a bonobo humanity?

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