I've been slow to write about the war in Palestine this time around, mainly because I don't have that much time to blog here these days. I've written to and tweeted at our Foreign Affairs Minister and our Prime Minister to say it's not good enough to bleat about 'Israel's right to self-defence' and then call feebly for a 'humanitarian pause' when 30,000 people have been killed, most of them women and children, two million have been displaced, most of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed, its population faces famine and we continue to sell weapons components to the perpetrators of these war crimes. No matter what Hamas operatives did on October 7 last year, none of this is OK.
Rashid Khalidi is the descendant of a prominent Palestinian family and his research included spending a couple of months trolling through the papers of his various ancestors and relatives which are held in a library in a family property in East Jerusalem. His telling of the story is a mix of wide-scale history and stories of his and his family's engagement in the Palestinian struggle.
To set the tone he begins with the correspondence between his uncle, Yusuf Diya, and Theodore Herzl whose 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) expressed the foundational ideas of Zionism - the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine through large scale immigration of European Jews. In a diary entry in 1895 Herzl wrote:
We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be done discreetly.
Yusuf Diya wrote to Herzl, expressing sympathy with the Jewish cause and with Zionism in the light of the persecution of Jews in Europe and their religious connection to the land. However, he said that whatever the merits of Zionism, the "brutal force of circumstances must be taken into account". The most important of them were that "Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, more gravely, it is inhabited by others."
Khalidi goes on to discuss Herzl's response.
Glossing over the fact that Zionism was ultimately meant to lead to the Jewish domination of Palestine, Herzl employed a justification that has been a touchstone for colonialists at all times and in all places and that would become a staple argument of the Zionist movement: Jewish immigration would benefit the people of Palestine.... "In allowing immigration to a number of Jews bringing their intelligence, their financial acumen and their means of enterprise to the country, none can doubt that the wellbeing of the entire country would be the happy result.”
In the 1890s Zionism was just the movement of a group of Jewish activists. A few hardy souls had migrated to Palestine and set up communities there, but most had either never been there or only visited briefly. Most of the Jews in Palestine had been there for centuries, mainly descendants of people who had taken refuge in the Muslim Middle East after they were expelled from European countries at various times in the late Middle Ages. They were part of the local culture, were mostly not Zionists and some were opposed to Zionism.
However, the European Zionists were well-connected and knew how to work the European political system. They touted their project around the European powers and eventually struck gold with the British. In 1917 the British government ratified what has become known as the Balfour Declaration, after Lord Balfour, who at that time was Foreign Secretary.
His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the existing civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Khalidi continues:
For Zionists, their enterprise was now backed by an indispensable 'iron wall' of British military might.... For the inhabitants of Palestine, whose future it ultimately decided, Balfour's careful, calibrated prose was in effect a gun pointed directly at their heads, a declaration of war by the British empire on the indigenous population. The majority now faced the prospect of being outnumbered by unlimited Jewish immigration to a country then almost completely Arab in its population and culture. Whether intended this way or not, the declaration launched a full-blown colonial conflict, a century-long assault on the Palestinian people, aimed at fostering an exclusivist 'national home' at their expense.
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| Rashid Khalidi |
Nowhere in the subsequent twenty-eight articles of the Mandate is there any reference to the Palestinians as a people with national or political rights. Indeed, as in the Balfour Declaration, the words "Arab" and "Palestinian" do not appear. The only protections envisaged for the great majority of Palestine's population involved personal and religious rights and preservation of the status quo at sacred sites. On the other hand, the Mandate laid out the key means for establishing and expanding the national home for the Jewish people, which according to its drafters, the Zionist movement as not creating, but "reconstituting". The Zionist movement, in its embodiment in Palestine as the Jewish Agency, was explicitly designated as the official representative of the country's Jewish population, even though before mass immigration of the committed European Zionists the Jewish community comprised mainly either religious or mizrahi Jews who in the main were not Zionist or who even opposed Zionism. Of course no such official representative was designated for the unnamed Arab majority.
This created the bizarre situation where the Zionist Jews, very few of whom lived in Palestine, became the 'provisionally recognised' nation in Palestine, while the Palestinian Arabs, most of whom lived there, had no representation, no provisional nationality and were treated in official documents as if they didn't exist, or at least that their existence was not important. This had two consequences. The first is that the Jewish Agency was able to start acting in many ways like a national government - it could undertake public works, accredit diplomatic representatives and sit on international councils, and run local services. More importantly, with British support it was able to facilitate large-scale Jewish immigration. It was also able to raise funds and money poured in, mainly from wealthy Jewish people in Europe and the US, which was used to buy land from absentee owners for the use of the growing Jewish community, and to build infrastructure to support this community.
