Birth of a Nation: from the ashes of Palestine. posted by Richard Seymour

There is an obvious and glaring problem with discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict. On the one hand, it is altogether too easy to discuss Israel as an occupier, human rights abuser etc. On the other hand, so few understand what the war is really all about that most are obliged to rest their thoughts on the pre-digested pabulum of media stock phrases. Greg Philo and Mike Berry describe some of the consequences of this in their Bad News from Israel (Pluto Press, 2004). There's an essay by Philo summarising some of this here. Even those who are not left supposing that the Palestinians are aggressively trying to claim more land from The Only Democracy In The Middle East, or that the war is over some sort of Levantine Kashmir situated between two nations who both exert a claim on it, still end up regurgitating carefully contrived myths - that the occupation of Palestine began in 1967, that Israel was built by escapees from the Nazi judeocide, that the Palestinians are awfully-aggressive-too, that the motor for for the conflict is sectarian hatred, religious enmity, Extremists on Both Sides, a Cycle Of Violence (in which it is always Israel who takes 'revenge') etc. I maintain that you can't understand 1967 or anything that came after it without understanding the roots of the 1948 war, the one in which the Zionist project was consummated. The Palestinians call it the Nakba (catastrophe), although the reasons are poorly understood.

Introduction: Ideology, nationalisms, early conflict.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1947-8 was the culmination of the coterminous development of Jewish Nationalism and Arab Nationalism in the mid-19th Century. (There are, at the very least, some necessary qualifications to make to this claim. Adeed Dawisha makes a creditable case that Arab nationalism was really a superficial phenomenon until it became initially an adjunct of British imperialism and then a rebellion against it. Arab Nationalism: From Triumph to Despair, Princeton University Press, 2003.) Palestinian nationalism had its roots in an 1834 revolt against Egyptian rulers who had taken the territory of Palestine and Syria from the Ottomans between 1831 and 1840. Ibrahim Pasha, charged with ruling these territories, made himself unpopular through his demand for conscripts – for many Palestinians, conscription was a death sentence, while for a number of villages it threatened the labour supply. When a number of notable families in Palestine insisted that they could not supply the required number of conscripts, Pasha responded by relaxing the policy in other areas while making efforts to strictly enforce it in Palestine. This precipitated a rebellion against Egyptian rule in which Egyptian troops were ousted from several cities, including Jerusalem, until eventually they mounted a brutal response, reducing several cities to ash. When Egyptian forces were finally able to retake Palestine, Pasha imposed disarmament on the population (though not on those of contiguous lands): the state would monopolise the means of violence. The revolt had been characterised not by loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, but by a populist movement of peasants that was galvanised by leading feudal families, in a way that would become familiar in the 20th Century. In many ways, it would be the threat and example of Zionism that would be crucial in moulding Palestinian nationalism as it is known today. However, Rashid Khalidi crucially qualifies this point by outlining certain historical cultural inputs into the future development of Palestinian nationalism – in particular, a sense of Palestine as “a special and sacred place”, and a concern with the status of Jerusalem and its permanent vulnerability to external threats. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1997, 29-30.

Jewish nationalism was both a reaction to European anti-Semitism and a reflux against traditional Jewish communities. There had been approximately 24,000 Jews living in Palestine before the first Aliya of 1882, but the migrants among them tended to be elderly European exiles seeking to live their last days in one of the holy cities. The generation that arrived in 1882, by contrast, sought refuge from Russian and Eastern European anti-Semitism (particularly the Tsarist pogroms beginning in 1881), but also built agricultural settlements in which they might regenerate themselves as a people. This was not Herzlian Zionism, but it did involve a self-image of the settlers as ‘pioneers’, laying the foundations for a future Jewish community to be embedded in Palestine. This, very shortly, met a disorganised but often ferocious Palestinian resistance, particularly from those dispossessed by the settlers.

