“let Palestine be left alone”

For many of my generation the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics in 1972 was our introduction to the Israeli/Palestenian conflict. Herbert Krosney, who reported frequently for The Nation from Israel in those years, wrote “The Middle East After Munich…means an unrelenting military pressure which could, in the long run, have negative political consequences, but which Israel feels must nevertheless be pursued. The terrorists have said they are in a “state of war” with Israel and the government of Israel sees no reason to dispute that contention or withhold from retaliation in kind.”

Fifty years later we now see the consequences of Israel’s decision to pursue unrelenting military pressure on Palestinians. Unrelenting Military pressure has now morphed into all types of physical and psychological pressure as well.

In the early 19th century interest in a return of Jews to Palestine was kept alive mostly by Christian millenarians. Despite the Haskala, eastern European Jews did not assimilate well into european cultures. In reaction to tsarist pogroms, Jews formed the Ḥovevei Ẕiyyon (“Lovers of Zion”) to promote the settlement of Jewish farmers and artisans in Palestine.

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism:

“the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils…