Female leadership? It needs to find strength in numbers
Sanna Marin, current PM of Finland. The Scandinavians so often set the example
I live in Australia, thankfully, far from the madding crowd of male thugs and bullies in charge of such scary northern hemisphere oligarchies and/or dictatorships as Russia, Iran, the USA, China, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Burma, Uzbekistan and Trump’s Venezuela, to name a more or less random few. It really is demoralising to find, as I pass my 70th birthday, that so much of the world is in such a mess, with so little good news to turn to.
Where do our future hopes lie? Not so much in individual female leaders – Japan’s first female PM, Sanae Takaichi, has views described by Wikipedia as ‘conservative or ultra-conservative’, and she apparently wants to be seen as Japan’s ‘Iron Lady’, as she’s a big fan of Margaret Thatcher. Oh dear. At least she has a pro-Taiwan foreign policy. Italy’s first female PM Giorgia Meloni, another ‘right to far right’ leader, was involved in fascist politics in her youth. It almost seems as if female political leaders can’t be trusted, or popular, unless they come from a solidly conservative – that’s to say, male-dominated – part of the political world. Then again, New Zealand has had Jacinda Ardern (PM from 2017 to 2023), and we in Australia had our first and only female PM Julia Gillard (2010-2013). Both were Labour Party leaders. And I think it’s fair to say that Gillard in particular was given a really rough ride because of her gender. Ardern, on the other hand, benefitted, I would think, from being the third female Prime Minister of her country. Their second female PM, Helen Clark, held the post for nine years. This has paved the way, in New Zealand at least, for female leadership being something slightly approaching ‘the new normal’. Another approach has been that of Australia, where I live. It now has 22 women in the Cabinet, the core governing body of our federal system. That’s 55% of the total. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher only ever had one other woman in the cabinet in her 11-year tenure as PM – a Baroness who spent two years in the House of Lords. Currently, 50% of Britain’s Cabinet are women – a record for the country. Gradually, creepingly, the numbers are rising for women in government positions throughout the WEIRD world, and just look at those countries that eschew female political empowerment. They are invariably the world’s worst.
As for the power of the purse, or wallet (or crypto-wallet?) which is massive in that same WEIRD world, that power is still held overwhelmingly, and I do mean overwhelmingly, by men. I could provide the gory details, but surely everyone knows how true this is. Even though my own knowledge of crypto-currency is less than zero, I’m certain that it’s more or less entirely controlled by men, simply because I’m not a complete idiot.
Anyway, leaving that mysterious realm aside, female political empowerment in the future could be a weapon against the Puddings and Frumps of the world. Imagine if the current President of Ukraine was a woman, with a largely female cabinet, how that would play out in terms of global politics and alliances.
Losing our religion is another way we can boost the eternal feminine. Christianity, which is fading fast in Australia, involves the worship of a double male father-and-son act, and in its Catholic form, the next tiers of power are the ever-male Popes or Papas, the ever-male cardinals, the ever-male archbishops, the ever-male bishops and the ever-male priests. How delightfully aberrant. It’s my view that Protestantism was the first step away from that patriarchal religion, and towards atheism.
And then there’s Islam, the most patriarchal of all the world’s long-standing religions, all of which are patriarchal.
The growth of feminism in our global politics and economy, a slow but steady development – would that it were so much quicker – will lead to the increasing isolation of these rogue macho states. Take for example supposedly secular China, which surely has little excuse for its machismo. It has had no women in its 24-member politburo since October 2022, and has never had a woman in its 7-member Standing Committee, the elite body that essentially runs the country, when it’s not a dictatorship, which it arguably is today. But then, Xi PingPong is 73, and Mr Pudding almost a year older, and Frump is 80, I believe. They’ll all be dead soon enough, and the odour of machismo that hangs over the northern hemisphere, like that of a never-cleaned toilet, may just start to fade a little….
a more feminist future…. ?
On the patriarchy matriarchy feminism masculinism front, I watched a while back a video, apparently one of a series, by a young woman who presented, with amusing confidence, an anti-feminist position. I didn’t pay too much attention to her spiel (and thankfully I can’t find the video now to reference it!), but I noted a lot of approving comments, all from males. One even happily highlighted Aristotle’s view that women are naturally inferior, in terms of rationality, to men. Presumably this allowed him to believe that, whatever his own level of ‘rationality’, it was superior to that of the four billion or so females that inhabit the planet. I should mention that Aristotle also believed that slaves were naturally less rational than free Athenian citizens. Presumably female slaves were doubly dumb.
I’ve just finished reading Darwin’s The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, and I found it hard to take in the end, as in the final pages he expatiated on human sexual selection. Basically he was claiming that males select females for their physical appearance while females select males largely for that rationality thing, which explains why men have evolved to be smarter than women. So, I try to make allowances for Darwin, like Aristotle, being a creature of his time and his culture, as I am of mine…
Having read Darwin’s Origin of species a couple of times, and now his Descent of man, I’ve noted the great number of references he has to others in his field of interest – breeders of livestock, pigeon fanciers, ornithologists, zoologists, botanists and so forth, with whom he has corresponded. Not long ago I came across a collection of his correspondence, here in Adelaide’s reference library – a whole shelf of heavy tomes of the stuff. And in my own reading of these references, I’ve never found a single female. That’s Victorian England for you – not so different, perhaps, from ancient Athens, as far as the status of women is concerned.
Things have changed though, in the WEIRD world, in the last 150 years, and Darwin has been proven wrong about the female intellect. And it stands to reason – male dogs and cats aren’t smarter than their female counterparts, and female bonobos aren’t intellectually superior to the males they manage to keep in their place via a powerful sisterhood. Male gorillas may be bigger and tougher than the females but there’s no evidence that they’re smarter.
Having said all that, I’m still holding out for a female-dominant human world, as they have other qualities that we need more than ever in the current climate. Yes there may have been some not so admirable female leaders in recent years (the only period in which female political leadership has been allowed), but none have been as disgusting as Putin or so absurd as Trump, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assess current female leadership without recognising that they’ve achieved their position within a largely patriarchal framework. That framework, it seems to me, is more competitive (and thus warlike) and less collective than that of matriarchy. Not that the difference is huge – I’m a big fan of women’s soccer, and of course it’s hugely competitive, but you don’t get quite the brutalism and the confrontations with referees that are fairly common in the men’s game. Time may tell a different story, but I doubt it.