The movement was labelled Zionism by Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum in 1885, and it was seen as an attempt by a people scattered since 586 BC to ‘return’ to Zion. It was Theodor Herzl who, witnessing the ferocious anti-Semitism unleashed by the Dreyfuss affair, founded an explicit political Zionism. Jews, he said, could not be emancipated or assimilated in Europe because they were a nation. Europe was “perpetual enemy territory”, and while he himself was happy to ponder any number of possible homelands on which a Jewish State could be erected, for most of his contemporary sympathisers Palestine was the only serious option. Congruent with this goal was Herzl’s convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, which resulted in two Viennese rabbis embarking on an exploratory mission to Palestine. Their verdict upon return: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Herzl, for his part, received a message from Yusuf Zia al-Khalidi in 1899, in which the latter begged the Zionists to reconsider – if they attempted to occupy Palestine, they would face such an uprising that the Turks, however well-disposed they were toward the Zionists, would be unable to put down. Herzl sent a reassuring reply: the Arabs would find ‘excellent brothers’ in the Jews, who would bring their own “individual wealth” and thereby increase the lot of Arabs. He knew better. As he explained in The Jewish State, immigration would be useless unless based on “assured supremacy”. He recorded in his diary that military strength would be a crucial part of the Zionist strategy for ‘returning’ to Palestine. Uniquely, Jewish nationalism was projected into an external territory. Whatever the Biblical claims to the territory, and however leavened by reassurances from Zionist leaders, as soon as the movement settled on Palestine as the site of a Jewish state, conflict was almost inevitable. For this and other reasons, the Zionists sought to imbricate themselves with the major imperial powers – first, the Ottomans; then after Sykes-Picot, the British; and latterly, the United States. The success in winning the British to a ‘Jewish Homeland’ (not yet a state) was sufficient that the Arab revolt of 1936 was to be directed both at Zionism and the Mandate, and indeed the two occupiers sometimes worked together in military operations against the insurgent population.

From Heimstatte to Judenstaat: the British and the Zionists.
The Sykes-Picot agreement had divided Arab territories up between British and French rule under Mandate conditions. As the British had assumed control of Palestine, leading Zionists were eager to win their approval for their national aspirations. Chaim Weizmann explained that he wished “to make Palestine as Jewish as England is English”. Weizmann’s approaches had been rewarded in 1917 with a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur J Balfour to Lord Rothschild, known as the Balfour Declaration, in which it was announced that Her Majesty’s government favoured “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. At the time, there were 56,000 Jews in Palestine alongside 600,000 Arabs, and the agreement insisted that the civil and religious rights of the Palestinians were to be upheld. The political rights of the Palestinians, however, did not feature at all.

However, contrary to the assumptions of some Zionist politicians, British interests were not synonymous with theirs. The British had settled on a mix of apparently contradictory policies in their aim of controlling some of the former Ottoman Empire. To break the grip of the Ottomans for good, they had declared support for an Arab Kingdom under Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, who in return led an uprising against the Turkish rulers. This conflicted with the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided what might have been Hussein’s kingdom between France and Britain. The Balfour Declaration wasn’t strictly compatible with either British or Arab rule – however, it may have been seen as solving a number of problems for the British in that might provide, as Sir Ronald Storss put it, a “little loyal Jewish Ulster” in Palestine. Churchill, a Colonial Secretary during the Mandate, was also persuaded that Jewish nationalism was a useful counterpoint to what he described as the “International Jew”.

