Archive for the ‘Palestine, Zionism, Arab nationalism’ Category
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
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
Who are the Palestinians?
There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state?
Golda Meir, President of Israel, 1969
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank, 1944
As I’ve pointed out a few times before on this blog, nations are a human invention, and quite a recent one. Here in Australia, we became a ‘state’ in 1901, when the British government decided they’d had enough of governing our land by proxy from the other side of the world. France and Germany’s borders were obviously still under question during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, and Germany was two nations from 1949 to 1990. Italy became a nation-state in 1861, Switzerland in 1848, Austria in 1804 (as a central part of the Austrian Empire – it didn’t become a sovereign state in its current form until 1955). The borders of the Chinese and Russian ‘states’ have changed regularly over the centuries, more or less entirely due to warfare and pillage.
I should also point out that humans have been around for 300,000 years, and for some 99.9% of that time – or is it more? – have done quite well without the need for nations. And the land has existed for some 4 billion years, in different shapes and sizes, without being ‘owned’ by anything resembling a human.
The remarks by Golda Meir quoted above (and often repeated by her) were obviously made without a trace of irony, considering that there had never been an Israeli or Jewish state before it was imposed on the people of the region after massive dispossession and bloodshed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In any case there is no doubt that Palestine is a place. As such, it is mentioned by Herodotus in his 5th century BCE histories. Before that, the region was called Philistia, the land of the Philistines, dating back another 7 centuries, and even before that, the land of Canaan. People lived there, as they did in Australia some 40 to 50 thousand years ago, and made it their own. Of course, they didn’t have a state. Such a concept didn’t exist before the modern era.
Years ago, I had a friend who wrote about and essentially complained about what he called ‘heavy culture’. I was inclined to agree, and that was some years before I joined a humanist organisation, as a kind of statement to myself that I considered common humanity to be more important, far more important, than nation or ethnicity.
Of course, that kind of thinking raises the question – what do we do with culture? What is culture, exactly? Think of unique cultural products, like kimonos or didgeridoos, which, over time, and sometimes grudgingly, get to be shared with cultural ‘outsiders’. And think of language, perhaps the most central cultural product. Nobody really knows how many there have been, but it’s in the tens of thousands, at least. Is it a tragedy that most of them are no longer spoken? Is it a tragedy that most of the gods we’ve invented are no longer worshipped? Is the movement away from religion, particularly in the WEIRD world, a form of evolution?
But I digress. The Palestinian people have suffered death, destruction and humiliation through the latest settler colonialist venture, just when we thought we were done with all that shite. And to be honest I’m not quite sure that when people talk of the state of Israel they’re not talking about the 51st state of the USA. That country has poured billions of dollars into Israel’s settler movement, especially its military, and has long been a profoundly biased negotiator in Palestinian-Israeli disputes.
Palestinians have had their villages erased, their leaders murdered – along with quite a few Israeli leaders, it must be said – and their lives continually threatened, for a long time now. They fight back against enormous odds, they reach out desperately for allies in the region, some have even become suicide bombers. Being mostly Moslem, like all their Arabic neighbours, they get little in the way of help, or even sympathy, from the WEIRD world. That world, where it exists in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of Africa, had a more or less ‘successful’ settler-colonial history, which it now tries to come to terms with, more or less successfully. Of course we know that recent Jewish history has been traumatic to say the least. I’ve read books and watched TV programs on the Holocaust. The diary of Ann Frank was a set text at school when I was only twelve or thirteen, and I still get emotional just hearing her name. But there have been other examples of mass-murder, far less publicised, because those slaughtered belonged to cultures and ethnicities that have never gained prominence in the West. This is the case with the Palestinians, whose voices have gone largely unheard, first by the British, then by United Staters (I rather enjoy calling them that).
So, who are the Palestinians? They are the long-term residents of the region, who can trace their ancestry there for generations. They’re also people who have left the region for a better life or at least some kind of life after their homes have been destroyed, family members killed, their lives threatened and so forth. They’re a hurt and angry people, but many are stubborn and resolute about their homeland and their need to protect and preserve it. Of course many first people everywhere – here in Australia, in New Zealand, in all the Americas and much of Asia – have had what they thought were their lands taken away from them by more powerful new arrivals, but now we know – history tells us – that much of what those new arrivals did to the established populations was cruel and inhumane. The Palestinian people, like all those other first populations, deserve better.