But returning to the young woman who’s presenting an anti-feminist series of videos, my guess is that she’s been shaped, as I’ve been, by childhood experiences. My own childhood was shaped by a dominant and largely competent female parent, who was the major breadwinner, as she moved up the scale from a registered nurse to a sister to an assistant matron of a hospital and then, after further training, to a nurse educator, while my father remained an unskilled labourer, often unemployed. My mother also ran the house, getting my siblings and I to do set chores – even assigning sections of the back garden for each of us to tend. The house was filled with books, though she wasn’t a big reader, and my father not at all. The marriage wasn’t a happy one, though they were still together – only just – when I left home at about nineteen.
So, though I had clashes with my mother, and in many ways it wasn’t a happy childhood, it was definitely due to her that I and my siblings are very much on the feminist side, which makes me speculate about the anti-feminist woman on Youtube. It seems highly likely that for her, the father was the dominant parent, and competently so, and the mother, not so much. This is wild speculation of course, but – well, perhaps not so wild.
It’s the free will/determinism thing again. Trump’s grandad was Friedrich Drumpf, but someone was inspired to switch it to something nominatively determining, and the rest is a horrible history. I’ve read a biography of Putin, and I’ve heard much of the early childhood of Trump, all enough to explain what terrible tragedies they are for the rest of the world – but their success in obtaining leadership has also much to do with the psychology, if I can describe it so, of the countries they’ve come to dominate. With Trump’s country it’s libertarianism, ‘the land of the free’, where anyone can apparently become a billionaire if they work hard enough, or are super-smart or super-bold, etc. In Russia – well, its autocratic history is long, and is well described by Orlando Figes in The story of Russia:
The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. From the 16th century, the first tsars of Muscovy drew upon the Mongol imperial tradition, adapting it to their own purposes. Beginning with Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) they justified their claim to an imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Chingiz Khan.
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, p51
The tsars maintained this largely bogus tradition to the end, and Putin, after a period of bolshevik turmoil, and the hopes of Gorbachov’s perestroika, has effectively resurrected it:
Here was the fundamental weakness of the Russian aristocracy. The most senior boyar clans – those who were closest through marriage or royal favour to the Moscow court – formed an oligarchic ruling class, which at times, when the grand prince was weak, might direct his government. But their wealth and power came from him. They kept them only for as long as they retained his protection. It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day. Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.
Ibid, p52
So, Russia and China have never come close to anything resembling democracy, in spite of glasnost and the brutally suppressed Tiananmen Square protests – their long, brutal histories have made such a transformation highly unlikely – but then, the future is long – at least we hope so.
A lot of those hopes, for me, lie in a greater – and greater and greater – role for women in government. First, inevitably, among democracies, so that the ultra-male oligarchies and dictatorships will be shamed and bewildered by the people they’re dealing with, and then…
Well, it’s a pleasant dream…
References
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to sex, 1871, in Darwin: the indelible stamp, ed James Watson, 2005
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, 2022
epigenetics at the very beginning of life – my explorations
So let me see if I can understand epigenetics through other sources, and through what I’ve read so far. First, it’s essential for the very first cell divisions in human – or shall we say mammalian – life, at least for placental mammals. Their lives begin with a fertilised egg, a sperm cell and an egg cell (both known as gametes), each with its complement of DNA (but the egg cell contains much more, and there’s a difference between an ovum and an oocyte, which I won’t go into, as if I could). This cell, also known as a zygote, is the ultimate totipotent stem cell, potentially able to form every type of somatic (diploid) cell. So what causes this cell to divide and multiply, and become, in a few days, a blastocyst?
A blastocyst is already quite a complex collection of cells, with an outer layer, the trophectoderm, an inner cell mass, and a blastocoel, which is a fluid-filled cavity. So, already quite a jump from a zygote, so I need to know how that happens. But even before that, I need to know how a zygote comes into being. Wikipedia puts it this way:
The formation of a totipotent zygote with the potential to produce a whole organism depends on epigenetic reprogramming. DNA demethylation of the paternal genome in the zygote appears to be an important part of epigenetic reprogramming.
That doesn’t help too much, but I’m guessing that this ‘epigenetic reprogramming’ thing is what creates cell diversity – but this description tells us that the formation of the zygote is itself an epigenetic product. Here’s another description of the first steps:
The four stages of embryonic development include fertilization (zygote formation), cleavage (rapid cell division), blastocyst formation, and finally, implantation into the uterine lining.
Cleavage? The website I filched this from (ferty9.com, listed below) fails to elaborate, and looking up the word an sich just takes me to female breasts, which is pleasant but distracting. AI (never lies) gives more detail, claiming four cleavage stages, 1. the zygote stage, 2. the 2 to 8 cell stage, 3. the morula stage, and 4. blastocyst formation. And presumably epigenetics plays a role in the move from one stage to the next?
So, I’ve tracked down a most sciencey article, from ScienceDirect, entitled ‘Epigenetic regulation of early human embryo development’, which I hope to make sense of. Its opening paragraph is a bit daunting though:
Epigenomes undergo profound change during the first few days of embryonic development. The resetting and establishment of epigenomes are coordinated within and contribute to the wider processes of embryogenesis. As a consequence, faithful epigenetic regulation is required to safeguard development and to establish long-lived epigenetic states that have effects on genome function throughout the life course.
So now we have epigenomes, and here’s a definition:
Epigenome: The epigenome consists of all the chemical modifications of DNA and histones of a cell/organism that contribute to regulate gene expression independently of DNA sequence.
Histone modification involves the post-translational modification of specific amino acids that influence the overall structure of histone proteins. Changes in histone structure may then influence their function, resulting in incomplete DNA unwinding that may also effect transcription activity. Major histone modifications include acetylation, methylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitylation, and, less frequently, ribosylation, sumoylation, and citrullination
References
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4783933/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S153458072101042
https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Blastocyst_Development#Introduction
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590923003314
could I ever manage to get my head around epigenetics?