It was not long, however, before the British felt obliged to curtail their commitment to Zionism – in 1922, Winston Churchill’s white paper limited Jewish immigration based on economic criteria, proposed elected institutions based on proportional representation rather than strict parity between Arabs and Jews, and excluded Transjordan from the zone of a potential Jewish State. These restrictions disappointed not only the ‘revisionist’ Zionists who followed Ze’ev Jabotinsky but also his more moderate opponents who supported Weizmann. The British attitude varied according to circumstances, but there is also a close correlation between Zionist attitudes toward the British and their strength in Palestine. Malcolm Yapp notes that “before 1936 the Jewish community was too small to stand alone and it needed the protection of the British umbrella. After 1936, at 400,000 and 30 per cent of the population, it could contemplate forming a state and if necessary dispense with British supervision”. From Basle, it had been the policy of the Zionists to publicly disavow the intention of building a Jewish State, preferring Herzl disciple Max Nordau’s term ‘Heimstatte’ (Homeland). This was to avoid provoking the Ottomans as much as the Arabs, and later, the British. Yet, following the Arab uprising of 1936, the commission appointed under Lord Peel to investigate the causes of the uprising and propose a solution arrived at a recommendation for partition – the Jewish State would be comparatively small, only 5,000 square kilometres, but it was nevertheless recognition by the British that such a state would exist in Palestine. The Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937 accepted the plan – despite objections from the Revisionists, Ben Gurion declaimed that this was the beginning and not the end: “we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement and mutual understanding with our Arab neighbours or in some other way”. And when the British attempted in 1939 to introduce a white paper that would strictly limit Jewish immigration and regulate land sales, the Zionists reacted with fury: Dr Herzog, the Chief Rabbi, tore up the document in front of a weeping congregation; Arab shops were looted; a general Jewish strike was proclaimed; public spaces and buildings were bombed. The Zionists were becoming confident, but also angry at British equivocation, and Zionism was henceforth a thoroughly militarised affair. Following the Second World War, during which time they had fought alongside the British , the Zionists – assured of their ability to found a state – took up arms against the British Mandate authorities, notoriously bombing the King David Hotel in 1946. The British, depleted after the cessation of hostilities in Europe, announced that they would withdraw in 1947, finally departing in 1948.

Palestinian identity and Pan-Arab Solidarity.
If the Palestinian Arabs were constant in their antipathy toward Zionism, this did not usually take the form of hostility to Jewish immigration. Yapp points out that “From 1923 to 1926, a period when many Jews entered Palestine, the country was quiet. In 1929, at a time when Jewish immigration was at an all time low, the most serious riots until that time occurred.” Often, the immediate cause of hostility to the arriving Jews was the disappropriation of fellaheen, while a more generalised hostility to Zionism had developed among Palestinians, and particularly in the Arab press. The opposition to Zionism was not delimited by class, but different layers of Palestinian society responded to it differently.


Rashid Khalidi, in his efforts to demonstrate that there was a coherent Palestinian identity long before the Zionists’ comprehensive victory in 1948, discloses that most of those who sold their land to the Zionists prior to 1948 were non-Palestinian absentee landlords for whom it was no more than a mere economic transaction. However, David Hirst points out that a large number of Palestinian political leaders did sell their land to the Zionists and were met with no more than verbal abuse – often hypocritical abuse at that, since many of those who waxed indignant about it had indulged in the practise themselves. Further, as Khalidi acknowledges, there was a clear class dimension involved in the land sales, which intersected with the national dimension: the fellaheen were least inclined to sell their land to the Zionists, while large landowners were most inclined to do so. Class was also an important dimension in the relationship between Arab and Jewish workers: if the Arab antipathy to Zionism and the anti-Arab practises of the Histradut (Zionist trade union) weren’t enough to prevent solidarity where it might otherwise have taken place, the generally privileged position of migrant Jews in the economy made it even more improbable. And if it is true, as Khalidi suggests, that most of those who sold their land to Zionists were non-Palestinian, it is also true that many of those who joined in Palestinian uprisings, especially in 1936, were non-Palestinians. The inspiration for the uprising derived, to some extent, from similar disturbances in Egypt and Syria, and there was considerable popular pressure on the semi-autonomous governments of those countries to support the Palestinian struggle. Palestinian nationalism was both contiguous with and often surpassed by Arab nationalism. Nevertheless, the refusal of large numbers of the domestic elite to sell their land to Zionists was an important element binding the emerging political leadership with the masses of peasant workers. And it adverted to the increasingly widespread recognition that Palestine would be a separate national state, formalised at the Third Arab Congress at Haifa in 1920. If it was the fellaheen who initiated and drove the anti-British and anti-Zionist insurgency, the notable families and elites that made up the more conservative Arab leadership were if nothing else obliged by pressure to remonstrate with the British rulers in militant language.