References
Olfat Mahmoud, Tears for Tarshiha: A Palestinian refugee’s inspiring tale of her lifelong fight to return home, 2018
Ramzy Baroud, The Last Earth: A Palestinian story, 2018
Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and loathing in Greater Israel, 2014
Rashid Khalidi, The hundred years’ war on Palestine, a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance, 2024
On Palestine, settler colonialism, humanism, and the universe
I was always a bookish kid so it wasn’t surprising that my mother, who very much encouraged me in this, bought me a big book to read one Christmas, when I was ten or eleven years old. I knew it was my mum, she was the one who encouraged all that, packing the house with books and getting us, my two older siblings and I, out to the library in the next suburb every fortnight or so.
This book, though, has a special place in my memory, though I can’t recall the precise title or the author, and the book itself sadly disappeared from my belongings, along with almost everything else, a lifetime ago. It was a history of the ‘American West’, and it included two chapters, titled something like ‘Blood in the mountains’ and ‘Blood on the prairie’. The emotional impact of these chapters on me was profound, and lasting. Nowadays we describe this ‘land-clearing’, or more accurately ‘people-clearing’, process euphemistically as settler colonialism, and of course it happened here in Australia. The story is generally told this way – ‘we came, we saw, we conquered, and we improved the lot of the vanquished, or at least of those who survived’, though I’m pretty sure that the author of the book I read presented no such silver lining, to his credit.
All of the above is preliminary to a reflection on Israel-Palestine, another version of settler colonialism, which has been ongoing, really since the 19th century. But in more recent times we’ve wised up a little to the injustice of it all, and we can’t use the excuse that United Staters and Australians have used – that it was all in the past, that we know better now than to call indigenous peoples ‘savages’. We even like to have their artwork on our walls.
So I can be holier than thou about the Palestinian situation?
Actually, it’s simpler than that. It’s just like that old book about the West, it’s about siding with the victims. I also like to use the ‘no free will’ argument – we didn’t get to choose the culture or ethnicity we were born into. Or the species, for that matter. Would I have preferred to be a bonobo? Not really… but then, there’s the sex…
The fact is, being born Palestinian in the contested region of Palestine-Israel in the 20th or 21st century is one piece of bad luck among many (Rohingyas in Burma, Congolese under Leopold II’s ‘Free State’, Chinese under Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, Ukrainians under Stalin and his Holodomor). Then again, luck isn’t the word – it’s about brutality, selfishness, indifference to suffering, all the negative elements of humanity.
But now, more than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, with global communications prying into every corner of the globe, we can’t so easily hide the cruelty, the arrogance, the blatant injustice of what the perpetrators avoid describing as settler colonialism, that quaint descriptor.
I’m writing this because, due to the choice, by a reading group I’m a member of, of a novel by an Australian author of Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was recently ‘disinvited’ to Adelaide Writers’ Week, probably the nation’s premier writers’ festival, for reasons unknown to me. This action prompted a boycott by so many other writers that the event had to be cancelled, an unprecedented situation in the event’s history, as far as I’m aware. I should say that a terroristic attack in the area of Bondi Beach in December last year (2025), carried out by members of an anti-semitic organisation called Islamic State, in which 15 people were killed, appears to have influenced the Writers’ Week Committee’s decision.
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel, Discipline, told a story of young Palestinian-Australian intellectuals struggling to get the message of the plight of their people heard by the media and academia in Australia. As an ‘oldie’, I found all the talk about Whatsapp, Insta Tiles, Tik-Tok, LinkedIn, flipbooks, app interfaces and such to be exasperating. I found the Moslem or Arabic cultural and religious references – Allahu Akbar, Bismallah, Salafi, Wallahi, intifada, iftar, koshari, fajr and so on – a little more interesting, but, insofar as they’re religious, not so much. Frankly, I find all religious beliefs to be just plain silly, especially given what we now know of our universe and our evolutionary history, though I make some effort to recognise that they’re bound up with heavy cultural identity and such. I’m just glad, or lucky, not to have been brought up in such a heavy culture. No free will and all that.
