"The Mistake" -- Steve Feldman

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What happened that caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people to become refugees from their homes and villages? Some people say that the Palestinians' problems derived from a bad strategic decision, a mistake, made by Arab countries in 1948 not to accept Israel. That wasn't the mistake that caused Palestinians to become refugees. Arab countries didn't declare war on Israel until well after the Jewish army, the Haganah, had already expelled hundreds of thousands of Christian and Muslim Palestinian men, women and children from their homes and lives, at least according to Israeli historians.

Based on the Jewish morals taught at my Hebrew school, the underlying mistake goes back further, back to the idea that an exclusive Jewish State could be created in a land where Christian and Muslim families were already living. Jewish Palestinians had been living in Palestine for centuries, peacefully alongside Christian and Muslims Palestinians. European Jews, suffering horrible discrimination, felt the need to create a state for themselves. That's understandable. But they chose to do so in a land that was already populated with other people. That was the problem. European Jews came to Palestine, bringing with them prejudice against the local population. These European Jews had high, socialist ideals, but it was socialism only for Jews, and the unions they set up were exclusively for Jewish people.

On its surface, the ideas of a Jewish state, of Jewish labor, of self-determination for Jews all sound great, and that's why it seemed so reasonable I first heard these ideas in Hebrew school. But are these ideas more reasonable than "separate but equal" in the American South or more reasonable than the righteousness of self-determination for Afrikaners? Indeed, claiming that the Palestinians' problems came from not accepting Israel doesn't seem all that different from Afrikaners claiming Blacks' problems under Apartheid came from not accepting the right of a White Afrikaner state to exist.

This isn't rocket science or naïveté. You can't create a state for Jews in a land where non-Jewish families were already living, not within the moral constraints of the foundational principles of our beliefs (whatever your religion is). When you figure that we are talking about a Jewish state created at the expense of good Christian and Muslim families who had been living largely in peace with their Jewish neighbors for centuries, you realize that creating such a state goes against the fabric of our moral character. The mistake, the great mistake, was thinking that Jews should be treated differently than Christians or Muslims, a mistake that violated, and continues to violate, the very heart of the Torah. The festering sore will heal when and only when we end the discrimination.