The Palestinians were at a double disadvantage in this brewing conflict. Not only did they lack the backing of the British or of any other great power, they lacked strong political institutions of their own. Having been part of the Ottoman Empire for the previous four centuries, and other similar empires before that, they were unprepared for post-imperial life. They moved rapidly to rectify this - in the decade following the end of the Great War they held seven Palestinian Arab congresses, organised by a network of local Muslim-Christian societies. These established an Arab Executive and gave it a mandate based on rejection of the Balfour Declaration, majority rule and an end to unlimited Jewish immigration and land purchases. The British, however, would only engage in discussions if the Executive accepted the terms of the Mandate and the Declaration, effectively demanding they collude in their own displacement.
In the end, the Palestinian population lost faith in the process of debate and negotiation and took direct action. A six-month general strike in 1936 progressed into an outright revolt which lasted until 1939. Not surprisingly, it was eventually crushed by the might of the British military. Khalidi says that 10% of the Palestinian Arab population was either killed, imprisoned or exiled, including all of its established political leaders, and further political organising was banned.
World War 2 effectively led to a pause in these various doings as the region was embroiled in the war. Both Jewish and Palestinian troops fought alongside the British, the Jews via their own Jewish Brigade, the Palestinians scattered through various other forces. The land itself was a theatre of war and a staging ground for troops fighting in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. The British dominance in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East ensured that the region was put on a war footing.
By this time, with British patronage, the Zionists had firmly established themselves in Palestine. In 1945 they were still a minority in the country but no longer a negligible one. At this point, the total population of Palestine was about 1.9m, including over one million Arab Muslims (including those temporarily overseas as a result of the war and British expulsion), 135,000 Christians and 550,000 Jews. The Jewish community also had substantial resources. Overseas backers continued to pour resources into the Jewish Agency and they had control of substantial infrastructure. The Jewish Brigade which had fought alongside the British during WW2 provided a well-trained and well-equipped fighting force loyal to the concept of a Jewish State. By contrast, Arab Palestinians had their political institutions dismantled and their leaders sent into exile, their fighting men were scattered around the allied forces, many of them outside Palestine, and they had few resources and few international backers.
After World War 2, with the British and French in control of most of the Middle East, the international community moved quickly to shift from colonial control to the establishment of local nation-states. European sympathy for Zionism, always based on a sense that Jews were persecuted in much of Europe, became almost universal in the wake of the Holocaust. The need for a safe haven for the Jews who had survived this horror was now indisputable. Various locations were discussed, in Africa and even in Western Australia, but with the Zionist project already well under way in Palestine it is hard to take any of these alternatives seriously. There was only ever going to be one outcome.
In 1947 the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, envisaging the establishment of separate Jewish and Arab States in Palestine - the origin of the 'two-state solution' we are still vainly discussing today. Although the Jews comprised less than one third of the population and owned about 6% of the land they were assigned 56% of the Mandate territory, including the best lands. The Jewish Agency moved immediately to declare the state of Israel and forcibly expel the Palestinians in what Palestinians call the Nakba, an Arabic word for 'catastrophe'.
About 720,000 Palestinians fled over the course of the takeover, mostly to the surrounding nations - Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Libya. Other Palestinians were already out of the country in 1947, many due to displacement during WW2, and were unable to return. About 160,000 remained in Israeli territory but many had their lands confiscated. All the fine words about colonisation benefiting everyone were exposed as a sham - just like every other colonial project, the dispossession of the prior inhabitants was a necessary condition of success.
Of course the Palestinians fought back. However, the Jews had a disciplined, well-equipped fighting force and the Palestinians did not, so their resistance was local, sporadic and easily defeated. Meanwhile, because their political activities had been brutally repressed during the Mandate period they had no comparable para-state apparatus to base their own State around.
Where were the surrounding Arab nations while this was going on? Arab public opinion was firmly on the side of the Palestinians, and there were mass protests throughout the Arab world. However, the surrounding nations were not democratic in any meaningful way, nor were they well established. Their leaders, sponsored by the British, were reluctant to buck the wishes of their colonial masters, and they lacked the military power and organisation to challenge the Israelis.
Some of them also had their own agendas which didn’t align with Palestinian nationalism. For instance, King Husayn of Jordan was anxious to extend his tiny kingdom by appropriating the Palestinian lands in what is now known as the West Bank. The Egyptians likewise were intent on hanging onto their own territories in Gaza. The combination of their weakness and their wavering commitment to the cause meant that when they finally bowed to public opinion and intervened militarily in 1948 they were easily defeated by the Israeli forces.
The Zionist project, which had been under way for over 50 years, had finally borne fruit in the creation of a sovereign Jewish nation. In the process, the existing inhabitants had not so much been ‘spirited across the border’ with the promise of employment as forced from their homes at the point of a gun, into refugee settlements in the surrounding nations. This meant that the war was not over, it merely entered a new phase, as we will see in the next instalment.
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