Roots of the Mideast Crisis Span the Globe

The so-called Prince Abdullah plan--which would offer Israel normalization of relations with the Arab world in return for withdrawal from all the lands Israel seized during the 1967 Middle East War--contains a number of positive proposals for solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But it is far from being comprehensive. And it omits any reference to those who should be held responsible for this tragic conflict.

What has befallen the Holy Land and its people for more than 50 years now is not a natural disaster. It was man-made. Governments and individuals who caused it should be made to pay the price. Any plan that does not designate responsibility is like a judge trying to determine an appropriate sentence without knowing who is on trial.

In the West, the history of the Palestinian debacle has been grossly and maliciously distorted. Impartial analysis would show wide responsibility for the Palestinian dispossession, including:

* Britain, which, through the Balfour Declaration of 1917 pledged the establishment of a Jewish homeland to Jews on the land of a third party, the Palestinians.

* Germany, whose criminal persecution of Jews created a suitable environment for Zionism to flourish and indirectly gave life to the anachronistic Zionist idea that Judaism is a nationality as well as a religion.

After the state of Israel was created, Germany became one of its principal suppliers of financial and military aid.

* Russia, where notorious pogroms of the Jews were another cause for the emergence of Zionism.

* France, which in the 1940s promoted illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine and later Israel and provided Israel with a nuclear capability.

* The U.S., which granted unconditional military, political and economic support to Israel.

* European and American liberal intellectuals, who confused their sympathy for the plight of Jews with support of Zionism, when Jews constituted only 5% of the population and owned 7% of the land.

A typical popular reference on the Palestinian problem was “Exodus,” a novel that portrays Palestine as a “stinking and sun-baked ... worthless desert in the south end and eroded in the middle and swamp up north” sparsely populated with bands of Bedouin thieves and listless men who “sat or lay around on the ground as their wives tilled the fields.”

* Israel, which through international manipulation and violence on the ground deleted a whole country, confiscated the assets of its population--houses, farms, cattle, furniture--and rendered its inhabitants refugees or under military occupation.

* The Arab countries, whose potential force gave credence to Israeli propaganda that portrayed Israel as a weak nation surrounded by a sea of powerful and hostile Arabs, when Arab support to the Palestinian people in most cases was little more than rhetoric.

The new order that the U.S. promised in the early 1990s still could work. It needs to be reinvigorated with a heavy dose of equity and oblige Israel to respect international legality and withdraw from the occupied territories.

It also would uphold the right of refugees to return to their homes, and it would reject a violation of that basic principle on flimsy grounds, such as the impact of their return on the Jewish character of Israel.

In a fairer world, it would be reasonable to expect those responsible for the Palestinian tragedy to pool together a serious financial package to help the Palestinian people rebuild their shattered country and institutions and write their history.

Then, out of the ashes of lies and distortions, the truth might finally rise showing that the crime the Palestinian people committed over the past century was the one of existing on a land that was coveted by others.