Posts Tagged ‘Palestine’
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
this disastrous election and its global consequences
A Palestinian protest held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the day of Trump’s election
It’s November 5 in Australia, 1.32 am in the USA and their election is determined. Not already determined, but determined nonetheless – just as Trump and Harris are determined, by their respective genetic inheritances and their vastly different backgrounds. I don’t know vast amounts about those backgrounds, but enough to know that they were raised in very different circumstances by very different people.
Trump’s influences were mostly male, capitalistic and grasping, to the effect that he had a million dollars to play with, sort of, by age 8. As an adult he has bankrupted himself six times. He has of course, been a chronic tax avoider, and it’s clear that this and other traits, such as his everyday racism, his attitude to women, his big-noting of himself, and his various get-richer schemes, were laid down early in life. Trump’s father Fred was a real estate developer and businessman who lived well into his 90s, and clearly he was the principal influence in Donald’s life. His mother Mary is described as a socialite and philanthropist, presumably on the basis of her husband’s wealth.
Kamala Harris is the USA’s current Vice-President, which means, according to the USA’s rank-obsessed political system, she has already become the USA’s highest ranked female. Her father is a Jamaican-American professor of economics, and her late mother, born in Madras (now Chennai) in India, was a researcher in women’s health, notably breast cancer. They divorced when Kamala was a child of 6 or 7. Clearly these academic interests impacted on Kamala just as Fred Trump’s pecuniary interests heavily influenced Donald, but the fact that Kamala was brought up for much of her childhood by a single mother would have heavily shaped her view on women’s issues.
I’ve collected this scanty information from the public record, which of course provides very little in the way of granular detail, but enough to indicate vastly different life trajectories in a land of great contrast socially and culturally, together with the developed world’s most massive rich-poor divide.
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So twenty-four hours later, Trump has won the presidency of the USA, this time including the popular vote, which, in my view, is the only vote that should count in a one-on-one election for near-dictatorial powers (though of course no such political system should exist in a democracy and, as far as I’m aware, no other democratic system provides such dictatorial power to a single individual).
In my view, the most serious disadvantage Harris faced in this election was the fact that she is a woman. We don’t know as yet how the election, for the first time, of a convicted felon to this dictatorial position will pan out, but even if it ends in disaster, it’s my view that no woman will be given the top job – held by men in that country for over 230 years – for decades to come. And I suspect that the presidential role will only cease to be overly empowered to the ridiculous and catastrophic degree that it is today when a woman is elected to that position. Not any woman, it must be said. Not a woman like Margaret Thatcher or Sheikh Hasina, but a woman indeed like Kamala Harris or Jacinda Ardern.
I’m reluctant to think about the internal future of the USA over the next few years – I thankfully live far away from that storm – but of course I worry for the Palestinian and Ukrainian people, and for Xi’s now-boosted ambitions regarding Taiwan. The world is terribly interconnected, and we should have interconnected and humane concerns, but there’s not much use telling that to one of the most self-centred human beings on the planet, an individual who now has control of the world’s largest military-industrial complex, and who worships dictators.
My first instinct is to avert my eyes from the USA. And yet, I have that curiosity that allegedly killed the cat. I shall try to direct this curiosity to related matters. Having just read Peter Apps’ comprehensive biography of NATO, I know that this development will create something of a crisis for other NATO nations. They will have to step up their support of Ukraine, and do all that they can to avert the serious possibility that Trump and his minions will actually provide support to the dictator. As to the people of Gaza – what is there to say? Trump has no fellow-feeling whatsoever. Absolutely none. This has nothing to do with politics. Trump is not a politician, or anything like a normal human being. The term malignant narcissist has never been more apt for an individual, and it’s obvious to any reasonably informed observer, that’s why the fault of his becoming any nation’s leader doesn’t lie with him but with that nation’s massively ineffective guardrails. And the whole world is going to suffer, we don’t yet know how much, for that nation’s massive failure.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyamala_Gopalan
Peter Apps, Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO
the Palestinian/Israeli tragedy 2 (not so much a timeline)
It’s been a while since I wrote the first part of this series, and I may never have returned to it but for a book I’ve been perusing, A brief history of the Middle East, by Christopher Catherwood, which has caused some slight irritation. It has also made me feel that my first timeline, which tried to cover the region from about 9000 years ago to the destruction of the second temple by the forces of Titus in the first century CE, didn’t sufficiently cover the religious developments in the region. This is no doubt a product of my secular bias, but since so much of the modern tragedy is wrapped up in religion, I feel I need to at least try to make an effort to make something of the changing religious impulses and beliefs of those more or less prehistoric times.
