to stress the central role of Palestine in Jewish, if not Arab,
history.
As late as May 1956,
Ahmed Shukairy, subsequently head of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
declared to the United Nations Security Council, “It is common knowledge that
Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.” In view of this, I believe I may be
forgiven if I took Arab spokesmen at their word.
Until the 1960’s,
attention was focused on the Arab refugees for whose plight the Arab states
would allow no solution though many constructive and far-reaching proposals
were made by Israel and the world community.
I repeatedly expressed
my sympathy for the needless sufferings of refugees whose abnormal situation
was created and exploited by the Arab states as a tactic in their campaign
against Israel. However, refugee status could not indefinitely be maintained
for the original 550,000 Arabs who in 1948 joined the exodus from the battle
areas during the Arab attack on the new state of Israel.
When the refugee card
began to wear thin, the Palestinian terrorist appeared on the scene flourishing
not the arguable claims of displaced refugees but of a ghoulish nationalism
that could only be sated on the corpse of Israel.
I repeat again. We
dispossessed no Arabs. Our toil in the deserts and marshes of Palestine created
more habitable living space for both Arab and Jew. Until 1948 the Arabs of
Palestine multiplied and flourished as the direct result of Zionist settlement.
Whatever subsequent ills befell the Arabs were the inevitable result of the
Arab design to drive us into the sea. Had Israel not repelled her would-be
destroyers there would have been no Jewish refugees alive in the Middle East to
concern the world.
Now, two years after
the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur War, I am well aware of the potency of
Arab petrobillions and I have no illusions about the moral fiber of the United
Nations, most of whose members hailed gun-toting Yasir Arafat and shamefully
passed the anti-Semitic resolution that described Zionism, the national
liberation movement of the Jewish people, as racist.
But though Israel is
small and beset, I am not prepared to accede to the easy formula that in the
Arab-Israeli conflict we witness two equal contending rights that demand
further “flexibility” from Israel. Justice was not violated when in the huge
territories liberated by the Allies from the Sultan, 1 percent was set aside
for the Jewish homeland on its ancestral site, while in a parallel settlement
99 percent of the area was allotted for the establishment of independent Arab
states.
We successively
accepted the truncation of Transjordan, three-fourths of the area of historic
Palestine, and finally the painful compromise of the 1947 partition resolution
in the hope for peace. Yet though Israel arose in only one-fifth of the
territory originally assigned for the Jewish homeland, the Arabs invaded the
young state.
I ask again, as I have
often asked, why did the Arabs not set up a Palestine state in their portion
instead of cannibalizing the country by Jordan’s seizure of the West Bank and
Egypt’s capture of the Gaza Strip? And, since the question of the 1967 borders
looms heavily in the present discussions, why did the Arabs converge upon us in
June 1967, when the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, the Gaza Strip and
old Jerusalem were in their hands?
These are not idle
questions. They go to the heart of the matter – the Arab denial of Israel’s
right to exist. This right is not subject to debate. That is why Israel cannot
by its presence sanction the participation of the Palestine Liberation
Organization at the Security Council, a participation in direct violation of
Resolutions 242 and 338.
We have no common
language with exultant murderers of the innocent and with a terrorist movement
ideologically committed to the liquidation of Jewish national independence.
At no point has the
P.L.O. renounced its program for the “elimination of the Zionist entity.” With
startling effrontery P.L.O. spokesmen admit that their proposed state on the
West Bank would be merely a convenient “point of departure,” a tactical “first
stage” and finally, a combatant “arsenal” strategically situated for the easier
penetration of Israel.
I am often asked a
hypothetical question: How would we react if the P.L.O. agreed to abandon its
weapon, terror, and its goal, the destruction of Israel? The answer is simple.
Any movement that forswore both its means and its end would by that fact become
a different organization with a different leadership. There is no room for such
speculation in the case of the P.L.O.
