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Contrasting Narratives: Palestinian Perspective
I am a Palestinian. The land of Israel, formerly known as Palestine, belongs to my people.
We have lived here for hundreds of years. My father farmed this land, as did his father before him and his father before him, back in this manner for generations. We never tried to destroy the Jews, as the Nazis did. We lived our lives and kept our peace. We felt honored to live so close to Jerusalem, a city with sites holy in our religion of Islam.
All of this began to change with the arrival of the British in 1918 after World War I. First, they promised to support our independence from the Ottoman Empire (the people who controlled Palestine) if we helped to fight against these people. Then, they changed their minds and decided to support the Jewish cause of using our land for their homeland in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. After World War I, our land was given to the British by an international organization, the League of Nations. Given! As if anyone had the right to give away land that did not belong to them! This gave them the right to do as they pleased with our homeland. Were we ever consulted? Never.
The British continued to waver for years. First they were for us, then they were against us. They tried to appease us by banning the sale of land to Jews in 1939. But still, they did not remove these foreigners from our land. And still, the Jews kept pouring into Palestine.
Finally in 1947, the world turned their backs on us. In a session of the United Nations, with no Palestinians represented, the countries of the world decided to divide our land. They gave half of it to the Jews, leaving the rest of us to make do with half of what we once had. In 1948 the Arabs in surrounding countries tried to help us win back our land in a war that became know to our people as “The Catastrophe,” but we failed. 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes, many never to return. The Israelis leveled entire villages to keep us from coming back.
They didn’t stop with what was given to them. In 1967, “the Setback” gave the Israelis three times as much land as they had. They immediately began displacing more of our people, some of whom had already run from their armies once. They set up their own towns and their own farms, so that there was no chance that we could return to our homes. Again. We almost gained our land back in the Ramadan War of 1973, but the Israelis defeated us again.
As a result of all of this war, hundreds of thousands of my people are crowded into refugee camps scattered throughout Israel and neighboring Arab countries. The conditions are horrible. The majority of my people live in poverty. We are kept from making a decent living by the Israelis.
As the years have passed, we have tried many ways of getting our land back. We have protested peacefully, through events such as our annual “Land Day,” founded in 1975. We have tried appealing to the countries of the world. We have tried to compromise in peace talks, but the
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most generous offer of the Israelis does not even meet our minimum requirements for peace. They give us “limited authority” in our own land. We will settle for a piece of what was ours, but they will not even give us what the United Nations agreed was ours (only 22% of what we once had)! Many of our people have given up hope. They see violence as the only way. These are the young men and women who become suicide bombers to make us a free people in our land.
This is our land. We have nowhere else to go.
2010-2011Unit 3: Middle East - 1Grade 7 World Cultures