Statements in Catherwood’s book have also made this a priority. In its opening chapter, ‘Ancient Empires’, he clearly takes much of the history of the Palestinian region from the Old Testament, which I’ve always assumed to be a highly unreliable historical document (but of course I’m no authority on the region or the period). Particular claims strike me as odd, such as this, on what Catherwood calls the Israelites, or the Children of Israel:
Initially, the new state in which the different tribes settled was a kind of theocratic republic. The people were ruled by prophets speaking on behalf of the one God, a being who the Jews realised was not just a tribal deity, or even simply their tribal deity, but the one and only God who existed.
C Catherwood, A brief history of the Middle East, p19
There’s much that’s problematic here. First, the Jewish movement towards monotheism was a matter of changing belief, not realisation. Realisation here suggests reality, and there’s no evidence that a universal god is any more real than a local, tribal one. This isn’t history. The ‘different tribes’ here refers to the putative tribes of Israel who conquered the promised land. Catherwood assumes that this conquest, and the exodus from Egypt, were real events, even dating the beginning of the conquest at ‘around 1220 BC’ (note the use of the Christian dating scheme, which has long been superseded). You will find voluminous material about the ‘ten (or twelve) lost tribes’ online, but very little, indeed nothing, that amounts to evidence. Much (or should I say all?) of the material is written by Jewish scholars, who spend their lives in disputation over such matters. It’s easy to get swamped by all this. A good place to find a more objective view is researchgate.net, but the likelihood that these Israelites were once enslaved in Egypt is not great – the Egyptians weren’t slave-owners as the later Greeks and Romans were, and there is no evidence of major warfare and ethnic cleansing in the Palestine region at the period Catherwood suggests.
Having said all that, the problem for Palestine is that conservative Jews fervently believe in these myths and in their god-given right to ethnically cleanse all unbelievers and other-believers, in spite of their ancestry in the region.
I’ll take a deep breath and dive into what is known about the religious beliefs and practices during the period when Jewish monotheism became a thing, in future posts on this subject.
The Israeli horrorshow that our governments pretend isn’t happening
Canto: We just have to talk about Israel. It’s doing my head in.
Jacinta: I know. So let’s start with the slogan – don’t know if its like some official government position – ‘Jewish and Democratic’ – do you see the problem with that?
Canto: You know I do. Democracy is, at least theoretically, inclusive, while Jewishness is, most practically, exclusive. The two are as immiscible as lipids in water.
Jacinta: Well put. And on that basis, I mean considering the putative inclusiveness of democracy, much-touted Athenian democracy, which never lasted long anyway, was never really democratic, because women weren’t regarded as citizens, in fact they were virtually non-persons.
Canto: Right, not to mention slaves, who would’ve been a substantial proportion of the population, and non-citizens like Aristotle, who could never become citizen-voters, despite their contributions to the state. But turning to modern democracies, we’re far more sensitive to the need for inclusiveness if we’re to legitimately describe ourselves as democratic – think of the national shame we feel in Australia about not allowing our indigenous people the right to vote until the early sixties. And of course anyone from overseas who becomes an Australian citizen not only can but must vote here.
Jacinta: But we don’t think of our country as ‘Australian and democratic’, in spite of some pollies and others trying – unsuccessfully in my view – to characterise typical Australians. And the same with Brits and Americans.
