History and Fiction in Boasson's Comments on Galtung

Abstract

Boasson argues that the principles of ownership and self-determination have no relevance in the conflict. Accordingly, he concludes that 'if Galtung meant by ownership the principle of sovereignty, no such sovereignty was ever invested in the Palestinians at any period before 1948'. There is unanimous agreement among historians that Palestine for the last 2000 years was the homeland of the Palestinians, the original descendants of the Canaanites, Jews, and Arabs (preand post-Islamic). During all this period they lived and practiced political and social rights on their land. Until the British Mandate and even under its administration they were considered as a self-governing political society. (For text of the Mandate see Hurewitz 1956, Document No. 38, p. 106.) The question here is not a question of ownership or sovereignty, but one of self-determination of a people who have been living unchallenged in Palestine since time immemorial. Whether Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, under a Mandate or 'an independent nation' as defined in article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations,1 does not change this fundamental fact. It is one of the most ironic incidents of history that the Jews who have been the most ardent defenders of what they considered as their 'right of self-determination' in an inhabited country with which they had no legal or political links for at least the last 2000 years until the creation of Israel, deny this very principle to the Palestinian people whom they partly dislodged and partly reduced to a community under military occupation. Raising the question of the Palestinian's right of self-determination to a matter of dispute the way Boasson does might lead to the conclusion that the transformation of Zionist Jewish colonization in Palestine to a condition of statehood was taking place in a vacuum. The existence of the Palestinians in Palestine, whether expressed in terms of 'ownership' or 'sovereignty', whether accepted or denied by one party to another still remains the hottest issue facing Israel, because it is this existence of the Palestinian human factor which constitutes the core of the conflict and raises the entire problem way over the luxury of definition and research.