One consequence of the feudal social structure in Palestine was that notables and religious leaders dominated the national discussion. It was they who communicated with the British authorities, petitioned, and formulated demands. That elite, for its part, took its cue from the broader Arab ruling class. Leading notables like Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the “political wing of the Arab Higher Committee”, were responsible for allowing the initiative in the Palestinian cause to be appropriated by Arab states, preventing the establishment of independent institutions and leadership. (The other side of this was the British policy of expelling Palestinian leaders, thus fragmenting and dispersing an indigenous movement). From the formation of the Arab League in 1944, it established an independent Palestine as one of the principles of Pan-Arabism. It was the Arab Higher Committee that organised the general Arab strike and the boycott of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), while the Arab League would coordinate the reaction to UNSCOP’s report, which heavily favoured the Zionists. The main Arab nations involved in the conflict, Egypt and Jordan, were frequently more concerned with recruiting Palestinians to their opposing causes than with encouraging Palestinians to liberate their territory. The Hashemite rulers of Jordan had also formed alliances with the Jewish Agency and had agreed with the British to tacitly support the partition of Palestine. The fragmentation of the local leadership into distinct ruling families, meanwhile, caused fractiousness: at one point before the civil war, there were two national treasuries for Palestine, one controlled by the Husaynis, another by Musa Alami, supported by the Hashemite Iraqi government. The division of the population into local forces prevented a serious national army from emerging: at the onset of the civil war, the Palestinians had a total force, including volunteers, of 12,000, while the active Zionist forces amounted to 22,425.

War, and Aftermath.
The Palestinian and Arab forces entered into combat with the Zionists ill-prepared. The Palestinian leadership was still in disarray, following the British crackdowns after the 1936-9 uprising. Much of it had been or remained in exile. And the bulk of the wealthy elite had simply evacuated at the onset of civil war in 1947. This time, it was the Zionists who were in full revolt. The Palestinians had responded to the partition resolution recommended by UNSCOP with some sporadic attacks on Jewish settlements, but the Zionists had the initiative, having successfully created para-state institutions, a parallel Jewish economy, and a number of well-equipped armies. They had also procured the vital support of the USSR and President Truman. (The Palestinian, by contrast, had “no functioning national-level institutions, no central para-state mechanisms, no serious financial apparatus, and no centralised military force”. Rashid Khalidi, “The Palestinians and 1948: the underlying causes of failure”, in Eugene L Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp 12-36.) Such, in fact, was the success of their diplomacy, the Zionists were even able to induce the National Executive of the British Labour Party to publicly endorse a ‘transfer’ of the Arab population, a small embarrassment to Chaim Weizmann at the time. For all that, even as the violence escalated, the Palestinians appeared to have an early advantage, so ferocious were their attacks. By February 1948, the notes from Mapai meetings were sorely critical of the leadership of Ben Gurion, particularly over the isolation of settlements in the Negev. In the same month, the Arab Higher Committee had announced that it would never accept the partition of Palestine. Yet this was also the moment at which the war turned around. Palestinian fighters were running out of ammunition , and the Haganah were able to exploit the divisions between different Palestinian groups.

In May 1948, the war became an international one, with Arab forces finally being dispatched to assist the Palestinians. There had been considerable discord among Arab governments about what action needed to be taken, particularly since the Jordanian government hoped to annexe much of Palestine, arguing that it could not stand alone. In consequence, each nation’s troops fought as a separate army with no collectively determined goals or strategy. The ensuing war proceeded in stages, punctuated by truces: and each stage gave the emerging Israeli state more land, from the Negev to Galilee. A major part of the Zionist success was the implementation of Plan Dalet, a blueprint prepared by the Haganah with two specific objectives: to take any installation evacuated by the British, and to “cleanse the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible”. The means were not exclusively military, but where the refugee flights were not inspired by direct experience of Zionist violence, they were animated by knowledge and often well-founded rumour of what awaited those who remained. The massacre of two-thirds of the inhabitants of the comparatively pacific Palestinian village of Deir Yassin between 4.30am and 12pm on 10th April 1948 by Haganah, Irgun and LEHI forces , stood as a frightful object lesson in this regard. Of 1.3 million Palestinians, it is conservatively estimated that approximately 700,000 were expelled.