Nessa Carey’s book, The epigenetics revolution, was published in 2011, and discusses, and introduces, to many of us, gene methylation, histones, a number of different types of RNA, the names of specific genes, karyotypes, selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), phosphorylation, the Waddington epigenetic landscape and much else besides. Wikipedia’s account of epigenetics is no doubt more up-to-date, and is just about book-length (how long does a book have to be?), with over 200 references to scientific papers and such. Although the term was coined in the 1940s, the study of epigenetics is very much a 21st century thing, Our current knowledge of the area, like our knowledge of neurophysiology, has been one of the great developments in modern science. To read about it is exasperating, because there’s just too much to learn, to explore, to get your head around, and yet it’s vital to an understanding of who and what we are. When I think of SETI, for example, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, I wonder – how could such ineffable super-complexity have developed more than once in the universe, even given its incalculably massive extent?
I wish I was young and gifted with the opportunity to work in such a field, one which explains us, or tries to. How we manage to replenish all the cells in our bodies throughout our lives – not perfectly, for then we could live forever – but for a period extended enough for us to learn our own history, to fall in love, to learn from our many mistakes, to experience, delight in and suffer through all the stages of life, to observe all its amazing variety – the birds and the bees as they say, and the flowers and the trees, all of which have their genetic blueprints.
To think we had virtually no idea of this only a century ago, and we are 300,000 years old as a species, and DNA-driven creatures have existed for millions, maybe billions of years on this planet. We only worked out the structure of this molecule in the 1950s, and now we know for example that a spruce tree contains about six times more DNA than a human, and that it’s likely that our world was preceded by an RNA world, which still enlivens the viruses that plague us with influenza, hepatitis, polio, COVID-19 and so much else.
And all this epigenetic stuff – which is mainly about DNA methylation and histone modification – has been going on beneath our awareness, and certainly without our permission, since our life began as an embryo. That’s how our cells differentiate into some 200 different types. It has much to do with whether we’re tall or short, sickly or healthy, extroverted or introverted – even before we’ve ever met another soul. All of these goings-on in our growing bodies, as well as the inter-connections, disconnections and reconnections in our growing brains, in the time spent connected to a placenta and the subsequent years being buffeted by parents, relatives, strangers and frenemies, are what shape us for a lifetime.
So where am I going with all this? Those who know me might guess, and be much annoyed, or much heartened.
To return to Carey’s book, which explores, inter alia, how laboratory creatures like rats and mice show specific patterns of behaviour for a lifetime after early deprivation, stress and other conditions, I was struck by this passage:
The human brain possesses sufficient flexibility to generate adult outcomes in response to similar childhood experiences. Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand others to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It’s hard to imagine this, so let’s visualise each connection as a disk that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion disks on top of each other and they will reach to the sun (which is 93 million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
That’s a lot of connections, so it’s perfectly possible to imagine that our brains have a lot of flexibility. But the connections are not random. There are networks of cells within the giant grid which are more likely to link to each other than to anywhere else. It’s this combination of huge flexibility, but constrained within certain groupings, that is compatible with a system that is mechanistic but not entirely deterministic.
Nessa Carey, The epigenetics revolution, pp 235-6
This is, I believe, the only passage in Carey’s 300-page book that refers to determinism, and of course it struck me enough to write one word in the margin.
‘Really?’
I don’t often write in the margins of my books these days. Decades ago I had a girlfriend who expressed shock and great disapproval at finding margin notes in some of my books. She apparently found this behaviour to be sacrilegious in some way. Texts were sacred even if they were reproduced in their thousands. So, though I respectfully disagreed, I’ve reduced my sacrilegious behaviour, maybe to honour her memory. But this time I couldn’t resist.
– ‘mechanistic but not entirely deterministic’? What is the difference between these two terms? Aren’t these mechanisms determined by other mechanistic processes? Isn’t this what the book is all about? Isn’t this how we know about epigenetic processes, because they produce certain changes under certain specific conditions? Aren’t the determining factors precisely what we’re looking for, and what knowledge is all about. And yet there is, I find, a kind of fear or distrust of the word, even amongst those researchers who rely on mapping out the causal chain, often a complex and elusive one, to make good their discoveries. Whether we’re looking at the causes of cancer, or how one or two bees become queens while thousands more become workers, to mention just two topics explored in Carey’s book, we’re always trying to uncover and explain the determining conditions. It’s the sine qua non of all science.
Maybe I’m mis-representing Carey here. Maybe she meant, when she described the ‘huge flexibility’ of our neuronal system, the impossibility of trying to pin things down, cause-and-effect-wise, with absolute certainty. But then, that’s not what she wrote. She wrote ‘not entirely deterministic’, and that was a red flag to me. So what was the part that escaped determinism? It doesn’t actually make sense.
The idea, it seems to me, and the argument that most people try to use against determinism, is that complexity trumps it (sorry to use the word ‘trump’ here). If complexity was infinite, that might be so, but complexity isn’t infinite, it’s just complex.
So, that’s enough for now. Again, I wish I was fifty years younger, and a more disciplined person than I was in my youth, because I’d love to be working in the field of organic chemistry, or molecular biology, or neurophysiology, rather than peering at it over a vast stretch of ignorance, as I am today. But never mind…
References
Nessa Carey, The epigenetics revolution, 2011
on epigenetics and the free will debate, and such…
The free will thing has come to the fore of my head again recently because of an offhand ‘no free will’ remark I made, which of course caused some friendly argy-bargy. When the topic comes up I like to throw ‘the lot’ at it, our early neurological wiring, unwiring and rewiring, our hormonal activity, our genetics, our epigenetics, our position in the womb, our early interactions with parents, siblings and others, our culture, our gender, our first language, the time and place of our birth and so on.
Of all these variables, epigenetics is one that’s likely to catch people off guard. If they ask, I’ll say it’s all about gene expression, hoping that will silence them, and even impress them. But if they inquire further, I’d only be able to say something like ‘environmental factors affect how genes are expressed’ – and that would be the limit of my knowledge, even though, some years ago, I read Nessa Carey’s The epigenetics revolution, published in 2011.
So now I’m reading it again, and it seems for the first time. I’m finding it really hard to understand, and I’m sure it isn’t Carey’s fault. I suspect it’s the kind of topic in which you need to be active in the field to fully understand it, and even then….