Canto: So that takes us back to Israel and the Jewish obsession with cultural identity, and its association with a particular piece of land, which some Jewish people seem to think is exclusively and eternally theirs. We’ve read a number of texts on the Palestine-Israeli tragedy, or disaster, or whatever you choose to call it, the first one being The case for Palestine, by Australian lawyer Paul Heywood-Smith, which focuses particularly on the legal issues re the creation of the Israeli state, as well as all the hard-headed lobbying of western politicians by Zionist ideologues in the early twentieth century. It was most educational, but what has most haunted me since reading the book is a less characteristic passage:
What is a secular American Jew? 22% of American Jews now describe themselves as having no religion. That figure rises to 32% for those born after 1980. Is this secular American Jew an American? Is he/she a Jew? Is he/she an Israeli living in the US? Why do Jewish American Organisations regard assimilation as the greatest danger? Religious Jews no doubt have a reason to call themselves Jews. But non-religious American Jews no longer suffer discrimination….. Why can’t they just be American? The answer is – Israel
Paul Heywood-Smith, The case for Palestine, p83.
The reference here is to American Jews but of course it equally applies to Australia, Britain or any other country. It’s strange that Jewishness, which began as a religious rather than a national signifier, should continue to have such significance for non-religious Jews. I think there are two answers rather than one: first, the land of Israel, which was propagandised in Jewish religious writings as ‘the promised land’, upon which was built a magnificent but totally mythical kingdom under David and Solomon, and second, the history of Jewish oppression, throughout Europe in particular, culminating in the holocaust. This has combined to create a heavy sense of culture, associated with a particular stretch of land – which, to be factual, never belonged wholly to the Jews during Old Testament times.
Jacinta: Yet it’s still strange. It does seem, though, that heavy culture – in which one’s culture almost seems to take precedence over one’s humanity – is generally forged in opposition to oppressors. Members of indigenous cultures, for example, who probably took that culture for granted when left to themselves, often develop a fierce pride in it, when it comes under threat from ‘whities’.
Canto: Yes, they dig in and get quite conservative about it. They become preservationists. But returning to Israel – is there any nation now existing on this planet that’s more racist than Israel?
Jacinta: That’s interesting. You might say that because there’s actually no such thing as ‘race’, and I think science backs me up on this, there can be no such thing as racism, but that’s not true. Race is about fact and science, whereas racism is about perception and belief. I’d roughly define racism as a belief in superiority based on a perception of skin colour and/or cultural identity. That saying, I’m inclined to agree with you about Israel, though I haven’t visited that many nations, even in my cyberworld travels…
Canto: No matter, it’s clearly a racist country, by your definition. Add to that sense of superiority the nonsensical idea that the piece of land modern Israel has been built upon (whatever its rather flexible boundaries) has ‘always’ been theirs, and the promotion of a peculiar ‘everyone hates us so we must be super-strong to defend ourselves’ paranoia, and you have a most peculiar and unique form of racism, which is no less vicious for being so.
Jacinta: So clearly Israel is no more a democracy than South Africa was under apartheid. Now, over the past months we’ve been educating ourselves about the situation there via reading – notably four texts. First, The case for Palestine, which is useful for, inter alia, recording the indefensible attitude of successive Australian governments towards Israel’s brutality, of which more later. Second, Tears for Tarshiha, a memoir by Olfat Mahmoud, who was born in Burj Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut, after her family were driven out of their native town, Tarshiha, in what is now the north-west of Israel, as part of the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, which saw some 700,000 Palestinians fleeing or being forced out of the region. Mahmoud is a Palestinian peace activist and director of an international NGO, who represents the resilience of Palestinians amid horrendous suffering. Her story is simply told but sometimes painful to read. Third is The last earth, by Ramzy Baroud, which tells multiple stories from the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian diaspora, as part of a people’s history of individual voices and perspectives, a rejection of the ‘terrorist’ stereotype. Fourth is Goliath: life and loathing in greater Israel, an enormous piece of on-the-ground reportage by the Jewish-American journalist Max Blumenthal, which identifies some of the main figures in Israeli right-wing politics and presents a stark picture of the cultivated racism of the Israeli military and its education system, and a multi-faceted picture of the resistance movement. Honestly, no words of mine could do justice to this valuable work.
