“Arab-Israeli Wars” (1982) by Chaim Herzog.
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION
~By Terence Prittie
The Palestinian Arab Question is of recent origin. There are several reasons for this:
1. There has never, in the whole history of the area known today as Palestine, been a Palestinian Arab state.
Palestine, between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, has been ruled, since the Arab invasion in the seventh century, by Bedouin, Christian Crusaders, Mamelukes, Turks, and finally, from 1919 to 1948, by the British.
The area has generally been an outlying province, as during the four and a half centuries of Turkish rule which preceded the British Mandate.
Historical Palestine included an area east of the river Jordan, which has been part of the Emirate, and later Kingdom of Jordan, since 1921. It could be argued that this is the only Palestinian Arab "state" which has ever existed.
2. Because there has never been any other Palestinian state, there has not until very recently been a well-defined Palestinian national identity. The Palestinians Arabs can hardly be blamed for this; they have been subjected to continual invasion and alien rule.
In addition, they were a very small community, probably less than 480,000 in all, up to the time of the British Mandate. Arabs conventionally regarded the area in which they lived as "southern Syria".
3. The principal failure of the Palestinian Arabs to create a well-developed sense of national identity occurred during the period of the British Mandate. The Jewish community established its own institutions and its own instinct for nationhood during this period. The Palestinian Arabs did not, although they roughly doubled in numbers thanks to Jewish immigration and increased material prosperity under British rule.
4. The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan gave the Palestinian Arabs a state of their own. Not only did they reject the UN Plan, but after joining in a war waged against Israel by the armies of five outside Arab countries, they made no attempt to set up a state of their own when the fighting ended.
The Arabs of the West Bank accepted occupation and annexation by the Kingdom of Jordan, while the Arabs of the Gaza Strip were placed under Egyptian military occupation. Significantly, it is precisely in these areas that it is now proposed to set up a Palestinian "mini-state".
5. Between 1949, when armistice agreements were signed between Israel and her Arab neighbors, and 1967, when the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fell into Israeli hands, neither Jordan nor Egypt made any serious attempt to encourage a Palestinian national identity or to give the Palestinian Arabs even the kernel of a state of their own. Not a word was said about the Palestinian Arabs right of self-determination, save in so far as it concerned the right claimed by Palestinian Arab refugees to return to their old homes.
6. The existing Arab states, equally, have made no serious attempt to set up or sponsor a Palestinian government-in-exile. This could have been done at any time after 1949, and it could have developed a political philosophy and an understanding of governmental aims, methods and institutions.
To sum up, one can say that the Palestinians Arabs showed little ability to evolve a full and normal national consciousness, and the outside Arab world showed singularly little interest in them and no desire to give them the help and advice, which they needed so badly.
This failure of the Arab world to look after "its own" had nothing to do whatever with the Israelis. It was a projection of the previous history of the Palestinians within the Arab world, and of a basic lack of Arab unity.
Chaim Herzog was a man of many accomplishments -- Major in the British Army, Major General in the IDF, commentator on Israeli radio, Ambassador to the UN, President of Israel.
Herzog probably knew a lot about many things, but maybe he's not the most unbiased source of information about Palestinian refugees.