But, I’ll have a go. Rett syndrome is a rare but devastating neurological disease which occurs almost exclusively in girls. Apparently, if a male child contracts it, it’s more or less immediately fatal. As AI (never lies) puts it:
Infants typically develop normally for 6 to 18 months before experiencing a severe regression in motor skills, speech, and hand use. While there is no cure, symptoms can be managed with targeted therapies and specific medications.
The development of this syndrome happened to coincide with infants receiving the MMR vaccine, which, as we know, caused much controversy some time ago, but the mechanism was worked out in 1999. It mostly has to do with mutations in a gene called MECP2, which severely affects the production of a functional MECP2 protein. Dysfunction/mutation in other genes have caused the syndrome, or something like it, in a minority of cases. The cells are able to methylate their DNA correctly, which is what much of what epigenetics is all about, but they’re unable to read that section of the epigenetic code properly. So Rett syndrome isn’t a mental/psychological disorder at all, it’s purely genetic, and because the dysfunction is on the X chromosome, and because females have two X chromosomes while males have XY, the male karyotype is more vulnerable to the condition.
I choose this extreme condition (suffered by one in 8500 females) as one among many examples of how our genetics can fail us, and there are many others, much more subtle and hard to pin down, both in terms of our genes themselves and how they are expressed. We – I mean the scientists and researchers among us, and those going along for the ride – have learned especially in recent decades just how complex and beyond our control our brains and bodies are, not just in terms of physical make-up, but genetic and cultural inheritance. A regular awareness of this – a mindfulness, if you like – helps me to cope with the people who damage our world – the war-mongers, the bullies, the intolerant and over-confident – as well as to sympathise with the overwhelmed (like myself).
So, again to epigenetics – I’ll keep trying to comprehend at least some of it, as it’s intrinsically interesting when it’s not completely baffling. Meanwhile, I’ve had a book recommended to me, by two humanists and no-free-will proponents, called Being: why it’s harder to be human than a hamster or a herring, by a daughter and father duo, Rachel and Ross Menzies. Sounds like an antidote to all that epiphenomena…
References
Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How modern biology is rewriting our understanding of genetics, disease and inheritance, 2011.
the road to 1948 – part 4
From 1936 to the the beginning of the 1939-45 war, the British government under its Mandate ruled Palestine as ‘basically’ as it could, with typical colonial contempt, as Khalidi describes it:
The British treated the Palestinians with the same contemptuous condescension they lavished on other subject peoples from Hong Kong to Jamaica. Their officials monopolised the top offices in the Mandate and excluded qualified Arabs; they censored the newspapers, banned political activity when it discomfited them, and generally ran as parsimonious an administration as was possible in light of their commitments. As in Egypt and India, they did little to advance education, since colonial conventional wisdom held that too much of it produced ‘natives’ who did not know their proper place. First-hand accounts of the period are replete with instances of the racist attitudes of colonial officials to those they considered inferiors, even if they were dealing with knowledgeable professionals who spoke perfect English [Khalidi, p 39].
Meanwhile, Jewish migration to the region proceeded at ever-increasing pace. From the end of World War 1 to 1926, the Jewish population had tripled from 6% of the whole, to 18%. In the following years to 1932, movement slowed almost to a standstill, but the rise of Nazism to power in 1933 changed all that. According to Khalidi, ‘In 1935 alone, more than 60,000 Jewish immigrants came to Palestine, a number greater than the entire Jewish population of the country in 1917’. German Jews brought with them assets amounting to around $100 million, by agreement with the Nazi government. The Jewish economy in the region had now well surpassed the Arab economy (rich Jews having also bought much of the best land and introduced quasi-governmental institutions), and the Jewish population had climbed to well over 30% by 1939.
Palestinians responded with a general strike which lasted for 6 months, and led to ‘the great 1936-39 revolt, which was the crucial event of the inter-war period in Palestine’ [Khalidi, p42]. Up until that event, the divide and rule approach more or less unconsciously adopted by the Zionists (and more deliberately by the British) had been largely effective, but the strike brought about an organisation called the Arab Higher Committee, the first of various attempts to unite Palestinians against British rule and the Jewish incursion.
In 1937, the British sought further control via a Royal commission, which
‘proposed to partition the country, creating a small Jewish state in about 17% of the territory, from which over 200,000 Arabs would be expelled (expulsion was euphemised as ‘transfer’). Under this scheme, the rest of the country was to remain under British control or be handed over to Britain’s client, Amir ‘Abdullah of Transjordan, which from a Palestinian perspective amounted to much the same thing. Once again, the Palestinians had been treated as if they had no national existence and no collective rights’ [Khalidi, p43].
This cavalier treatment resulted, unsurprisingly, in a more militant Palestinian response. An armed revolt broke out in October 1937, which took two years to suppress, just in time for British troops to be redeployed for the new World War. Britain’s response to the rising ‘left 10% of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled’, with sentences of execution applied arbitrarily to anyone (apart from Jews of course) in possession of firearms. Over a hundred executions of this type were carried out, and thousands were imprisoned in what the British called concentration camps, while leaders were sent to such remote regions as the Seychelles, Kenya and South Africa. The homes of these captives and exiles were usually demolished.
Khalidi, a member of the Palestinian elite, is able to present an insider’s perspective, as many of his relatives had dealings with the British military leaders in Palestine, who imagined that the military crack-down would ‘solve the Arab problem’. They couldn’t, of course, be more wrong. Even so, cracks had opened between the more militant and the more conciliatory wings of the Palestinian leadership. Such cracks were, of course, exploited by the British, so that internecine strife complicated an increasingly dangerous and seemingly futile scenario.
Meanwhile, just as the British had finally, or seemingly, crushed the Palestinian revolt, war broke out again in Europe. Britain needed support from the Arab nations, and so needed to counter Axis propaganda, such as it was, about British atrocities in Palestine:
Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper in an attempt to appease outraged Palestinian, Arab and Indian Muslim opinion. This document called for a severe curtailment of Britain’s commitments to the Zionist movement. It proposed strict limits on Jewish immigration and on land sales (two major Arab demands) and promised representative institutions in five years and self-determination within ten (the most important demands). Although immigration was in fact restricted, none of the other provisions was ever fully implemented [Khalidi, p48].