Canto: Yes, so let’s take some choice quotes from these books to discuss. From The case for Palestine:
In the days preceding the September 2013 election, the [Australian] Foreign Minister and deputy leader of the party Julie Bishop, attacked the Greens over its supposed ‘support’ of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement. Bishop demanded that the Greens leader, Senator Milne clarify her party’s stand on ‘the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign’. To so describe the BDS campaign demonstrates a remarkable lack of understanding by an incoming foreign minister.
Paul Heywood-Smith, The case for Palestine, p111
Jacinta: Yes, and the author goes on to quote from the movement’s website, which makes clear its human rights agenda, its opposition to racism, anti-Semitism, etc. This ‘anti-Semitic’ slur is commonplace from the defenders of the indefensible, but I’m not sure about Bishop’s lack of understanding – I suspect she knew exactly what she was saying re defending Israel at all costs, which is habitual with right-wing politicians (and many left-wing politicians) in Australia. We’ve long been all the way with the Americans on the topic of Israel, as witnessed by our shameful unwillingness to censure Israeli practices at the UN, putting us always in the outlying position along with our Great Ally.
Canto: I have nothing to add. From Tears for Tarshiha I will quote something in the preface, from a speech made by the author Olfat Mahmoud at the UN, to mark the formation of UNRWA:
As a Palestine refugee in Lebanon, I have very limited rights, I am stateless, and I exist but am not recognised… My father and mother and my grandmothers and grandfathers and my children will remain refugees even if they marry Lebanese. For us the phrases ‘human rights’ and ‘the right to be free from statelessness’, and the right to live in safety and dignity’ have lost all their meaning.
Olfat Mahmoud, Tears for Tarshiha, p4
Jacinta: Well, this speaks to so much, it’s hard to know where to start. The beginning of the end came for non-Jewish Palestinians at the turn of the 20th century, in a rather quiet way, when wealthy European Zionists began buying up land in the region, setting up the Jewish National Fund in 1901 and making it a rule that all land that it acquired was ‘to remain inalienable Jewish property that could not be sold or leased to others’ (Heywood-Smith, p25). This dubious ‘law’ still exists, and reflects the exclusivity that has led to today’s horrorshow in Israel.
Canto: Yes and speaking of horrorshows, the horrific treatment of the Jews under nazism meant that, post-war, the Jewish people benefited from a surge of goodwill, more or less worldwide, which helps explain the rush to create the Israeli state and the bowing to Zionist pressure to ‘simplify’ the massively complex politics of the region in order to bring that state about. And so, the Nakba and all that followed, as some of the world’s most powerful nations turned a blind eye.
Jacinta: All of which cemented thinking in the neighbourhood of the region, which didn’t have to be the case. Israel, due to its behaviour, will have to make itself a fortress against all its neighbours, when it isn’t attacking them. It’s astonishing, when reading Olfat’s book, how little bitterness she shows for the tough upbringing she was forced to endure, but it shouldn’t be at all astonishing that many Palestinians, and their supporters, do feel bitter, and vengeful.
Canto: Now to Ramzy Baroud’s The last earth. I won’t quote from it, I’ll briefly mention some of the stories (there are nine in all), to give some semblance of their variety. Marco’s story – a Palestine refugee born in Yarmouk, Syria, he couldn’t help but be caught up in the conflict there, identifying himself with any one of the competing forces he needed to in order to survive, until he realised that flight was the only option. In his struggle to get to Europe he meets with many demoralising setbacks and the story ends with him still trying to reach a destination with some modicum of security. Ahmad al-Haaj’s story tells of his escape, as a teenager, from the siege of Al-Faluja in 1948, where many family members died. The siege itself is described in detail – the hope followed by despair and the sense of betrayal, the sense of being eternally out-gunned and harrassed, the ruthlessness of Moshe Dayan and the Israeli military. The disruption of families is a major feature throughout. Another story tells of life in a Gaza refugee camp – the disappearances, the frustrations, the constant Israeli intrusions, the quasi-mythic heroes and the legends used to maintain morale amid the desolation. Other stories tell of imprisonment, torture, ritual humiliation, martyrdom, starvation, as well as love and humour.
