By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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When King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia travelled up the Red Sea to meet with US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Egypt in February 1945, he was confident he was going to meet a potential friend who would prove to be gracious and generous, and with whom his kingdom could build a mutually beneficial co-operation.

It was the first time Abdul Aziz was meeting a Western leader, and this was no ordinary Western leader. Nazi Germany had been defeated, Great Britain had lost its world-superpower status and the US was emerging from World War Two as the single greatest power on earth.

The meeting between the two very different leaders went on quite well, with all the diplomatic niceties observed. Until, that is, Roosevelt surprised the king by bringing up the question as to whether Saudi Arabia would help the West’s bid to settle massive numbers of Jews in the Middle East. 

European Jews, of course, had suffered unspeakable exactions at the hands of the Nazis, losing an estimated six million people in concentration camps and elsewhere. The West was anxious to do whatever it could to redeem its conscience over that calamity and the Zionist movement was already helping to settle thousands of Jews in Palestine (then a British Protectorate).

Naqba

Abdul Aziz did not understand the logic behind such a request. If it was true that the Holocaust was indeed the doing of the Germans, why not make them shoulder the responsibility for the settlement of their victims? Simple, organic Bedouin logic.

We know that eventually the Jews were allowed to settle in Palestine despite all Arab protests and objections. Most Palestinians were pushed off their land and forced to live in refugee camps throughout the Middle East and farther afield.

As was to be expected, the Arab states did not take this lying down. Rejecting this move by the West — which they dabbed “Naqba,” or catastrophe — the Arabs attacked the new-fangled state of Israel, which some of them vowed to drive into the sea. Three wars have so far been fought, and three times Israel, bolstered by the Western powers’ support, has emerged victorious.

Seventy years have passed since the Naqba, and the injustices done to the Palestinian people have continued to inject poison in the politics of the region and the whole world, including spawning all manner of religious extremist groups that swear by that fateful decision of 1948.

That decision has had the effect of creating an elastic state with no borders and which expands with every military success. In addition to the lands taken away from Syria and Jordan, and which Israel insists on holding onto, the state of Israel is encouraging its citizens to build illegal settlements on Palestinian lands.

Hardliners

Jerusalem is another thorny issue. The three major faiths in that troubled city claim it as their holy shrine, and all the past attempts at solving the Middle East crisis have indicated the desirability of keeping Jerusalem open to all faiths.

The Jewish hardliners want to have it all to themselves, and in this they are supported by US President Donald Trump, who has relocated the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus provoking protests by young Palestinians, who are being massacred as the world watches.

It is high time the world spoke out to condemn these crimes by the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his soldiers at the same time as the international community sought to engage new efforts to bring the warring protagonists to the table to seek a peaceful solution to the knotty problems that have been made seemingly intractable by Trump.

But one thing is clear in my mind. African states have no right to abandon our Palestinian brothers and sisters simply because they have been promised a bowl of beans by the Zionist government. 

The freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people is worth more.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]