In any case Chamberlain’s government was on the way out, and his successor, Churchill, ‘was perhaps the most ardent Zionist in British public life’ Khalidi, p49. More importantly, the war that followed not only gave great point to pro-Jewish views, but it also signaled a global power shift from Britain to the USA. The Palestinian leadership, including Khalidi’s uncle, Dr Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi, had found the British quasi-rulers of Palestine and their ‘hypocrisy, haughtiness and duplicity’ virtually impossible to deal with. The British government’s approach to the region had been heavily influenced by a wealthy home-grown Jewish and Zionist community, who lobbied forcefully, and richly, for their cause. Now it was time for the Americans to be won over in similar fashion.
While some of the Palestinian elite were concerned with the major powers and their lack of understanding of or commitment to the Palestinian-Arab cause, others were more focussed on the Zionists, and the divided and ineffective Palestinian leadership. Yet even without that leadership ‘it took the British [more than 100,000 troops] to prevail over the Palestinians in 1936 through 1939’ [Kalidi p51].
Clearly, the British government had never really wavered from its commitment to the Zionists set out in the Balfour Declaration, and the rise of Nazism and the resultant 1939-45 war was, of course, disastrous for the Palestinian cause. When the British finally withdrew from Palestine in 1948, it was clear that the Zionists had prevailed. What wasn’t clear was the extent of US power and influence in the region from that time forward. And, of course, global sentiment in relation to the Jewish people had shifted radically as a result of the war. Khalidi summarises the situation on the ground:
By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted. Some 80% of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their land and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78% of the territory of former mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one fifth of the pre-war Arab population. This seismic upheaval – the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, as Palestinians call it – grounded in the defeat of the Great Revolt of 1939 and willed by the Zionist state-in-waiting, was also caused by factors that were on vivid display in the story my father told me: foreign interference and fierce inter-Arab rivalries. These problems were compounded by intractable Palestinian internal differences that endured after the defeat of the revolt, and by the absence of modern Palestinian state institutions. The Nakba was only finally made possible, however, by massive global shifts during World War II [Khalidi, p58].
This, of course, is the briefest of summaries, told by a member of the Palestinian elite. My own reading of such books as Tears for Tarshiha and A Palestinian story (referenced below), have given me just a slight insight into the bewilderment, disarray and suffering experienced by the local people due to the still ongoing Zionist project. I wrote all this, again, for my own understanding, and because I still encounter people who have no idea….
References
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 2024
Max Blumenthal, Goliath: life and loathing in Greater Israel, 2013
Olfat Mahmoud, Tears for Tarshiha: a Palestinian refugee’s inspiring tale of her lifelong fight to return home, 2018
Ramsy Baroud, The last Earth: A Palestinian Story, 2018
monogamy: a virtue or a curse? Natural or invented? Alternatives?
Kibbutz kids of yore
I read somewhere recently, from some feminist source, that pornography is anti-feminist, presumably because it largely involves women being available to the more or less insatiable lusts of men. It reminded me of the late Frans de Waal’s comment that bonobo sexual activity seemed to him to be at times ‘pornographic’. And yet bonobo society is matriarchal, while chimp society, which is less sexually inclined, is patriarchal. These two species are equally closely related to us, more closely than any other species. So, what to make of it all…?
One interesting line of thought worth exploring here (and it neatly takes me away from the minefield that is pornography) is that we humans consider ourselves to be a monogamous species, which is not the case for bonobos and chimps. But are we monogamous by nature, and if so so, how did this come about? They say that the course of true love never runs smooth. Is that because it’s a straight-jacket we’ve invented to torture ourselves with?
One might say that monogamy is for the birds. 90% of bird species are monogamous, compared to only 5% or so for mammals, and I’m not sure if H sapiens are in or out of that 5%. And to complicate matters further, some 25/30% of primates are considered monogamous. In any case, and surely unsurprisingly, the naturalness or otherwise of human monogamy is a highly contested issue.
When I was young, stuck with parents in an apparently loveless, strife-torn marriage, I came across a book called Children of the Dream, by Bruno Bettelheim, which told a story of children brought up in a kibbutz, with multiple adult role-models to choose from and multiple kids to play with and learn from. I didn’t read it carefully, it was just the idea that fascinated me, that set me dreaming. Now I realise that bonobo society has a similar openness, with a rich variety of playmates and role models. And let’s not shut our eyes to all that mutual masturbation.
Do bonobo youngsters actually know who their biological parents are? Does it matter, if you’re taken care of, cuddled, fed and mucked around with in a spirit of fun by a variety of carers and oldies? In any case, bonobo mothers certainly know who their kids are, and work hard in their best interests, as various sources, including the Leakey Foundation, inform us:
…for bonobos, sex really is often a family affair. What’s more, rather than being an embarrassing hindrance, motherly presence greatly benefits bonobo sons during the deed.
Bonobo mothers … seem to make a war out of seeing their sons successfully make love. They’ve frequently been observed to form coalitions with their sons to help them acquire and maintain high dominance rank, protect their sons’ mating attempts from interference by other males and even interfere in the mating attempts of other, unrelated males. The new research, published in Current Biology, shows that these strategies pay off. Males who had a mother present in their social group engaging in these behaviours were about three times more likely to produce offspring than males whose mothers were no longer part of the group.
So, it seems that bonobo society, while not monogamous, is very much concerned with the production of offspring, at least as far as their own male children are concerned. No mention is made, however, of daughters. Presumably that’s because bonobos are male philopatric. The females move to other troupes when they reach breeding age – and presumably they are precisely the ones that mothers encourage their male children to mate with. This would avoid inbreeding – the whole purpose of philopatry, presumably – but how do they know? It appears to be something instinctive (if that explains anything), based perhaps on familiar and unfamiliar scents. A little bit of research tells me that this is a fiendishly complex topic with a variety of costs and benefits, so let’s return to monogamy.
One argument for human monogamy is the extended childhood and dependence of offspring. So, social monogamy has evolved, with, eventually, parent-children units domiciled separately from other such units. Over time, such units come to seem natural, so that the kibbutzim would seem to be an experiment ‘against nature’.