Having said that, the novel has refocused my attention on the Israel-Palestine horror-show, and that above-mentioned term, ‘settler colonialism’. The first book I read on the issue was The Case for Palestine, by an Australian lawyer, Paul Heywood-Smith, which introduced me to Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the buying of land in the region by wealthy Jews, and the pressuring of governments, notably the British government, to accept a more or less exclusively Jewish homeland in Palestine. For Palestinians, this has been a horror story, of displacement, cruelty and, especially in the early years of this displacement, up to and including the Nakba, international indifference. The land of Palestine, the land of Caanan, was multicultural for millennia. What has happened to it has been, from a humanist perspective, a catastrophe, resulting in hatreds and enmities that seem eternal. A friend of mine used to call it the problem of ‘heavy culture’, and as a person who doesn’t particularly identify with a nation (though a ‘sovereign citizen’ I most certainly am not), and enjoys the multiculturalism – and the remoteness – of the country I inhabit – I tend to agree. This morning I sat around a table conversing with two Columbians, two Chinese and an Australian, and in earlier conversation groups with Japanese, Sri Lankans, Koreans, Mexicans and Taiwanese, mostly recent arrivals, and I could feel in their faces, voices and movements that they were happy to be here – perhaps even relieved. I’m possibly being a little starry-eyed, but this is the sort of country I always want to live in.
And yet, I’m still drawn to the world’s horror-zones – Palestine, the USA, China, Russia, Sudan, Ukraine and the like – mostly hoping for good news rather than wallowing in shadenfreude. I think it’s just identifying with the human under stressful conditions, and hoping for happy endings, or just signs of improvement…
Anyway, I’m now reading with great interest The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, which gives a rich and broad account of this tragedy from something of an insider’s perspective, as his family have for generations been part of Palestine’s intellectual elite. I don’t suppose the book has a happy ending, but what could such an ending look like? A sudden, or gradual respect for those who can trace their ancestry in the region back thousands of years? But then, why would that ancestry make them more respectable than others? I presume that my ancestry goes back tens of thousands of years, as does everyone else’s, and if they stayed much of that time in one region, that hardly makes them more worthy than those who chose or were forced to move around. And of course for 90% of that ancestry there were no countries, though there were emerging languages and cultures, no doubt with relations between them varying from very warm to very cold….
All of this is what you might call humanist chatter. As I like to say, there are no real countries, we made them all up, mostly by people saying ‘this is our land exclusively and if you argue we’ll fight you and, if necessary, kill you, and by the way I think that land over there is ours too…’, etc, etc. But all of these people will die, and countries will disappear, and humans too, but the land will endure for longer, though not in its current form, for it too will transform, as it has in the past, and… to speculate further is a bit beyond me.
Where am I going with all this? I’m not sure, except that to say that a particular piece of land belongs to a particular culture is always questionable to say the least. We have become more international, more culturally fluid, more multicultural as they say, and this is bound to continue, so the key is to get people to stop fighting over what was never theirs to begin with, and to recognise that their project should be to mutually thrive, learn about and enjoy the land, the planet, the universe that we rather miraculously find ourselves being tangled up in.
Reference
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 2020
palestine 5 – the turbulent thirties and forties, towards the Nakba
The 1930s saw a growing animosity among the native, mostly Sunni Moslem population towards Zionist claims to and appropriation of Palestinian lands. Sentiments about the future of the region were diverse, animated and increasingly dogmatic. There are no clearly ‘representative’ figures, but the career of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, illustrates some of the complexities of Arab-Zionist-European relations in the period that includes WW2.
Husseini was born to a prominent Palestinian family in Jerusalem (his father and his half-brother also served as the city’s mufti). At the outset of WW1 he joined the Ottoman army, but switched his allegiance to the British after their forces captured Jerusalem, seeking their support for Arab independence against the Ottoman Turks. After the war he became a prominent writer and activist, and a supporter of the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria. Later, after securing the position of mufti (and exalting the title to Grand Mufti), he sought to limit or stop Jewish-Zionist immigration to Palestine, in direct opposition to the Balfour Declaration and the British position on the region. Interestingly, it was only through British string-pulling that he was able to secure the job of mufti, a lifelong sinecure. For more than a decade Husseini was seen as a British ally in the region, in spite of his increasing interest in Arab-Palestinian nationalism and his antagonism towards Zionism, but the Arab Revolt (1936-39) obliged him to take sides against Britain. Evading an arrest warrant, he fled Palestine and finally took refuge in fascist Italy and Germany, where he sought Nazi support for Arab independence in the Levant. As a propagandist for the Nazis he was implicated in war crimes. He found refuge in Egypt after the war, but was still active in political life, expressing opposition to the 1947 UN partition plan, and helping to organise an All-Palestine government in Egypt-controlled Gaza. Though supported by many Arab states, it was limited in effect and was superseded by the PLO in the sixties. Husseini died, a controversial and complex figure, in Lebanon in 1974. His connection with Nazism and with the anti-semitism that has since been such a feature of Arab nationalism appears to have been his major legacy.
