WALTER LAQUEUR
43
Najada and other groups) burned down and pillaged the Jewish com–
mercial center outside the Old City; many Jewish families lost their
livelihood. Close to where I lived, a colleague, an Anglo-Jewish jour–
nalist named Stern, was killed. After a few days of murder, arson, and
pillage, we too, together with the other Jewish families, had to move out
very quickly from the German Colony, leaving some of our belongings
behind. It was very difficult to get a van and two porters to help us, as
the German Colony was becoming a war zone. It was not an easy time;
we had a month-old baby, and had to sleep for weeks on the floors of
crowded apartments belonging to friends until we were allocated a
three-room apartment which we had to share with two other families.
In recent years, Mr. Said has expressed the opinion that an admission
of guilt by the Zionists for what they did to the Palestinians in 1947-48
would be an absolute precondition for reconciliation between the two
nations. If this could help the peace process I would be all in favor. On
various occasions within the last year, Mr. Barak has in fact expressed
regret in the Israeli parliament about the suffering of the Palestinian peo–
ple, especially the refugees living in miserable conditions. But how could
he apologize for the Arab uprising in December [947 following the
U.N. Partition Plan, and the invasion of the Arab armies in 1948 which
started it all? Mr. Said might argue that the Palestinian Arabs had no
alternative but to take up arms against a plan which they thought
threatened their vital national interests. But the recourse to arms is
always a risky business, since no one knows how it will end. Hitler
launched a war in 1939 and in the end many millions of Germans
expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Prussia, and other places–
most of them no doubt innocent of war crimes-had to pay the price.
I have often asked myself what would have happened if the Arab
attacks in December 1947 and the months after had not taken place–
if the Palestinians had, however reluctantly, accepted the U.N. decision
to partition Palestine. Counterfactual history has no certainties, but
chances are that the Palestinians would have been given a state in [948
and that Jerusalem would have been a
corpus separandum
under inter–
national supervision. It seems unthinkable that the Israelis would have,
in violation of the U.N. resolution, expanded the territory allotted to
them by forcing Palestinians to flee from the territories the Israelis
seized. In that case, the Jewish state would never have been recognized
when the British left on May
J
5, 1948. Would a small Jewish state have
been viab le? Would a Palestinian Arab state have been able to exist? We
do not know whether a binational state could have survived, or whether
it would have led to conditions similar to those in Indi a in 1947-or in
