a bonobo humanity?

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