Jacinta: Yes, these are the stories of ‘ordinary’ people in intolerable situations, people who are as smart, thoughtful, hard-working and ambitious as the rest of us to our varying degrees, but who find themselves thrown into a hellhole by an unlucky throw of the dice.
Canto: Finally, Goliath, which we can no more do justice to here than to any of the other works. For his reportage, Blumenthal mixed with the new right-wing high-fliers as well as the Palestian-Jewish protest movement, the religious zealots and their trapped victims. This overheard piece of conversation from one Jeremy Gimpel, described as ‘a thirty-two year old Israeli transplant from Atlanta who lived in the settlement of Efrat’ and was an electoral candidate, caught my attention:
‘When was Palestine called Palestine? We’re from Judea… we are the indigenous people of the land of Israel!’ I heard him proclaim in a suburban American accent. ‘How dare they try to kick us out of our homeland!’
Jacinta: Yeah, right, note again the paranoia – who is this ‘they’? But the absurdity here needs to be highlighted. The idea (coming from an American!) seems to be that, assuming that Palestine was never an ‘official’ name, the people of Palestine, apart from the Jews, aren’t ‘official’ human beings. It’s like saying that Australia’s indigenous people (or those of the US) aren’t really people because the land then didn’t have an official name – so the white people who arrived and bestowed a name on the place are the indigenous inhabitants!
Canto: Yes, it’s all very logical. Of course, Judea, a small section of Palestine, is only as old as Judaism – a mere 4000 years, and the region had human inhabitants long before that….
Jacinta: Yes but they were all wiped out by the Israelites coming out of Egypt, remember?
Canto: Haha, oh yes, ethnic cleansing….
References
The case for Palestine: the perspective of an Australian observer, by Paul Heywood-Smith, 2014
Tears for Tarshiha: a Palestinian refugee’s inspiring tale of her lifelong fight to return home, by Olfat Mahmoud, 2018
The last earth: a Palestinian story, by Ramzy Baroud, 2018
Goliath: life and loathing in greater Israel, by Max Blumenthal, 2014
the Palestinian/Israeli tragedy – a timeline 1
Every time I start writing about something I feel vaguely guilty that I’m not writing about something else. Pretty silly but there you go. I hope to get back to sciency stuff after this….
I’m going to try writing a timeline of events and data leading up to the current situation in Palestine/Israel, which will never be comprehensive but…
- c9000 years ago the region we may now call Palestine or Israel didn’t have a clear name. It was inhabited by agricultural communities practising various religions. There was at least one concentrated centre, Jericho, regarded as one of the world’s oldest towns, successively inhabited for the past 11000 years.
- c7000 years ago – evidence has recently been discovered that Jerusalem was inhabited at this time (the Chalcolithic era). The Israeli press made much of this, but there’s no evidence of course that Judaism dates back that far. I should add that, in considering the history of the people of the region, I make the reasonable assumption that ‘holy texts’ are propagandist and of extremely limited reliability.
- c6000 years ago – the region from this time is generally known as Canaan, at least by historians and archaeologists – though the first known use of the term comes much later (we’re at the very beginnings of rudimentary writing). The inhabitants spoke a variety of Semitic languages and dialects. We’re talking here about a large region encompassing much of modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
- c4500 – 4000 years ago – the region’s population grew – it benefitted from but was also threatened by surrounding civilisations, such as the Egyptians to the south, the Sumerians and Akkadians in Mesopotamia, and later the Assyrians, Babylonians and other peoples. These infiltrating groups also influenced religious beliefs.
- c3500 – 3000 years ago – small city states had developed, and the region, particularly in the south, came under increasing control of Egypt. one of the principal languages was Eblaite, in the north. The Hittites of Anatolia were another major influence. During this period, a number of towns and cities still known today came into being, or into prominence, including Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Jaffa, Beirut and Hebron. The Canaanite religion, from which the Israelite religion essentially derived, was polytheistic but hierarchical, and among the many deities worshipped in a very diverse and volatile region were Dagon, Ba’al Hadad, Anat, Astarte, El Elyon and Moloch.
