Via AFP
February 26, 2010
by Norman Finkelstein - February 2010
From the chapter entitled SELF-DEFENSE(reproduced with the permission of the author and the publisher)
Question:
What do you feel is the most acceptable solution to the Palestine problem?
Mahatma Gandhi:
The abandonment wholly by the Jews of terrorism and other forms of violence. (1 June 1947)1
On 29 November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution dividing British-mandated Palestine into a Jewish state incorporating 56 percent of Palestine and an Arab state incorporating 44 percent of it.2 In the ensuing war the newly born State of Israel expanded its borders to incorporate nearly 80 percent of Palestine.
The only areas of Palestine not conquered comprised the West Bank, which the Kingdom of Jordan subsequently annexed, and the Gaza Strip, which came under Egypt’s administrative control. Approximately 250,000 Palestinians driven out of their homes during the 1948 war and its aftermath fled to Gaza and overwhelmed the indigenous population of some 80,000.
Today 80 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants consist of refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants, and more than half of the population is under 18 years of age. Its current 1.5 million inhabitants are squeezed into a sliver of land 25 miles long and five miles wide, making Gaza one of the most densely populated places in the world. The panhandle of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza is bordered by Israel on the north and east, Egypt on the south, and the Mediterranean Sea on the west. In the course of its four-decade-long occupation beginning in June 1967, and prior to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s redeployment of Israeli troops from inside Gaza to its perimeter in 2005, Israel had imposed on Gaza a uniquely exploitive regime of “de-development” that, in the words of Harvard political economist Sara Roy, deprived “the native population of its most important economic resources—land, water, and labor—as well as the internal capacity and potential for developing those resources.”3
Read More…
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
No comments:
Post a Comment