Posts Tagged ‘David Ben-Gurion’
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
palestine 6 – the Nakba
On May 14 1948, Israel was unilaterally proclaimed as a nation by David Ben-Gurion, ending the British mandate in the region. US President Truman immediately recognised the new state in spite of the views of his predecessor, Roosevelt, who had argued that Arabs and other natives of the region should be consulted. According to the US ‘Office of the Historian‘:
The British, who held a colonial mandate for Palestine until May 1948, opposed both the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine as well as unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to the region. Great Britain wanted to preserve good relations with the Arabs to protect its vital political and economic interests in Palestine.
There’s no doubt some truth in this, but also by this time Britain was falling out of love with colonialism due to bitter and costly experience, and the post-war era experienced a re-emergence of general concern for oppressed people. 1948 was also the year of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so it’s worth noting some of the Articles in light of the Palestinian situation:
Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 13 (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 15 (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
These are just some of the articles being drawn up at the time which have direct relevance to what was going on in Palestine, and it seems odd that the US, so heavily involved in the Declaration, was not particularly attuned to that relevance. Nevertheless it’s clear that the USA has been for decades the staunchest ally of the Zionists, and its arms and support have been vital to Israel’s imposition of an apartheid state in the region.
Going back to 1947, Palestine was in a world of tension, and the UN plan for partitioning the region, described in the previous post, only made matters worse. Neither the Zionist nationalists nor the Palestinian Arabs were happy with British control, and both sides – but particularly the never-consulted Palestinians – were unhappy with the partition as defined. The wider Arab region was becoming increasingly sensitised to the issues, as a sense of Arab nationalism grew. At the same time, the revelations of the Holocaust created greater sympathy for the Zionist cause, particularly in the US. Within Palestine itself, atrocities were committed on both sides, tit-for-tat killings, finally escalating to the point of civil war as the British were reluctant to intervene. It seems the Arab side was most active in the initial stages, as the Zionists began to organise for the long term, with increasing support for the paramilitary Haganah, and Ben-Gurion’s plan to have all Jewish men and women perform military service. Arms for the Yishuv (the aspirational and Zionist Jews within the Palestinian Mandate) were effectively smuggled from Europe and other regions. Meanwhile, upheaval and economic insecurity in Palestine disproportionately affected the Arab population. The displacement of the Arabs, a feature of Zionist tactics from the beginning, rose sharply in this period, leading to later evacuations.
It’s impossible, in a small blog piece, or a limited series of posts, to do justice to the events of 1948, before and after the declaration of Israeli statehood. Needless to say, these events, variously described as the Nakba (catastrophe), the Palestine War, or the War of Independence/Liberation, all depending on allegiance, left a legacy which has never been dealt with and continues to fester. Things started ‘small’, with car bombings, house bombings, indiscriminate grenade attacks, riots, and the mining of railways causing the deaths of scores of Arab and Jewish civilians as well as British military personnel. In February-March 1948, the charismatic Arab leader Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni organised a successful blockade of Jerusalem, using a force consisting almost entirely of volunteers. Although this was a blow to the Jewish leadership and the Haganah, who lost most of their armoured vehicles in trying to relieve the blockade, the Zionists were always better-funded than the Arabs, and the situation on the ground generally was such that an increasing number of Arabs and non-Jewish Palestinians, especially of the middle class, fled the region, always hoping to return.
Over time both sides became more organised and militarised. The Haganah in particular became more active, effectively relieving the Jerusalem blockade in mid-April 1948. The death of al-Husayni in battle at this time profoundly affected Palestinian-Arab morale.
The surrounding Arab nations provided some troops but were insufficiently organised to make a decisive intervention. The situation became increasingly disastrous for the Arab population. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were sacked, and the major cities of the region became void of Palestinians. Numbers are always in dispute, but the monoculturalist ambitions of many (but not all) Zionists were essentially achieved, as some 80% of the Arab population no longer resided in the new state of Israel by the end of the war. Many of them had understandable hopes of returning after the situation had stabilised. It took some time for the Arab population to realise that ethnic cleansing was always the aim of the Zionist monoculturalists. Not that all Zionists were monoculturalists, but the moderates in Israel were outmanoeuvred by the hardliners, and have been in the seven decades since.
In any case, the chaos on the ground during the early period of the war, with Jewish retaliation becoming increasingly heavy-handed, and the commission of such atrocities as the Deir Yassin massacre, led to panic flights of Arab populations. Arguments still rage, of course, as to whether there was a clear-cut policy (outlined in Plan Dalet) of what we would today call ‘ethnic cleansing’, but it’s clear enough that the Palestinian flights fulfilled most Zionist desires, and they were certainly encouraged by Zionist psychological warfare. The Palestinian flight from the city of Haifa, for example, was ‘facilitated’ by Haganah’s Arabic language broadcasts calling on Palestinian inhabitants to (irony of ironies) ‘kick out the foreign criminals’, and to evacuate the elderly, women and children. But these were more than psychological ploys, as Haganah battalions attacking Haifa had orders to shoot every male Arab on sight and to burn down Palestinian houses wherever they found them.
David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli leader and new Prime minister, was clearly the architect of the Nakba, insofar as there was one. He was more than willing to flout UN directives, and he clearly considered that Israel had to be a homogenous Hebrew state. It’s a repeat, in many ways, of the colonial enterprise here in Australia and in the United States. You either kick out the original inhabitants or you neuter them through overwhelming power and violence. Yet this was happening in the twentieth century, after all we’d learned about colonial injustice, and at the very time that the world was formulating a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Expulsion of Arab populations became more standard, and more brutal, as the war entered its final stages. There were also (e.g. the evacuation of Nazareth) cases of outright deception, reminiscent of the US government’s dealings with its native population in the 19th century. Ilan Pappé, the expatriate Israel historian, writes of this period:
In a matter of seven months, five hundred and thirty one villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied … The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape and the imprisonment of men … in labor camps for periods of over a year.
The expelled Palestinians were mostly forced to live in refugee camps in surrounding countries, most notably Lebanon, where they were often subject to extreme restrictions, raids and massacres by forces allied to the Israeli government, as described, for example, in Tears for Tarshiha, by Olfat Mahmoud. Those who tried to return were often shot. The right of return is of course guaranteed by the UN, for what that is worth.
Writing about these events, and reading about them, is one of the most unpleasant and demoralising tasks I’ve ever undertaken. So this will be the last historical piece. Instead I will focus on heroines and heroes in the dark world of Israel/Palestine, many of them largely unsung. Most of them have suffered for their humanist outspokenness. Israel today is very close to the bottom of my list of countries worth visiting, and what is most exasperating is that telling the truth about it is likely to get you into big trouble even in Australia, if you happen to be a politician or a high profile intellectual. Luckily I’m neither, so I can write what I like. I’ll try my best to tell the truth – and the truth does have a habit of coming out eventually, though I strongly expect that the truth about Israel’s anti-democratic democracy will be a long long time in coming. I mean the global acceptance of the truth, which is currently accepted by only a tiny beleaguered minority.
Some reading
Tears for Tarshiha, by Olfat Mahmoud
Goliath, by Max Blumenthal
The case for Palestine, by Paul Heywood-Smith
The Last Earth: a Palestinian story, by Ramzy Baroud