a bonobo humanity?

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