So my question – is monogamy a good or bad thing? – boils down to the parents, some of whose children are terribly damaged, others extraordinarily gifted (not from the same parents, evidemment). In general, it has worked – except when it hasn’t, and sadly we don’t get to choose our parents.
My interest in this issue, as I’ve stated more or less at the outset, has to do with child-rearing. It seems to me that among bonobos, it’s much more of a communal thing than it is for humans, and it surely reduces the problem of what we call ‘badly-adjusted’, or simply damaged, kids. Nowadays, in the WEIRD world at least, the ‘family unit’ has become a bit more multifactorial than mum, dad and a small handful of kids. I won’t go into all those factors, but what it means for the kids surely depends on the wider society’s acceptance of such variety, as well as the example it sets for those kids. Ultimately, it’s all about care, teaching, love, fun and other such precious intangibles.
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/philopatry
the road to 1948 part 3
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, as quoted: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
So, as it became clear, with the Balfour Declaration and the refusal of the British and the Western powers to recognise any Arab initiatives opposing that Declaration, that the Palestinian homeland was under serious threat, the region became increasingly violent, a violence ‘often provoked by Zionist groups flexing their muscle’, according to Khalidi. With recognition that the West in general was supportive of the Zionists, the resistance movement became increasingly clandestine.
One outcome of World War 1 that seemed to offer hope for a more peaceful future was the establishment of the League of Nations. But not so for the Palestinians:
In 1922, the new League of Nations issued its Mandate for Palestine, which formalised Britain’s governance of the country. In an extraordinary gift to the Zionist movement, the Mandate not only incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim, it substantially amplified the Declaration’s commitments.
Khalidi, p34
In the preamble of this Mandate only the Jewish people are presented as having a historic connection to Palestine, in spite of the glaring physical evidence of non-Jewish ‘villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine and earlier periods’ of settlement in the region.
And it gets worse. The 28 articles of the Mandate that followed made no mention of Palestinians or Arabs, the overwhelming majority of the people living there, but outlined ‘the key means for establishing and expanding the national home for the Jewish people’, which, according to its drafters, the Zionist movement was not creating, but “reconstituting” ‘ [Khalidi p35].
Such was the apparently ‘global view’ of the League of Nations. The village-dwelling Palestinian fellahin literally didn’t know what had hit them. Further negotiations between the Europeans and Americans and the Palestinian majority were henceforth based on acceptance of this Mandate, which represented the Euro-Americans’ essential view and treatment of the region for some 30 years, despite a growing Palestinian lobbying and resistance movement.
The one-sided nature of the Mandate’s articles is plain to see – for example, Article 2 provided for self-governing institutions, but only among the yishuv, the term used for the Jewish minority in Palestine. When eventually the Palestinian Arab population became organised enough to request similar institutions from the controlling British mandatory government, acceptance was made conditional on ‘Palestinian acceptance of the terms of the mandate, which effectively nullified their existence – only the first Catch-22 in which the Palestinians would find themselves trapped’ [Khalidi p35].
Article 4 treated the Jewish Agency (the principal organ of the Zionist movement) as a ‘quasi-government’, with wide-ranging economic and social powers – effectively a partner to the British mandatory government, with even a role in League of Nations decision-making. Palestinians, as they became more organised, struggled in vein to be granted similar powers.
Article 6 was all about encouraging and facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine – the latest example of ‘settler colonialism’:
This provision was the foundation for significant growth in the Jewish population and the acquisition of strategically located lands that allowed for control of the country’s territorial backbone along the coast, in eastern Galilee, and in the great fertile Marj Ibn ‘Amer valley connecting them.
Khalidi p36
Other articles were similarly weighted against the indigenous Arab population, as well as facilitating an envisioned self-government of the region by and for the Jewish minority. The 1914-18 war had ended the Ottoman Empire, and its former territories were, for a time, under the mandate of either Britain or France. With some self-serving reluctance, these territories were finally handed over to the local, mostly Arab, populations. Palestine was the exception.
Lord Arthur Balfour, of the infamously one-sided Declaration, also wrote a confidential memo in 1919 (not made public until the 1950s) which was blunt in its approach to the Palestinians:
… in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…. The four Great Powers [sic] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. (Khalidi p38)
Again here we find the ‘Western’ racism towards the long-term inhabitants of a particular region that has prevailed in the Americas, in most of Africa and in Australasia. Further, the suggestion is that these Arab ‘inhabitants’ were new arrivals, supplanting an earlier Jewish population. This kind of myth-making helps to explain why many current Zionists actually believe that the land was once overwhelmingly populated by Jews, as Max Blumenthal, himself Jewish, describes in his critique of the region in his book, Goliath: life and loathing in Greater Israel. However, most of the governing and financial elite have little concern about history, they simply want control in the present, after the fashion of settler colonialism. But in these early days, few were so blatant about the supposedly high-minded Zionists and their ‘greater need’ compared to the Arab majority.
So between the two World Wars Jewish immigration to the Palestinian region increased, particularly from 1933, when the Nazis became the German government. At that time, anti-Semitism was still rife in Britain and the USA, so Palestine seemed about the only safe place for many Jews (the Balfour Declaration, it should be pointed out, had an anti-Semitic element to it – it was a way of encouraging Jews to leave Britain). The result of this influx, especially from wealthy Jews, who came to monopolise land ownership and business, was exactly as one might expect:
During the 1930s the Jewish economy in Palestine overtook the Arab sector for the first time, and the Jewish population grew to more than 30% of the total by 1939. In light of fast economic growth and this rapid population shift over only seven years, combined with considerable expansion of the Zionist movement’s military capacities, it became clear to its leaders that the demographic, economic, territorial, and military nucleus necessary for achieving domination over the entire country, or most of it, would soon be in place. As Ben-Gurion put it at the time, “immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all Palestine”. Many Palestinians came to similar conclusions [Khalidi pp41-2]
So, the Palestinians were increasingly up against it. The ever-growing land acquisitions and consequent expulsion of fellahin from ancestral lands resulted in banditry and repression. Arab leadership sought redress, or at least a voice, in British and other government circles, but they were generally out-numbered and out-manoeuvred by the Zionists. Increasing Palestinian violence and unrest, and representations to the British government, resulted in a number of enquiries and ‘White Papers’ throughout the 20s and 30s, which, largely due to more powerful Zionist lobbying (and British self-interest), went nowhere. By 1936, Palestinian frustrations led to a six-month strike, which in tun led to ‘the great 1936-39 revolt’, which I’ll deal with next time.
