To the editor:
The December 2 Letter to the Editor “Respect free speech in Great Barrington” and Raymond Jacoub’s comments on it are a much-needed breath of editorial fresh air on the troubled history (in the past 100 years) of the region commonly referred to as Palestine for 500 years before 1948.
One statistical addition: Raymond J. writes that the percentage of Jews in Palestine was around “8 percent in 1890 when modern Zionism was nascent.” When the League of Nations awarded Great Britain a legal mandate over Palestine and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) at the 1920 San Remo conference, the percentage of Jews in Palestine was still only about 10 percent. The other 90 percent was mostly Muslim, with much smaller numbers of Christians, Druze, and Bedouins. (These figures are derived directly from the first British census of Palestine in 1920.)
Britain’s assignment in 1920 of political power in Palestine to the then-10 percent Jewish minority over the remaining non-Jewish 90 percent violated the principle of self-determination established by the League of Nations for such mandates.
Scholars of the region’s history, including my paternal grandfather, Egyptologist and historian James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), warned as early as 1920 that this political arrangement would have dangerous and unfortunate long-term consequences.
Most mainstream media accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian situation habitually ignore this relatively modern history. They perpetuate ignorance of the deep historical roots of the injustices that, for more than 75 years, have given predictable rise to almost perpetual violence in the region that came to be known as Israel.
Most mainstream pundits on U.S. foreign policy write as if they too are ignorant even of the well-documented—and more recent—history of the grinding oppression of the Palestinians by all Israeli governments since the violent founding of that nation in 1948.
As journalists, they also seem negligently blind to the ridiculous hypocrisy of the claims of U.S. presidents and secretaries of state, past and present, that the U.S. can serve as an “honest broker” between the Israeli government and the Palestinians while it has been the largest supplier of lethal weaponry and economic aid to that government for many decades.
None of what I have written above should be taken as a denial of the tragic and politically unforgivable sins of oppression and violence visited on Jewish people in Europe for centuries before 1948, or of their understandable aspirations after World War II to create a haven on this planet where such sins against them could not be repeated.
A discussion of how to discern the work the world needs to do now to create a lasting, non-oppressive peace in the Middle East—for two long-suffering peoples—is beyond the scope of letters to the editor. But the performance of that work is a collective task (for the so-called international community) as urgent for the survival of human civilization as the need to effectively address climate change.
John Breasted
Great Barrington
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