This does not mean
that at this stage I disregard whatever national aspirations Palestinian Arabs
have developed in recent years. However, these can be satisfied within the
boundaries of historic Palestine.
The majority of the
refugees never left Palestine; they are settled on the West Bank and in Jordan,
the majority of whose population is Palestinian. Whatever nomenclature is used,
both the people involved and the territory on which they live are Palestinian.
A mini-Palestine
state, planted as a time bomb against Israel on the West Bank, would only serve
as a focal point for the further exploitation of regional tensions by the
Soviet Union.
But in a genuine peace
settlement a viable Palestine-Jordan could flourish side by side with Israel
within the original area of Mandatory Palestine.
On July 21, 1974, the
Israeli Government passed the following resolution: “The peace will be founded
on the existence of two independent states only – Israel, with united Jerusalem
as its capital, and a Jordanian-Palestinian Arab state, east of Israel, within
borders to be determined in negotiations between Israel and Jordan.”
All allied problems
can be equitably solved. For this to happen the adversaries of Israel will have
to stop devising overt schemes for her immediate or piecemeal extinction.
There are 21 Arab
states, rich in oil, land and sovereignty. There is only one small state in
which Jewish national independence has been dearly achieved. Surely it is not
extravagant to demand that in the current power play the right of a small
democracy to freedom and life not be betrayed.
Golda Meir was
Prime Minister of Israel from February 1969 to June 1974.
Barry Shaw
Author of '1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel' and the 2018 book 'Sarah's Story. A Tale of Love and Destiny.'
An excellent reminder of the truth about Israel and her Arab neighbours. Thanks, Barry.
ReplyDeleteaMAZING... and there are may Arabs or Palestinians that thrive in Israel... it st seems that they are all thriving and surviving hopfully!!
ReplyDeletea
aMAZING... and there are may Arabs or Palestinians that thrive in Israel... it st seems that they are all thriving and surviving hopfully!!
ReplyDeletea
aMAZING... and there are may Arabs or Palestinians that thrive in Israel... it st seems that they are all thriving and surviving hopfully!!
ReplyDeletea
aMAZING... and there are may Arabs or Palestinians that thrive in Israel... it st seems that they are all thriving and surviving hopfully!!
ReplyDeletea
Very interesting, I learned a lot, though by training I would need to fact check actual quotes, but the points made are logical. Now looking at it from 2017, there are two major changes, first the Soviet Union does not exist anymore and its successor state, Russia, is not the anti-Israel troublemaker that the USSR apparently way. In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of former Soviet citizens in Israel, living as Israeli citizens, and in general, quite politically conservative and right-wing, not to say extremist. And secondly, what Golda Meir alluded to, about the PLO, has actually happened. It has renounced terror as a means (though not the "armed struggle" but that's hardly surprising and no self-respecting national liberation movement could do that, and that is not the same as terror per se, even if some acts are terrorist acts); and it actually accepts Israel's right to exist, and the Palestinian Authority even cooperates with the Israeli authorities, to the extent that the PA and President Abbas are vilified by many ordinary Palestinians. So I believe that were Golda Meir in power today, that she would be amazed, and happily surprised, at that change, and she would denounce Netanyahu's extremist policies. People who believe his policies are the continuation of hers obviously are not reading attentively and are not paying attention to context. Meir was a very astute and smart woman, paying attention to history, in a way which present Israeli leaders do not, and its a crime against logic and coherence that they might/could claim her mantle. She would probably, based on what is written here, strike a deal with Abbas that would be more acceptable to the palestinian public that all the stupid humiliating tactics the weak Netanyahu implements. Meir was strong, he is weak, which explains why she made sense, but he does not. The only big point of contention I see from this letter at least is the question of Jerusalem, but even here, I believe that the pragmatic Golda Meir would agree to some internationally acceptable deal, as long as security was assured. And how better to have security than to keep your enemy right close to your heart! Imagine if the government buildings of both states were just a few hundred meters or a kilometer apart! It would be basically impossible for one to wage war against the other!
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