References
Rashid Khalidi, The hundred years’ war on Palestine, 2024
Max Blumenthal, Goliath: life and loathing in Greater Israel, 2013
the road to 1948: part 2
An Arab demonstration in Palestine in the 1920s, long before the US and Western-backed Jewish control of the region
So the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was very much a fillip to the hopes of European Jews, many of whom had for some time been buying up land in the Palestinian region. At this time, that region had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire, a sprawling domain centred in what is now Turkey, and controlling lands in the Arabian region – northern Africa, the west of Asia and the east of Europe – for over six centuries. But all this came to an end with the First World War, and the situation in Palestine in any case had been changing quite rapidly since the turn of the century. Rashid Khalidi describes it thus:
… new ideas were spreading, modern education and literacy had begun to expand, and the integration of the country’s economy into the global capitalist order was proceeding apace. Production for export of crops like wheat and citrus fruit, capital investment in agriculture, and the introduction of cash crops and wage labour, notable in the spread of orange groves, were changing the face of large sections of the countryside. This evolution went hand in hand with the accumulation of private land ownership by fewer people. Large tracts were coming under the control of absentee landlords – many of whom lived in Beirut or Damascus – at the expense of peasant smallholders.
Khalidi, p17
Meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish land-owners and appropriators continued to increase, especially with the rise of Nazism in Europe. Still, they were very much a minority, though they and others brought with them a more westernised and educated culture, while also seeking to integrate themselves into what was, of course, a predominantly Moslem region. Prominent Zionists of the time, such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, future leaders of the Israeli state, became Ottoman citizens, and learned Arabic and Turkish.
The whole of eastern Eurasia was undergoing rapid change in the first decades of the twentieth century, and not just because of the first War, but that war came directly to Palestine in 1917. I’ll be relying heavily (and unapologetically) on Khalidi’s book, referenced below, for the details:
From the spring of 1917 through the late autumn, the southern parts of the country were the scene of a grinding series of battles between British and Ottoman forces, the latter backed by German and Austrian troops. The fighting involved trench warfare, air raids and intensive land and naval artillery bombardments. British and imperial units launched a number of major offensives, which slowly pushed back the Ottoman defenders. The fighting spread to the north of Palestine in the winter (Jerusalem, in the centre, was captured by the British in December 1917), and continued into early 1918. In many regions, the direct impact of the war caused intense suffering. One of the worst-hit districts comprised Gaza City and the nearby towns and villages, where large ares were pulverised by heavy British shelling during prolonged trench warfare and then the slow allied advance up the Mediterranean coastline.
Khalidi, p22
Many Palestinian families were torn apart by this conflict, with individual members fighting on different sides, and other taking to the hills, or even as far as the Americas, to avoid the whole thing. In the aftermath, the survivors were faced with a sudden end to the 600-year Ottoman rule. And then, as Khalidi dramatically but effectively puts it:
It was in the midst of this great trauma, as one era ended and another began, against a grim background of suffering, loss, and deprivation, that Palestinians learned, in a fragmentary fashion, of the Balfour Declaration.
Khalidi, p23
That short declaration can be found in part one of this series. Its seemingly benign language masked what was effectively a pledge of support for Jewish control of a region in which they were at that time a small minority. It failed to acknowledge Palestinians as a people, or the predominantly Arab culture to be found there.
Why was the British government so easily persuaded by the Zionists? Obviously, the whole ‘Holy Land’ story would have appealed to what was still very much a Christian nation (and even more so later vis-a-vis the United Staters). You could say it was revenge for all those medieval crusades which failed to dislodge the ‘infidels’ from the holy lands. Or you could just put it down to naïveté. Another, more cynical motivation may have been to encourage British Jews to leave the country for their ‘ancient homeland’. Khalidi tends to favour this motivation:
the British Empire was never motivated by altruism. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project, just as they were served by a range of regional wartime undertakings…..
More important than British motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration is what this undertaking meant in practice for the crystal-clear aims of the Zionist movement – sovereignty and complete control of Palestine. With Britain’s unstinting support, these aims suddenly became plausible.
Khalidi, p25
Now it may be that some would dispute that the Zionists, or the Jewish lobbyists, were not consciously intent on Jewish control of the whole of Palestine, that it somehow just fell out that way. One might say the same of the British in Australia much earlier, or the British and French in North America, or the Spanish and Portuguese in South America. Intent or not, what occurred in Palestine was a power play, built on a desire to create something new and powerful, and an indifference to the claims and the needs of the long-term inhabitants of the region.
After the 1914-18 war, Palestine came under British control, which, what with the Balfour Declaration, meant an increase in the Jewish population and a growing sense of embattlement for the Palestinians, many of them fellahin who had lived a traditional and largely undisturbed village and farming life for millennia. The Zionist movement had been adept at playing the political game, particularly with the British, but also with other European powers and the growing power of the US. European colonialism in Africa and the Middle East gradually awakened concern especially among the Palestinian elite, insofar as it existed. Tensions were growing, as Palestinians began to develop a new sense of identity under threat. The times were a-changing, long before Dylan pointed it out. And so…
As soon as they were able to do so in the wake of World War 1, Palestinians began to organise politically in opposition both to British rule and to the imposition of the Zionist movement as a privileged interlocutor of the British. Palestinians’ efforts included petitions to the British, to the Paris peace conference and to the newly formed League of Nations. Their most notable effort was a series of seven Palestine-Arab congresses planned by a countrywide network of Moslem-Christian societies and held from 1919 to 1928.
Khalidi, p31
Needless to say, these efforts fell on largely deaf Euro-American ears.
Reference
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 2024
the road to 1948: part 1
I’m just finishing The Last Earth: a Palestinian story, by Ramzy Baroud, having recently read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and Escape from Manus, by Javet Ealom: three very different books, but all about people who have been made to suffer because they were born into an ethnicity that was/is being persecuted by other ethnicities – to over-simplify the situation, probably quite a lot, in the case of the Palestinians.