There is much argument about the significance of Plan Dalet, but Ilan Pappe makes a persuasive case that its importance resides in that it called for the destruction of what were then population centres as a means of creating facts on the ground. While Kimmerling and Migdal point out in opposition to the interpretation of the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi that a large number of Palestinians had fled before local Haganah commanders had to decide on implementing Plan Dalet, Pappe points out that this in no way alters the fact of the plan’s existence and intent. Benny Morris claims that the plan was marginal to the exodus of refugees because the main wave of the Palestinian refugee outflux took place in April and May 1948, catching the Yishuv leaders and Dalet planners by surprise. Norman Finkelstein, however, compellingly disputes this claim using both the internal evidence in Morris’s texts and reliable extraneous evidence. In particular, Morris appears to have obscured crucial facts, such as that at least as many Palestinians were expelled after the declaration of Israeli statehood as before; that the period after the declaration was much more representative of Zionist policy, given that the accomplishment of partition removed some exiguous constraints on Zionist behaviour; and that the latter period saw Plan D become operative in the field. Finkelstein’s critique is made all the more compelling by the fact that he elicits much tacit agreement to these points from Morris’ text. (See Finkelstein's Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Verso, 2003, pp 51-87).

Israel had acquired much territory additional to that allotted it in the UN partition plan, and had only relented in taking more land under intense international pressure. When the guns fell silent in January 1949, 90% of the Palestinian population of what would become Israel was situated in refugee camps in the Jordanian occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Gaza. The Hashemite police state would be brutal in suppressing Palestinian nationalism, although an independent nationalist political structure developed all the same. The UN, following principles elaborated by Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator who had been assassinated by Jewish extremists, attempted to cajole Israel into accepting the full and immediate repatriation of the Palestinian refugees, the repartitioning of the land according to the population distribution, and the internationalisation of Jerusalem. Israel, having been accepted as a member of the UN, felt secure enough to resist even discussing such a possibility – under American pressure, it consented to discuss such matters at the Lausanne conference: the talks lasted for one day on May 11th 1949.

The failure of the Arab states to secure an independent Palestine was to have severe implications for the regimes. The fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 at the hands of Qassim’s Free Officers was partially the result of the failure of its efforts. The Egyptian monarchy and its Wafd government fell in 1952, in some measure due to its failure in and indifference to Palestine. The issue of Palestine would fundamentally determine alliances and political fates in Arab countries, not to mention the fate of Pan Arabism as an ideology. Israel, for its part, reduced the Palestinians living in its territory to little more than cheap labour with few political rights. It also sought, through coercion and persuasion, to import Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and Maghreb - who themselves were subject to racism, scorn and economic exploitation when they arrived.

In starting this post with the "two nationalisms, one land" heuristic, I was being deliberately glib. Such a false equivalence sits well with a certain kind of domesticated liberal discourse, as promulgated by the likes of Amos Oz and even the more critical Baruch Kimmerling. Yet the story becomes more simple each time you look at it: the Palestinians are the victims and the Zionists the manifest colonial aggressors driven by an often messianic nationalist project. This project brought with it an immense baggage of European racism toward the Arabs. (One instance of this was the Hadera settlement, which the Zionists insisted on building over a swamp-ridden area even though they were warned that they would perish in large numbers from malaria. They insisted that they would not take their cue from "barbarians" and that they, unlike the Arabs, would be able to find a way to deal with the malaria. When they duly began to die off, Baron de Rothschild provided a large wad of cash, enabling the settlers to purchase labourers from Egypt to dig ditches for drainage - and they died instead). Aside from racism, the imperative of building a Jewish State in an Arab country and the concomitant concern with 'the demographic problem' led to the ethnic cleansing of 1948, as well as that being perpetrated in the West Bank today, and numerous racist laws imposed by the Israeli government. You can't understand the Palestinians and their plight without recognising this, and you can't understand Israel's military aggression without recognising the expansionism embedded in Zionist ideology.