- c2800 years ago – by this time there were a number of distinct kingdoms in the region, including Israel/Samaria, whose principal god was Yahweh, Judah (also Yahweh), Moab (Chemosh), Edom or Idumea (Qaus), and Ammon (Moloch). Each of these gods headed a pantheon of lesser gods.
- c2700 years ago – around this time the Judaic religion began to take full form. Israel and Judah had become vassals of the Assyrian empire. Israel rebelled and its kingdom was destroyed. Refugees who fled to Judah, particularly the elite, promoted Yahweh as a supreme god, the only one to be worshipped. The sudden collapse of the Assyrian empire and the support of a new king of Judah (Josiah) helped the ‘reform’ to succeed. The old covenant, or treaty, between Judah and Assyria was replaced by a covenant with its new overlord, Yahweh. However, we cannot know how many people in the kingdom adhered to the new monotheism.
- 586 BCE – the Babylonians sacked Judah’s capital, Jerusalem, and the elite were taken captive. It’s impossible to know how many lives were lost. It’s claimed that the ‘first temple’, supposedly built under the reign of Solomon, was destroyed at this time, but there is no evidence of the existence of this fabulous structure.
- 539 BCE – the Persians under Cyrus the Great captured Babylon and many exiles returned to Judah. They regained control of the kingdom (now called Yehud) and brought with them a more ascetic, exclusivist form of the religion, very probably influenced by Zoroastrianism, a Persian form of monotheism. It was at this time that the Torah or Pentateuch was written. However, Yehud/Judah was now a part of the Persian Achaemenid empire, and remained so for over 200 years. The region was considerably smaller and less populated than suggested in Judaic holy texts – it was situated south of Samaria, bordering the Dead Sea to the east, but not quite stretching to the Mediterranean in the west.
- 332 BCE – Alexander the Great conquered the region, but died shortly thereafter. The Ptolemies, descendants of one of Alexander’s generals, gained control of the region.
- c 200BCE – another Greek dynasty, the Seleucids, based in Syria, gained control of the region. Clearly the people of the southern Levant region, among whom were people we might now call the Jews, had never really experienced autonomy, which might explain something of the modern situation. The Seleucids were keen to either suppress Judaism or to Hellenise it, leading to increased tensions with the ruling powers, and between traditional and ‘modernising’ Jews.
- 167-160 BCE – This was the Period of the ‘Maccabean Revolt’, involving a series of battles which eventually led to a semi-autonomous Jewish state, the Hasmonean dynasty.
- c110 BCE – with the weakening of the Seleucids, the Hasmonean dynasty became autonomous and expanded its territory into Samaria and Galilee in the north, Idumea to the south, and Perea and Iturea to the west. It should be noted however that this was a kingdom, not a religious state. The state was always reliant on more powerful states, such as the Roman Republic and the Parthian empire.
- 63 BCE – the region became a client state of Rome after invasion, and the Jewish territory was again reduced. The Hasmonean dynasty came to an end in 37 BCE when Herod, an Idumean, took over the throne. The Hasmonean period has been used for propaganda purposes by Zionist nationalists to claim modern rights to the land governed by the Hasmoneans before the Roman invasion.
- 6 CE – the first Roman governor/prefect of Judea – a Roman province – was appointed. The region was still a kingdom, but most power was in Roman hands.
- 66-73 CE – during these years a major rebellion broke out against Roman rule. The second temple was destroyed by the forces of the future Roman Emperor, Titus, and the first major diaspora of Jews occurred – though Jews were already starting to migrate to Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.
Okay, this first part of the timeline, taking us to the beginnings of the Christian era, has clearly more information about the Jews and Judaism than about the other peoples of the region. That’s largely because there’s more information out there about the Jews than the other cultures/religions. It’s virtually impossible to get reliable information about the population of the region in toto, let alone the proportions of different peoples, their range of occupations, the number and sizes of towns, the degree of co-operation and rancour between disparate groups etc etc. In any case, we’ve now covered the period which the most hardline Zionist nationalists say is the basis of their claim to a Zionist monocultural state. From this point on, the Jewish diaspora will be a feature, as well as the ever-changing situation in and around the southern Levant, or Palestine.
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