Is there something wrong with me for being drawn to such depressing material (I’ve gotten teary a couple of times while reading The Last Earth)? I can’t really answer that, but I think a lot of us are rather morbidly attracted to other people’s tragedies or messes, like the mess that Frump is making in the USA, the mess that Mr Pudding has made in Ukraine and the mess he now finds himself in in Putinland, and the long-standing tragedy of Palestine. Schadenfreude is a long word, but still not long enough to effectively capture the obsessive interest we have, or at least I have, in this seemingly interminable crisis in one of the oldest human habitations in our world.
So, I’m thinking of writing a series of pieces about the region, and my focus will be generally on the oppressed, rather than the oppressors. I want to begin with the year 1948, and sometimes I will move forward from there, sometimes backward. It’s all largely for my own education.
So, why was 1948 such a vital year in the history of this region? On May 14 of that year –
the National Council, established to oversee the political needs of the Jewish community in Palestine, voted to accept the final text of the Declaration [of the Establishment of the State of Israel].
So, Israel was established as a State in 1948, in the region formerly, and currently, known as Palestine. At the time, and for a few decades before, the Jewish population of the region was increasing. This matter is of course essential to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. I read somewhere that the Jewish population in the Palestine region at the end of the 19th century amounted to about 6% of the total population, but I can’t recall the source. Wikipedia provides this information:
The Ottoman census of 1878 indicated the following demographics for the three districts that best approximated what later became Mandatory Palestine; that is, the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, the Nablus Sanjak, and the Acre Sanjak. In addition, some scholars estimate approximately 5,000-10,000 additional foreign-born Jews at this time.
According to Ottoman statistics studied by Justin McCarthy,[113] the population of Palestine in the early 19th century was 350,000, in 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of which 94% were Arabs.
The estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882 represented just 0.3% of the world’s Jewish population.[114] From 1882 to 1904, the Jewish population in Palestine doubled due primarily to the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe as part of the Zionist Aliyah.[97]
I’m not sure if this is helpful, but it is clear that there was a major influx of Jewish people into the Palestinian region, starting around the above-mentioned period. The term ‘Aliyah’ refers to the immigration of Jews from the diaspora into the land of Israel/Palestine, the land of the ‘chosen people’, as their religion would have it. And I would have to state my position here clearly, that I’ve never considered religious belief as a justification for anything, and I’ve never considered the Bible as anything like a historically accurate text.
The above-mentioned increase in the Jewish population in Palestine around the end of the 19th century was, I believe, an effect of the growing Zionist movement, led by Theodor Herzl among others. They sought, and lobbied governments about, a homeland more or less exclusively for the Jewish community – preferably in their Holy Land, but the region around modern Uganda was seriously touted for a while. They focussed mostly on the British government, which before the World Wars was the most powerful government on the planet – them were the days.
It was also a period of richesse for many Jews, who were buying up land in the Palestine region – which was part of the Ottoman Empire at that time. It must be said that anti-Semitism was a commonplace in the WEIRD world throughout this period. It went back, of course, to the old Jesus-killer claims of almost 2000 years before, and was exacerbated more recently by Jewish business and commercial success.
So, an important development in the Jewish push for a homeland was the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a brief letter to the Jewish zillionnaire Lord Rothschild, quoted here in full:
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 civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
All of which reads as polite, civilised and well-meaning, at least to me, but recall that, only 20 or so years before, the number of Jews in Palestine was around 6% of the total population, though that percentage was very much on the rise. It might be drawing a long bow, but I’m reminded of White Australia and the concept of Terra Nullius, which ignored the people – ‘savages’ as they were more or less universally described by the whites – who had been living there for some 65,000 years, according to the most recent data. And the problem with this seemingly benign document is that it doesn’t refer to any consultation with the non-Jewish Palestinian people, who had been making their home there for thousands of years. That is what places this ‘plan’ in the category of ‘settler colonialism’, which describes the ‘white’ or European settlements in Australia, New Zealand and all the Americas, at great cost to the much earlier inhabitants of those lands.
So how did the 1917 Balfour declaration lead to the 1948 ‘establishment of the state of Israel? I suspect the Holocaust had much to do with it.
I think it was the last year of primary school, when I was 11 or 12 years old, that we had as a set text The Diary of Anne Frank. It was a devastating experience for me. Decades later I travelled in Europe, and my partner and I rented a flat in Amsterdam for a few days, very close to the Anne Frank museum. I declined a suggestion that we visit it, because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to cope with it emotionally. A couple of weeks later I was flanant les rues in Paris, as you do, with my camera at the ready, and I came upon this memorial:
Below this plaque there were placed fresh bunches of flowers, and on the plaque, as you might just see, was a long list of names, and above them an inscription, which I will roughly translate:
Arrested by the Vichy government, complicit with the Nazi occupation, more than 11,000 children were deported from France from 1942 to 1944 and murdered at Auschwitz because they were born as Jews.
More than 500 of these children were living in the quatrieme arrondisement. Among them, 101 little ones never had the chance to attend a school.
Passerby, read their name, your memory is their only sepulchre.
The holocaust was an event that we should never allow ourselves to forget, that surely goes without saying. And the Jewish community has made great efforts to remind us of this horror. It may seem churlish to point this out, but there have been large-scale slaughters that have received far less attention. These have been dubbed ‘silent genocides’, such as have occurred, and are ongoing, in Rwanda and the territory now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There was also the Holodomor in Ukraine under Stalin, and the so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’ famine under Mao. Statistics for these man-made genocidal disasters have been difficult to tabulate, of course, but the very preventable Chinese famine, in the most recent estimates, caused 30 to 46 million deaths. The estimated figures for the Holocaust are six million Jews, and about 5 million others deemed unworthy by the Nazi regime. Again, it’s virtually impossible to be precise about these numbers.
The war in Europe, and its immediate aftermath, had a devastating effect on Palestine, but in the decades immediately preceding that war the region was already being transformed at an unprecedented rate. That’s what I’ll focus on in my next post.
References
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah#Zionist_Aliyah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 2024