Husseini’s increasing anti-Semitism mirrored to some extent the Arab nationalist movement as a whole, at a time when post-war Europe and the USA were moving in the opposite direction after the revelations of the Holocaust. These shifts have been momentous in terms of international attitudes to the Arab world and the foundation of the nation of Israel.
Against this backdrop, and after a spike in Jewish immigration to the region, a nationalist revolt against the British mandate in Palestine, which began as a general strike organised by Husseini in 1936 and was at first confined to political action, became increasingly bloody and widespread in response to repressive British measures. According to the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi – whose figures are probably more reliable than those of the British – ‘over ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled’, while Jewish casualties were relatively small.
The Arab Revolt (1936-39) was an almost inevitable response to increased Jewish immigration and aggressive land acquisition, leading to an increasingly impoverished and desperate Palestinian Arab peasantry. It failed, of course, against the superior military forces of the British and their European allies, but it led to a more organised Arab resistance movement in the region, though this was countered by increased British support for Zionist militias such as the Haganah – the precursor of the notorious Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
British attempts during its mandate to limit Zionist appropriation of Arab lands were half-hearted and easily circumvented, with the result that the native population suffered the usual consequences of colonisation – marginalisation, impoverishment and disconnection from traditional custom and culture. This also led to an Arab nationalist movement that became increasingly conservative, harking back to a supposed pre-colonial utopia.
Unrest leading up to the revolt caused the British to set up a Royal Commission, which recommended partition of the region into Jewish and Palestinian sectors. The Jewish sector, though smaller, comprised the land already appropriated, which was of course the best agricultural land. The Commission also put forward a more radical proposal, of transfer of Palestinian Arabs from the region to Transjordan – east of the Jordan River. This strongly appealed to Jewish leaders of the period, such as David Ben-Gurion, who favoured Zionist monoculturalism. The commission’s proposals were rejected outright by Arab leaders, and with war in Europe looming, the Brits were anxious to avoid creating enemies in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world. Finally the idea of partition was rejected, or temporarily shelved.
Meanwhile, indiscriminate acts of violence and terror on both sides were stepped up throughout 1937 and 1938. Concentration camps were constructed to accommodate both victims and perpetrators, and collective fines added to the burdens of impoverished Palestinians. The Zionists were uncompromising in their ambitions for the region and this created an us-and-themism in the Palestinians which hadn’t existed before, at least not to such an extent. Elsewhere, as the ill-treatment of Jews in Europe was becoming known, Jews were offered the chance to emigrate to the US, Canada and Australia, but Zionists opposed these offers, as Morris Ernst, international envoy for refugees under Roosevelt, describes:
active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of freer immigration (into the US) in order to undermine political Zionism.
The crushing of the Arab Revolt by the British military was somewhat softened by an attempt to curb Jewish immigration. The Brits declared that it was ‘not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state, that 75,000 Jewish immigrants should be admitted over the next five years, but no more after that without the approval of the Arabs’. This declaration was followed until the end of WW2, after which the revelations of the Holocaust weakened British resolve and essentially sealed the fate of Arab opposition to the creation of the state of Israel. Some idea of what the Palestinians were up against is given in these lines from Paul Heywood-Smith, a Queen’s Counsel and Chairperson of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association:
The Jews not only intended to introduce an alien culture, they planned to make it the only one in the country: culturally, politically, economically and demographically. They insisted on Hebrew, separate schools and hospitals, self-segregation and the exclusion of Arabs from every institution they established.
Combine these drastic and uncompromising intentions with increasing support from the powerful nations of Europe and later the USA, and it becomes clear that the native non-Jewish inhabitants had far less than a fighting chance of having their voices listened to and their rights upheld.
By the end of WW2, Zionists were openly hostile to British attempts to contain the situation in Palestine. Jews were being smuggled into the region at increasing rates, many of them of course in traumatised condition. Non-Jews still outnumbered Jews by a substantial proportion, but organisations such as the Irgun, a well-organised paramilitary organisation which was as violently anti-British as it was anti-Arab, made this disproportion largely irrelevant. Terrorism sometimes does work.
