The roots of the conflict in Palestine

Al Arabiya News Channel, May 15, 2008

Dr Salim Nazzal

Let me seek to define three types of European colonial settlement projects seen in the past three hundred years. My intention in focusing on the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to demonstrate that the Zionist project is a corrupt copy of other colonial projects, which occurred in previous periods. The common factor between these colonial projects is the same, the crimes against the native peoples of these countries. Due to the limitation of time, however, I must do this without going into complex analyses of the similarities and differences between these colonial projects.

The first paradigm is the white European colonial settlement of what was called the 'New World,' that is, the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In this example, the native populations were overwhelmed by waves of overseas European immigrants turning the indigenous peoples into a minority. The second paradigm is the white European settlers in what were known as Rhodesia and South Africa; in this colonial model, the white immigrants continued being the minority and in the end lost their power due to the indigenous people's struggle. It is no coincidence that the state of Israel, which came into being in1948, maintained close ties with the white regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia, supplying both with arms.

The third paradigm is the Zionist colonial project in Palestine. The Zionist project did not conclude, as in North America, with the colonizers becoming the majority, nor as in apartheid South Africa where whites continued to be the minority. Despite the ethnic cleansing which took place in 1848 when the Zionist terror organizations expelled around 70 percent of Palestinians from their ancestral homes and lands and from more than 418 villages and towns, and despite the Israeli so-called right of law of 1951 allowing any Jew in the world to come to live in the state of Israel and to immediately acquire full citizenship while denying the Palestinian natives who became refugees by the same right, the current number of Palestinians living in historic Palestine is almost the same number as Israelis.

Continued . . .