McGentrix wrote:Israel made a country for themselves the Palestinians could do the same.
From the time after the first world war that the British began to implement its promise to the Zionists to establish a national homeland for Jews in Palestine through their mandate, Palestinian endeavors to build national democratic institutions as the preliminary steps to statehood were thwarted by the British as the latter gave precedence to the Zionists' nationalist endeavors in Palestine. The British had hardly considered Palestinian nationalist aspirations at all, merely referring to them in its Balfour Declaration as "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," and in its Palestine Mandate simply as "other sections of the population." The thrust of Britain's involvement in Palestine was from the start detrimentally prejudiced against the very peoples indigenous to Palestine in favor of a people from Central and Eastern Europe.
Palestinian efforts to establish a parliament along democratic electorial lines were rebuffed by the British colonial secretary Lord Passfield who in a May 1930 meeting with Palestinian delegates responded thusly:
Of course, this Parliament as you call it that you ask for, would have to have as its duty the carrying out of the Mandate . . . the Mandatory power, that is the British government, could not create any council except within which the terms of the Mandate and for the purpose of carrying out the Mandate. This is the limit of our power . . . Would you mind considering our difficulty that we cannot create a Parliament which would not be responsible and feel itself responsible for carrying out the Mandate?
In effect Passfield was asking the Palestinian majority to put aside its own nationalist aspirations for the nationalist aspirations of the tiny minority of Zionist immigrants in Palestine.
In terms of external support for Palestinian efforts to build pre-state institutions, the colonialist powers largely thwarted the efforts of the Arab populations under their control from supporting and contributing to the Palestinians. Rashid Khalidi in his book, "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood," describes how France through its Foreign Ministry in Paris and its colonial officials in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia prevented the sending of funds from these countries' peoples to the people of Palestine. France also prevented the travel of emissaries from the Maghribi community in Palestine to North Africa to request aid for the Palestinians such as after the 1929 Wailing Wall disturbances. In contrast France enabled the flow of large sums of capital to the yishuv from the Jewish communities of those selfsame North African countries whose non-Jewish populations it had blocked from sending aid to the Palestinians, and it facilitated the traveling of Palestinian Zionists to these North African countries under its control.
By the time the British dropped the problem it had created in Palestine onto the lap of the UN, and the latter's infamous recommendation to partition the country along ethnic lines, the Palestinians had no real or firm state structures through which to operate as a polity. After the 1948 war the territory that the UN recommended for allotment to the Palestinians was divided between Israel, Jordan and Egypt. After the 1967 war Israel arrogated and occupied the territories that Jordan and Egypt had controlled (the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively). Today the Palestinians have a weak, quasi-national jurisdiction, the Palestinian National Authority, which operated under the utter stricture of the state of Israel.