On November 27 1947, the newly formed UN General Assembly adopted a partition plan for Palestine (Resolution 181 II), terminating the British Mandate for the region. There wasn’t much in the way of consultation with the native Palestinians, who rejected the proposal out of hand, along with every other Arab state. The Zionists were willing to agree to it, no doubt as a stop-gap measure, but in any case nothing came of it, because civil war broke out immediately after the plan’s adoption. The British were by this time primarily interested in removing themselves from the region with a minimum of casualties. Their Mandate expired on May 14 1948, and on the same day David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s future first Prime Minister, declared Israel an independent state. The civil war, however, was still ongoing. This war and its aftermath, known in Arabic as the Nakba, (catastrophe in English) is probably the most important event in this several-part narrative, so I’ll save it for my next post.
I’ll end this post by looking again at the UN situation. In 1947 the UN voted 33 to 13 for partition of Palestine, with 10 abstentions. The people of Palestine had no vote in the matter. It was convenient for powerful western nations (whose doors were largely closed to Jewish refugees) to support a solution which gave 54% of Palestinian land to the Jewish minority. At the time, many Afro-Asian nations, who would certainly have taken a more dispassionate view of the issue, weren’t part of the General Assembly. Heywood-Smith adds some interesting colour to the vote – revealing much of the bullying shenanigans that have hampered UN votes right up to the present:
In any case, partition didn’t occur, and after the civil war, many hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were forcibly removed from their homes and out of the new nation of Israel, to which they have never been allowed to return.… of the 33 who voted in favour many went against their better judgment but were overborne by diplomatic violence and arm-twisting by the Truman White House. A war-devastated France was told it would lose US aid if it voted against partition. Liberia, an impoverished African state, was told that American investment in the country would not proceed unless it voted yes. Latin American delegates were told that the proposed Pan-American highway would be more likely if they voted yes. The Philippines changed its vote after intense pressure and after its delegate initially spoke against the plan.
References
Paul Heywood-Smith, The case for Palestine, 2014
https://www.paljourneys.org/en/story/14310/guerrilla-warfare-and-mass-strike-1936-revolt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936–1939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine
palestine 4 – the inter-war years 1919-1935
Jacinta: So with our tendency to think of the present as eternal, we imagine that countries like Jordan, Syria and Lebanon have always been with us. When and how were these countries, as well as Israel, created, and what was the purpose of their boundaries? Did they more or less capture particular ethnicities, or try to?
Canto: That’s a very big question, but an important one – we’ll try to give some semblance of an answer as we go along. It’s certainly the case that these terms are ancient and referred to indistinctly defined regions under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which had a loose structure of provinces or ‘eyalets’ over many centuries, their boundaries and titles changing as power ebbed and flowed in different sectors. After WWI the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, first planned years before, began. It was a four-year process.
Jacinta: The Sykes-Picot agreement really kicked off the planning, and it represented the first major incursion or interference of the modern ‘west’ in middle-eastern or Arab affairs. The partitioning was decided upon in a series of treaties presided over by the new League of Nations, which created temporary mandates over former Ottoman territories which the west clearly considered incapable, at least at the time, of governing themselves. Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
their peoples were not considered “able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world”. The article [Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations] called for such people’s tutelage to be “entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility”.
Canto: I suppose it’s easy to be cynical about this, but there was clearly a view that modern, western-style nationhood was the only way to go, that There Was No Alternative. It was a matter of shape up or be steamrolled. So, after Versailles, the middle-eastern lands were divvied up by decisions of the victorious Central Powers in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), the San Remo Conference (1920) and the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). The United Kingdom was given a mandate over the Emirate of Transjordan (roughly corresponding to modern Jordan) from April 1921, and Palestine (roughly corresponding to modern Israel) from September 1923. France was given control of ‘Syria’, which included Lebanon, also from September 1923. The Palestine mandate was to uphold the 1917 Balfour Declaration for a Jewish homeland in the region.
Jacinta: Which brings us to the situation on the ground there. The phrase ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ had become something of a catch-cry among Restorationists, the mostly Christian forerunners of Zionists, and it was used to play down the numbers and significance of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine at that time. For example, as far back as 1901, Israel Zangwill, an associate of Herzl, gave a speech using the phrase. Here’s how he described the region:
Palestine has but a small population of Arabs and fellahin [farmers or farm workers] and wandering, lawless, blackmailing Bedouin tribes… Restore the country without a people to the people without a country. For we have something to give as well as to get. We can sweep away the blackmailer—be he Pasha or Bedouin—we can make the wilderness blossom as the rose, and build up in the heart of the world a civilisation that may be a mediator and interpreter between the East and the West.
But interestingly, Zangwill disavowed this speech a few years later as he came to realise the density of the Arab population there, though he still used the sort of arguments that colonists have used everywhere to justify their incursions, claiming that the Arabs there weren’t really ‘fused’ with the land, and only used it ‘as a sort of encampment’. But the fact was that, in spite of the National Jewish Fund mentioned in the last post, the population of Palestine in 1922 was 75% Muslim, 13% Jewish and 11% Christian, and nobody seemed game to inquire of the majority population whether they would allow the Zionists to create a homeland – basically a nation-state – there. Unsurprisingly.
Canto: Yes, they didn’t inquire because they had a good idea of what the answer would be. Even before the mandate, the Brits and the French occupied the Levant and the Mesopotamian region due to their victories in 1918, so they were increasingly aware of the rise of Arab nationalism, which was a concomitant of the rise of Zionism. We wrote of the Arab Revolt and the McMahon Agreement last time, in which the British promised assistance in creating an Arab Kingdom in return for Arab assistance against the Ottoman Turks. This resulted in the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz in the western edge of the Arabian Peninsula, recognised in the Arab world as the first modern Arab state. Later, in 1920, the Arab Kingdom of Syria was self-proclaimed, but was opposed by the occupying British and French. It only lasted a few months before surrendering to French forces.
Jacinta: Yes the politics of all this is complex and murky. It seems many of the Arabs themselves weren’t particularly supportive of the Hashemite Kingdoms (Hejaz and Syria) because they saw them as British proxies. Many were more than happy with life under the Ottoman Sultanate. So there was tension among Arabs as well as tension between the British and the French, and between each colonial power and the Arabs, and then there were the Jews, who felt they weren’t being fully supported in their claims.
Canto: But though these first Hashemite Kingdoms weren’t well supported at the time, in later years their failure came to be, from the Arab perspective, symbolic of western interference and duplicity. As did western support for the Zionist cause. It’s interesting to note that at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 there was intense argy-bargying between the Brits and the French about control of Arab lands, especially in the Levant region, but it was the Americans who came up with the novel suggestion that perhaps the local inhabitants might be consulted. At first the Brits and the French agreed but then, presumably recognising what they might lose, they backed out. The Americans, though, went ahead with the consultation process and found that the Arabs were strongly in favour of an independent Arab state in the region. The results of the survey, though, weren’t published until 1922, after the League of Nations mandates were agreed upon.
Jacinta: And of course Arab-Zionists tensions were rising. Despite Zionist efforts, the Arab population in the early thirties still vastly outnumbered that of the Jews, but of course the Zionists had powerful interests on their side. Meanwhile many surrounding countries were attaining full independence – Egypt in 1922, Saudi Arabia in 1926, and Iraq in 1931. The French, in their way, were reluctant to grant independence, but did so partially to Syria and Lebanon in 1936. They took full independence during WW2. The region known as Transjordan, bordering Palestine, was nominally under the control of the British, but they showed little interest, and handed effective control to local authorities under a 1928 agreement. Full independence was granted in 1946. All of this added strength to a growing pan-Arabic movement.
Canto: Of course the British had put themselves into a tight spot, with promises to the Arabs and the Zionists, who grew increasingly hostile to each other. An anti-western Muslim movement, Salafism, became popular in Egypt and spread to regions of conflict – Palestine in particular. The movement was personified by, among others, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim scholar and preacher who landed up in Palestine after 1920. A militant opponent of Zionism, he was incensed by the treatment of Palestinian Arabs, especially the working poor, and embarked on a guerilla campaign against the British and the Jews. His death at the hands of British police was a major contributor to the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, of which more later.
Jacinta: Yes and at the same time, Arab pressure on the British brought about a reduction in Zionist immigration, which led to British-Zionist conflict. It was all about land of course, and neither the Arabs nor the Zionists were willing to give an inch on the topic. There were various more or less failed attempts by the British to placate both sides, including the Churchill White Paper of 1922, which, while emphasising the import of the Balfour Declaration, argued that this was not an imposition of a Zionist state upon the Palestinian population. It also called for a reduction of immigration to “the economic capacity of the country to absorb new arrivals”. But it seems that all attempts at compromise only increased militancy on both sides. And then of course there was the rise of Nazism in Germany – although this didn’t really come to affect the Palestinian situation until the 1940s.
Canto: So next time we’ll look at the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 and also at the impact of WW2 and the post-war creation of the United Nations, and how they influenced the increasingly fraught situation on the ground in Palestine.
This is from the great collection of Palestinian journalist Mohamed Ali Eltaher (1896-1974), a fearless critic of the Zionist movement, and of the Arab response to it